Sunday, January 18, 2009

Dutchman to Save Borneo: Meet Smits

Scientific American 3.0
Jan through March 17, 2009
"Regrowing Borneo, tree by tree"
by Jane Braxton Little

This periodical is full of green hope!:)
Smits, A Dutchman by birht , now Indonesian,has succeeded in
recreating a new orangutan habitat "one square meter at a time."
Smits fought deforestation and the setting to fire of the orangutan habitat
for twenty years now.His partners in his venture are 600 families of the Dayak
tribe in the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesia.
Smits calls this" the people's forest".
He calls the project "Samora Lestart." He has not yet submitted the project according to
Little for public scrutiny or review.
Borneo is the third largest island in the world. Borneo has 15,000 plant species,
222 mammal species and hundreds of bird species , fresh water and amphibian fish.
It has 6,000 species that are found nowhere else.
Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin's, wrote about these species in 1858.

In the 1970s loggers started to tear this pqlce apart.
The roads that they cut inot the woods reduced the habitat and the temeprature warmed up considerably. Smits is hoping that the entire island will be restred.
What do you think about Smits?:)

2 comments:

Bill said...

Good for Smits. We need more people in our world with committment like his.
Interesting Reading.
Regards, Bill

Heli gunner Tom said...

This all makes a lot of sense to me-- with cutting down the trees, etc and then the heat heat temps move in. too bad.
Nice post!

Cordially,
Tom S
tschuckman@aol.com

"Tom's Journal"