Panoramic Aerial View of Deforestation Area in Boreal Forest, Quebec · Photo by Onfokus

Huge trucks loaded with wood climb the steep slopes at a slug’s pace before hurtling down at breakneck speed across the Gaspé Peninsula in southeastern Quebec. On weekdays, any driver who finds themselves ahead of these motorized ogres will vividly relive the nightmarish journey of salesman Dennis Weaver chased by a mad trucker in Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film, Duel (think Jaws on wheels, with a tanker truck instead of a shark—in which you feel you are going to need a bigger car).

But on quiet weekend days, one feels completely immersed in nature, driving on the road meandering through thick evergreen woods. Yet, the hustle and bustle of the trucks suggest another story behind the green curtain.

In May 2020, I flew from Gaspé to Montreal. It was a painful experience. As the plane was reaching altitude, I was stunned by the scale of broad patches of cleared areas crisscrossed by dirt roads. I felt fooled by the thin wooded layer bordering the highway I’d used so many times, hiding the interior of a forest that no longer exists.

“Only space visible from road corridors and selected visually sensitive areas are protected by the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks,” says Marie-Ève Desmarais, forest engineer and member of La Commission Forêt at Nature Québec, or the Forest Commission. “All the rest is ignored.”

This way of preserving visually sensitive areas of the forest environment from the public eye first appeared over 20 years ago, following a shocking documentary denouncing logging practices destroying Quebec forests for the benefit of wood companies.

Richard Desjardins’ L’erreur boréale (Forest Alert), winner of eight prizes in Quebec and France, including the 1999 Jutra Award for Best Documentary, provoked a province-wide movement for the reappropriation of public forests by concerned citizens.

An author, composer, performer, and documentary filmmaker from Rouyn-Noranda, a small town located in the heart of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region in northwestern Quebec, Desjardins showed the public forest treated as a big pile of wood by industrialists and denounced the clearcutting practiced on vast expanses of the boreal forest.

The overview of massive clearcuts—the archetype of industrial horror in forests—completely transformed the social perception of the forest in Quebec. The provincial government reacted to the shift in public perception by creating a new Forest Management Plan in 2010 where timber companies would no longer be the only players in the forest. Instead, plans would be drawn up by the Ministry’s regional offices to meet the aspirations of the local population.

The film was a real eye-opener stirring up public outrage, forcing the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks to improve their methods by taking inspiration from natural forests, creating a landscape closer to nature, and engaging in more sustainable forestry practices. Their approach, tempered by social considerations, recognized that a way to maintain socially acceptable forestry was to mimic natural spatial patterns in managed public forests by replicating physical constraints, disturbances, and biological processes naturally present in the forest environment.

With public perception at stake, the concept of social acceptability, based on landscape ecology principles, emerged with the era of new sustainable forest practices. Visual quality assessment methods, inspired by 1960s American landscape architects, were integrated to determine, classify and map areas of significant interest with a high degree of visual sensitivity.

“If recent cuts occupy more than 40 percent of a landscape that you see, it falls below the threshold of social acceptability,” explains Louis Bélanger, a retired professor and researcher at the Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics at Laval University, Quebec.

Landscape ecology is the science behind understanding the interactions between ecosystems within a region and the environment’s ecological processes. In the forestry world, this translates into the imitation of natural patterns of ecosystem disturbance by recreating natural cut shapes, preventing straight lines, and waiting for the first cut to regenerate to a height of four metres before starting a second. It also means avoiding scattered trees on peaks and ensuring that logging does not dominate the visible landscape in distant perception areas.

“This is called ecosystem-based management,” says Pier-Olivier Boudreault, a conservation biologist at the Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP) Québec. “The goal is to reproduce the disturbances of nature, like a big forest fire or an insect outbreak.”

The Ministry must follow two steps to get a new cutting project accepted. First, landscape planners map sensitive areas to minimize visual impacts, using a series of criteria based on social values such as the attendance and the attractiveness of the area, the number and expectations of users, the duration of use and observation, the importance of infrastructure and equipment, and the diversity of services.

“When we’ve done that, we’ve already found the problems. We know what will be visible and what will be hidden,” says Desmarais. “But we have to validate in the field if what we’ve planned meets the needs of the population.”

To validate their maps, the Ministry is required to hold a public consultation process which can include 3D virtual models of cutting patterns to be shown to citizens and committee members such as Indigenous communities, town officials, outfitters, and recreational and environmental associations. Those who live in an area where a logging project is planned have to be given the opportunity to express their concerns about how the project could affect their quality of life and livelihood. This step suggests public participation has become essential over the years, strongly influencing forest management.

“It is a process of trying to make forestry visually acceptable in places people think are sensitive. But it does not work all the time,” says Bélanger. “If we did a survey to find out the level of satisfaction, I suspect we would get a C-minus. We don’t fail like we used to, but there aren’t a lot of As.”

The Ministry’s attempt to change in the decade following the scandal surrounding forestry management, thanks to Desjardins’ documentary, showed that they could easily take the preservation of forest landscapes’ visual quality into account in the calculation of authorized cuts.

As of April 1, 2013, the Quebec Sustainable Forest Development Act states that, while promoting the use of wood to create economic wealth, the Ministry is responsible, through protecting ecosystems and preserving biodiversity, for ensuring the perpetuity of the public forest for all users. But despite the progress made to implement an ecosystem-based approach over the past two decades, a conflict persists between recognizing the needs of industry and recognizing the landscape as a resource that must be valued.

“There are still no chapters in the strategic plan of the Ministry that take into account the landscape,” says Bélanger. “The aesthetics of the public forest is still not protected.”

Already at a strict minimum to meet a threshold of social acceptability, the public forest landscapes will continue to decline in the coming decades. In 2018, the new Quebec provincial government’s goal of reaching a 30 percent increase in harvested timber supply over the next 20 years might make it challenging for the Ministry to respond fairly to all the needs provided by a territory they define as a multi-use forest.

“They want to double the wood production targets. It’s scary,” says Desmarais. “The new harvest quotas are so high, I don’t know if there will be much room for ecological and landscape issues.”

This current large-scale depletion of the forest cover is due to the new 2018 Québec Wood Production Strategy, which seems to have supplanted the emerging visual trends established in the 2015 Sustainable Forest Management Strategy.

“The lobbying of multinational forestry companies in Quebec is powerful, and they have the attention of the provincial government,” says Desmarais. “And clearcutting is more profitable than adopting an ecosystem-based approach.”

Unfortunately, the Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, little account has been taken of citizens’ demand to protect a forest landscape against industrial logging’s visual impacts if it jeopardizes cuts already guaranteed to multinational wood industries. As a result, despite high expectations raised by the sustainable harvesting methods introduced in the 2010 Forest Management Plan, communities are still faced with a worsening of their living environment due to the Quebec provincial government’s unwillingness to concretely apply its own ecosystem-based approach.
“The current forest management plan is very good, and the sustainable forest development law is excellent,” says Desmarais. “But in reality, it is not applied in the field. Any cutting plan that could satisfy everyone but would have an impact on timber harvesting possibilities is systematically rejected.”

The awareness of the desolation left by large cut areas on the forest landscape is mostly felt for now by those who venture into the woods outside the main sensitive areas identified by landscape planners. This planned visual framing can be seen negatively by communities strongly connected to the forest, as it can be perceived as being deceived by concealing measures.

“The wooded layer, it’s cosmetic,” says Henri Jacob, ecologist and president at Action Boréale in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. “It does nothing for the decrease in biodiversity and fauna habitats caused by large-scale industrial logging. We cut faster than the forest can regenerate.”

The less well-informed citizens driving to national parks, main towns, and busy tourist areas are still spared the disturbing views and kept in some form of ignorance by being locked in these green buffer zones. However, the projected increase in wood harvesting might put in plain sight what is going on behind the visual barriers. No longer able to hold some shield if quotas have to be honoured, the Ministry may start playing in visually sensitive areas secured in the past.

“The Ministry is in a bind. It seems like they can’t keep the promises they made to the population. They have to deliver the timber to the industries,” says Boudreault.

On my next road trip through the peninsula, I got out of the car on a quiet Sunday morning and walked through the dense strip of evergreen trees lining the road. Coming out on the other side, the smell of fresh, damp moss shaded by the trees had disappeared, giving way to the hot, dry earth of a devastated field.
“The new forestry plan was supposed to put the citizen back at the heart of forest management,” says Boudreault. “Twenty years after L’erreur boréale, this is something that has not been achieved.”

Remnants of a clear cut logging operation near Grassy Narrows, Ontario. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

On a cold December day nine years ago, a group of young people from the Grassy Narrows First Nation lay down in front of a line of logging trucks on a snow-covered road.

Chrissy Swain, now 32, recalls that day at Slant Lake, about an hour north of Kenora, Ontario, which set off what has become Canada’s longest-standing logging blockade. “Back then youth didn’t have a voice,” Swain says. “But people started taking us more seriously when we started the blockade.”

For a long time, Grassy Narrows was accustomed to not being heard. In the 1950s, new hydro dams flooded the low-lying river valleys the First Nation had lived in, driving away the fur-bearing animals and submerging wild rice beds and sacred spiritual sites. In the early 1960s, the Canadian federal government moved the small Grassy Narrows community away from the river to a new location on a small stagnant lake off the highway to Kenora, where Chrissy Swain and her friends grew up. The 1970s brought more devastating news: the nearby Dryden pulp and paper mill was pumping mercury into the water. It eradicated the local fishing industry, leaving the community poor and sick. Hunting and trapping came to replace fishing, but in the 1990s, the provincial government of Mike Harris opened the area to clear-cut logging, which quickly drove out moose and other animals on which the community relied.

Chrissy Swain’s grandfather was one of many people affected by mercury poisoning on the Grassy Narrows and White Dog reserves. Today he shakes uncontrollably and can barely walk. Swain was just 16 when she began to realize things weren’t as they should be in her community and decided to take action. Though Swain would share in spiritual ceremonies, pick wild berries, fish and hunt, she yearned for a traditional Anishinabe life of living off the land. “I lost out on that part of my identity,” she tells me.

Decades of neglect and abuse by two levels of government have left a grim legacy, in the form of joblessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical and sexual violence, all of which afflict Grassy Narrows still. But a number of factors have recently come together that offer hope. One of these is a recent legal decision that could protect the land from harmful industry activity that affects aboriginal hunting and trapping. The precedent doesn’t just herald an opportunity to regenerate a devastated natural environment—it has the potential to turn the entire relationship between Canada’s First Nations and federal government upside down.

Years of mercury poisoning and clear-cutting “put them into a corner where they had to take a serious stand on both those issues,” explains Treaty 3 Grand Chief Diane Kelly. Chief Kelly is the leader selected by national assembly to preside over the 140,000-square-kilometre treaty territory encompassing two First Nations in Manitoba and 26 in northwestern Ontario, including Grassy Narrows. She says Grassy Narrows is facing these challenges head on. “The people of Grassy Narrows have been really diligent in standing up for their rights.”

The way Chrissy Swain sees it, standing up for those rights is just part of providing for her children, like any working Canadian mother. She’s been bringing her three kids to demonstrations and blockades since they were babies. Since 2008, Swain has led annual walks to raise awareness about indigenous and environmental justice. The first was over 1,800 kilometres from Grassy Narrows to Toronto, ending in a “Sovereignty Sleepover” at Queen’s Park attended by hundreds of First Nations leaders and activists across Ontario. Her last walk took her to a sun dance in Manitoba. “It was only a 300 kilometre walk,” she says casually.

Over the years the community has used every tactic in the book to stop industrial clear-cut logging: roving blockades of logging roads and highways, boycotts, rallies, speaking tours, and a high-profile court case. In the last few years, this persistence has started to pay off. Forestry giant Abitibi-Bowater surrendered its forestry license in 2008 and large-scale clear-cuts have stopped for now. Domtar (the largest paper producer in North America) and Boise have also committed not to source wood from Grassy Narrows traditional territory. More recently, a major legal victory for the small reserve of 900 residents asserts aboriginal hunting and trapping rights override the Province’s right to resources in the Keewatin Lands, a 50,000 square kilometre area in the Boreal Forest.

Grassy Narrows trappers Joseph Fobister, Andrew Keewatin, and now-deceased Willie Keewatin brought the suit in 1999 to judicial review, leading to a case in the Ontario Superior Court. “It’s quite simple,” explains 55-year-old trapper Joseph Fobister. “My right to hunt and fish are protected by treaty. When clearcut logging happens, it takes away that right.” The judge awarded them legal costs before trial, saying the issue was in the public interest and hadn’t been considered in any previous case.

“We’re not against logging. We’re just against bad logging,” says trapper Fobister. In the ’60s, he says he had good rapport with loggers, often catching rides to his family trap-line with them. Now, “there’s nothing for me to trap.” When he was young, unmarketable trees and debris were left. Today it’s a different story. “Everything is gone when you go there now.”

After years of waiting, the reserve finally got the chance to present its evidence in nearly eight months of hearings. On August 16, 2011 Justice Mary-Anne Sanderson ruled in favour of Grassy Narrows in a lengthy 300-page judgment. Ontario cannot infringe on aboriginal rights to hunt and trap enshrined in the Treaty 3 agreement signed in 1873 with the federal government, the judge said.

Joseph Fobister was choking back tears when he heard the news. “My first thought was ‘justice at last.’ It’s been a long 10 years waiting for something to happen,” he tells me following a press conference at Queen’s Park. Grassy Narrows Band Council Chief Simon Fobister is also elated: “This time the Indians won.”

A protest by members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

Trapping isn’t the only concern over clear-cut logging. Research suggests clear-cut logging practices can increase mercury levels in the soil. This past September Chief Fobister led a Grassy Narrows delegation to Japan to raise awareness about the health effects of mercury. Mercury poisoning, called Minamata disease, was named after the Japanese city where the first case was observed, after chemical company Chisso dumped waste water into the local bay. While on a trip to Japan, Chief Fobister screened the film The Scars of Mercury, a documentary about the findings of Japanese doctor Masazumi Harada, a leading specialist in mercury poisoning. Harada has been closely studying the situation in Grassy Narrows since the ’70s. In 2010, following his fifth visit to the reserve, Dr. Harada reported the impacts of mercury poisoning are worse now, despite mercury levels having decreased. Today pregnant women are still passing this mercury to to their fetuses and babies are being born already suffering Minamata disease.

When I visited Grassy Narrows in 2006, clan mother Judy Da Silva drove me in the back of her pickup truck out to a clear-cut where she picked wild herbs and berries and hunted and trapped as a kid. A large expanse of dust and baby evergreen saplings now stands where the old mixed forest used to. Da Silva, a tireless activist, could often be found sitting near the fire at the Slant Lake blockade, while her children skipped rocks on the lake or explored the bush behind the log cabins. Now her daughter Taina, 17, is taking up the cause, giving a public talk for the first time at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education while visiting Toronto this past summer. It’s the steadfast commitment of clan mothers like Judy Da Silva that continues to inspire the next generation of activists today.

“They have given a really strong foundation that has resulted in what we see today in this decision,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller. A tar sands campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Thomas-Muller grew up as a Mathais Colomb Cree in Winnipeg, joining the Native Youth Movement at 17 where he began working with Grassy Narrows.

Thomas-Muller says the case of Grassy Narrows represents a sophisticated new strategy: a collaboration between environmental and economic justice movements, NGOs, and indigenous solidarity groups across North America, using a variety of tactics, including civil disobedience, education campaigning, and legal challenges. “What Grassy [Narrows] represents is one of those catalyst moments in our contemporary history between Indian and white relations in this country.”

“Not only was it a decision for the people of Grassy, but it was a victory for all First Nations across Canada,” he says. Resource extraction industries have disproportionately affected the health and livelihoods of First Nations communities across the country. Whether it is the tar sands in Alberta that Thomas-Muller is now focused on fighting, or the mining, hydroelectric, or timber industries, native communities are on the front lines almost everywhere in Canada. Changing the calculus of how First Nations can control what industry can do on their lands is huge.

Robert Janes, the lawyer representing Grassy Narrows trappers, agrees that the decision has pretty big implications for First Nations across Canada. “This case doesn’t just apply to logging. It indirectly applies to all major resource development that could interfere with their treaty rights.” That includes mining, hydroelectric dams, transmission lines, and more. People in Grassy Narrows are hoping the court ruling will be a spark that ignites change across Ontario, says Janes, like the 1970s decision over hydro that led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement being signed with the Cree nation and the Quebec and federal governments.

“The courts have become more and more direct and prescriptive in their decisions because they too are becoming frustrated that the governments aren’t following certain court decisions,” says Russell Diabo, a First Nations policy consultant who has worked closely with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Quebec. “If that trend continues I think it’s going to become harder for the executive branches of the government to ignore.”

Forest near Grassy Narrows First Nation adjacent to a clear cut site. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has appealed the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal and Robert Janes says that the case will likely be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. This could drag out the issue for another five years. Janes believes that the government wants to preserve the status quo with regards to logging, but the likelihood of reaching a negotiated solution, the desired outcome for Grassy Narrows, will depend on the newly elected provincial government.

After a long legacy of government decisions that negatively affected the community, including residential schools, hydro flooding, mercury poisoning, relocation, and now the destruction of their forests from clear-cut logging, it’s easy to see why people in Grassy Narrows are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Andrew Keewatin, who initiated the legal case over a decade ago, is also skeptical. “It will be interesting to see if they’ll honour the decision now,” he says. “Most likely they’ll try to find a way around it.” Keewatin, known as “Shoon” in Grassy Narrows, teaches traditional practices to the reserve’s young people, such as building log cabins, snowshoe making, fishing, and trapping. “Trapping is no longer a means of livelihood for people on the reserve. It’s more of a favourite pastime,” he says. Life on welfare has taught trappers to limit their activity to the reserve, he explains. But he is looking towards the future. He notes that the Trappers Council is looking into ways of selling furs directly to tourists and that some businesses in South Korea have shown some interest in buying their otter furs.

How will this court ruling affect people on the front lines in Grassy Narrows? “We’re still going to be here,” says Swain, insisting the blockade will persist even after the ruling. “I’m still going to stand up for my children,” she says. “I’m teaching them, too, so that after I go they can use their voice.” What does she think about the court ruling? “It’s not a victory yet,” says Swain, explaining it’s a step forward, but there’s still a lot more work to do.

As the logging blockade enters its 10th year, Grassy Narrows First Nation is continuing to assert its sovereignty. This fall, the activists started issuing a toll on the blockaded logging road—many Americans visit the Lake of the Woods area, a popular tourist camping destination, driving past the log cabins and wig-wams at the blockade. When it comes to plans for the future, Swain isn’t short of them. She suggests that instead of the government issuing licences to campers on their lands, Grassy Narrows could set up their own camps. She also hopes they could someday take over jurisdiction from the Ministry of Natural Resources, regulating poaching and other activities on their land to create their own jobs. She says change is slow, but she sees it happening. “We’re trying to take back everything that was taken from us.”

Kinuseo falls in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the problems of company towns, which had a habit of becoming ghost towns, by empowering local governments to create real communities.

Not everything went as planned. Four decades and a dozen such towns later, many once-vibrant communities were near death as mills and mines shut down or shipped out. The government was, however, right about one thing: towns aren’t so quick to grab the tombstone. Here’s how four post–Instant Towns are embracing their abundant resources, natural and artificial, in hopes of a greener second life.

Hudson’s Hope

Industry: Hydroelectricity
Incorporated: 1965
Population: 1,012
Hudson’s Hope was incorporated in 1965 when it became the second-largest municipality in B.C. Dubbed the “Land of Dinosaurs and Dams,” the town is rich with fossils. There are more than 1,700 dinosaur tracks in the area dating back to the Early Cretaceous Period. They even have their own dinosaur—the Hudsonelpidia—that was named for the town.

Mackenzie

Industry: Pulp and paper
Incorporated: 1966
Population: 5,452 (2006)
Mackenzie is home to the world’s largest tree-crusher. Indeed, in 1968 the 175-tonne behemoth flattened a 1,773-square- kilometre patch of woodland that would become Williston Lake, the province’s largest reservoir. The town has since incorporated the tree-crusher, which sat idle for years, as a central attraction in the town’s push for tourism.

Tumbler Ridge

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1981
Population: 2,454
Tumbler Ridge bills itself as the “Waterfall Capital of the North.” Kinuseo Falls is taller than Niagara at nearly 200 feet. The Cascades are 10 waterfalls that are all located within a few kilometres of each other. The community also holds an annual music festival—Grizfest—which this year hosted April Wine, Platinum Blonde, and children’s entertainers Sharon & Bram.

Elkford

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1971
Population: 2,463
Elkford may be a coal town, but nature still dominates. Indeed, the town’s website calls it a place where “humanity borrows a bit of space.” Currently, Elkford is repositioning itself as a good getaway for photographers. If would-be tourists are brave, they can try to snap some of the area’s grizzlies, elk, lynx, or wolves. If not, there’s always the Elkford webcam.

Sugar palms are one of the crops that make up the plantation. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

Halfway around the world, on the eastern side of the island of Borneo, near the oil city of Balikpapan, a new tropical rainforest is being created out of what was once a poisonous wasteland. It is a story of radical loss and recovery for an entire ecosystem in a relatively short time. Only a century ago the rainforest was disparaged as “jungle,” wild and ripe for exploitation by the willing and the unscrupulous, its vitality apparently endless and unassailable. As part of that, in Borneo, near a town called Samboja, the land was ravaged by a lethal succession of mining, logging, slash-andburn farming, drought, and fires. Trees were cut down or burned. Alang-alang grass took root and secreted cyanide into the earth. The birds and animals disappeared. The sky was empty, dry. People could no longer make a living from the land. There was malnutrition. The life expectancy plummeted. Crime spread.

It was a heartbreaking downward spiral. As in Africa, South America, and Asia, Borneo’s once lush tropical rainforest was shrinking rapidly, pulling an entire ecosystem down with it, including one of the planet’s four species of great apes, the orangutan, now threatened with extinction. The process of devastation at Samboja started with the discovery of crude oil a century earlier but accelerated as the logging industry moved in, chewing its way through the forest to plunder its bounty. Nothing was left but barren fields of grass—the perfect fuel for the wildfires that snuffed out what remained of the land in the 1980s, when an El Niño–induced drought swept across the island. Blackened stumps still stand as symbols of the conflagration.

It seemed hopeless at Samboja—but, today, a controversial initiative is attempting to reverse the ecological collapse that has destroyed the forest. The project is the brainchild of a Dutch scientist named Willie Smits, a forester, microbiologist, and founder of the world’s largest agency for the protection of orangutans, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. Smits has a deep reverence for orangutans and so he launched this US$10-million project at Samboja designed to save the orangutans by saving Samboja’s rainforest. Smits, in his typically grand and ambitious way, is creating a model for a new kind of rainforest, one where people and wildlife can live harmoniously in an almost utopian symbiosis. Here, human beings, plants, and wildlife will exist together in a forest that sustains them both but preserves the fragile peace between humans and apes with a thorny barrier of salak palm trees. The orangutans get a home and food; the people regenerate the land that earns them a living.

The key to Smits’ vision is that human beings will have reason to protect the rainforest instead of just exploiting it. The new forest at Samboja could be an example to the world of a bulwark against the destruction of a species and, even more, the prototype for creating an entire ecosystem. Smits has such high hopes the project will endure that he named it Samboja Lestari—or “Samboja Forever.”

Dutch scientist Willie Smits with one of the Samboja orangutans. Photo by Cees Bosveld.

Eternity aside, there are more immediate concerns. Smits wants to preserve the diversity of a part of the natural world under severe stress—according to a 2007 Greenpeace report, Indonesia, which encompasses most of Borneo, has the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Smits believes his ambitious scheme can do a better job of sustaining both the local population and the local wildlife than traditional conservation methods. And yet Smits’ scheme is contentious and the science uncertain. His defiance of official and conventional thinking has created opposition—even within his own foundation. “The model I have developed is truly a model that can be modified for worldwide application,” Smits insists. “We can implement the techniques of Samboja in any place in the world. It is a recipe that is replicable.” If Smits’ project succeeds, it will be a miraculous accomplishment and a new symbol in a world where hope seems to be rapidly fading to reverse largescale environmental crises. But the big question still to be answered is whether Smits’ new ecological model is the best solution to deforestation—or just an expensive mirage.

The 53-year-old Smits is no idle dreamer, judging by the remarkable results so far at Samboja. I was there in 2004 while interviewing him for a book I was writing about orangutans and spent a week with him. It seemed that he was beyond ordinary things like food and sleep. Last summer, I went back to see the progress at Samboja Lestari.

Nature had returned. The hills that were once bare were flooded with trees. Where before there was nothing but grass and dirt across the project’s 1,850 hectares, frilly sugar palms had shot up alongside a diverse array of other tree species. Orangutans roamed on small islands and the distance between human and ape seemed to vanish for an instant. A mother orangutan was feeding a small child. A male gave me a bold look—and then quickly lost interest. A young orangutan was hauling himself through the leafy canopy on a rope. Officials from the project took me in a battered jeep to bounce along rutted and muddy roads to see the forest’s outer edge, where there are five villages with a total population of more than 10,000 people, some of them working to supply fruit and vegetables for the orphaned orangutans at Smit’s rehabilitation centre. Nanang Qasim, one of the project managers, told me the project tries to hire local people, rather than those from Balikpapan. It is the beginning of re-integrating a damaged natural community.

I talked to Muhammad Trafakhur Rochim, the Indonesian co-ordinator of human development for the project, who trains farmers from the villages. “They have a commitment to protect the land,” he said. “They really understand that this project is really important.” He said the contract to supply food for the orangutans is worth 125 million Indonesian rupiah a month (about $14,000) for a total of 150 people, and estimated the average monthly income for a worker in the villages is between one and two million rupiah.

I saw one truck come in loaded with melons for the orangutans and, in true Indonesian fashion, it stopped at a house just outside the preserve for a boy to pick a melon for his family, a gift from the red apes. The food was bound for orangutans confiscated by officials after they had been held captive illegally in homes, sometimes as though they were members of the family, at other times chained or held in cramped cages. The orangutans are quarantined and those who are not too sick to be released are rehabilitated for the forests. Those forests, however, have been reduced by logging. One of the three vets at the project, Dr. Siswiyani—with the single name that many Indonesians have—told me: “It’s difficult to find a release site for them because there is so much deforestation.” As we talked, a male orangutan named Sipur wandered nearby. “I love them all,” she said, echoing the kind of comment I heard so often from people who work with orangutans. “They are like humans, so I feel close to them.”

It is a critical time for a project like this, considering the endangered status of orangutans. Orangutans are only found in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra and most of that land is under the control of Indonesia. There are an estimated 60,000 orangutans left in the world, a number that is dangerously low and shrinking: close to 90 percent of the wild population was lost in the 20th century alone. The rainforests of Indonesia are decimated for palm oil plantations, which support consumer products such as cooking oil, biofuel, chocolate, ice cream, margarine, toothpaste, soap, cereal, and cosmetics. “There is not a single protected area in Indonesia that is not under threat,” says Smits. He believes his project can eventually support 2,000 people and 1,000 orangutans, the number of orangutans that many scientists think can create a self-sustaining population without inbreeding.

Melons are grown by local farmers to feed the orangutans. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

It is a task of incredible complexity (some would say scientific hubris) to recreate the diverse ecology of a tropical rain forest. And yet Smits seems to be accomplishing just that. The reconstruction of the ecosystem, as he explains it, needs nutrients and microorganisms that live in symbiosis with the roots, and it needs the right combination of the right trees, everything staged in the right sequence. The compost for the transformation—an elixir of life —comes from a recipe that Smits concocted to combat the hard, infertile soil. He mixed alang-alang grass, rotten wood, sawdust, rice husk, leaves, peels, and remains of fruits and manure from cattle and chickens with a microbiological agent he made from sugar and cow urine. Chalk and nitrogen were added to speed up the process, which takes less than three weeks to complete. Smits says the trees that were planted have created a microclimate that has lowered the average temperature in the forest by between 3 and 5C, increased cloud cover by approximately 12 percent, and improved rainfall by 20 percent. The project has small lakes and reservoirs, an eco-lodge, a sun-bear sanctuary, and a research centre where individual trees are monitored by satellite imaging. There are now over 1,200 species of trees, 137 species of birds, and nine species of primates at Samboja Lestari.

With all the changes, according to Smits, the health, contentment, and economy of the community have improved dramatically. A community of 2,000 Indonesians is being established through the local farmers, who are offered free land for agreeing to live harmoniously with the wildlife and to support the ecology of the forest. The farmers plant crops of pineapples, papayas, beans, and corn, and that list will be expanded to include bananas, cacao, and chilies. The farmers can harvest the sugar palms, which may someday be sold to the sugar refinery that the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation wants to build, and can also produce the material for ethanol to run a generating station. Smits wants to build schools for the farm community that will teach humanitarian principles and ecological practices.

He says that unless they build a forest that supports the local economy, the onslaught of logging will continue. So this new forest is designed to be protected by the people who make a living from it. “If you want to help orangutans, make sure the local people benefit,” he insists. “This forest can do so many small things that make the total sum much more.”

Not everybody is convinced by what Smits says. They have questions. They want details. They want to know why so many resources should be put into creating new forests, when efforts could go toward saving the existing ones. Erik Meijaard is one of those asking pointed questions. A conservation scientist with a background in biological anthropology, Meijaard has been working in

Indonesia for the past 18 years, including a stint in the 1990s under Smits. Meijaard says it remains unclear whether Samboja Lestari is a good idea that achieves results, and that the success will ultimately depend on the extent to which it can improve community livelihoods and achieve long-term financial stability. “That question remains unanswered,” he notes, “and will remain so for a few years, because that is the kind of time such projects need to be evaluated.” Meijaard raises other questions about the enormous cost of projects like Samboja, and their financial sustainability, too. He, like others, says that it is better to concentrate on projects that attempt to protect the remaining forests instead of trying to create new ones from scratch.

“Overall this is a good project with some real potential benefits for people, nature, and climate,” he says.

“But the question is how cost-effective and sustainable is it compared to other approaches.” Meijaard says that during his time with The Nature Conservancy, Indonesia had agreed to protect two limited forests, of 38,000 and 11,000 hectares respectively, holding between 500 and 750 wild orangutans. That is as safe as it gets in Indonesia, says Meijaard. He adds: “This is not a competition between two projects, but it does raise the question whether the far higher costs of Samboja Lestari justify its relatively limited benefits.”

According to Meijaard, the Samboja Lestari project is a reaction to the intensive illegal logging on the release sites where Smits’ organization had sent rehabilitated orphan orangutans—but without a clear indication of how many orangutans survived those circumstances. “So, the idea was to rebuild a forest from scratch, get local tenure issues sorted out from the start, deal with community conflict before it arises, and eventually have a safe haven for orangutans. But how many orangutans could the area harbour?” Despite Smits’ infectious optimism, Meijaard points out that the normal population of wild orangutans that a forest can support is much lower than the number planned for Samboja Lestari. “Can the forest provide enough resources for such high densities, or will it be more of a semi-wild population that relies on additional feeding and cannot be allowed to breed? And where would the population expand to?”

Smits thinks the obstacles can be overcome, that Samboja Lestari could hold 50 times more fruit trees than a natural forest, and support a near-miraculous 1,000 orangutans in a space where a conventional forest could normally support only 60. And yet even Smits is worried about how precarious the project is. “So far,” he says, “it is an experiment and I fear it can still go wrong.”

A mother and child at the Samboja Lestari orangutan preserve. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

There is a deeper meaning to the venture at Samboja Lestari. It is a critical time for rainforests and the life that depends on them, including ours, and Smits’ rainforest could encourage a pivotal shift in our thinking. If the idea of Samboja overcomes all the political and economic obstacles and proves to be workable, it could be part of a momentous change in our relationship with the natural world. The broad history of our interaction with the rainforest has been defined by our denigration of its strength and beauty. We have misunderstood it, reviled it, misused it. Now Smits wants to take a big leap forward with a radical recreation of a forest designed for human beings and wildlife alike.

Smits has seen what happens if we don’t dare to think big and act boldly. He told me about the dramatic effect the huge fires that swept across Kalimantan had on his thinking. They were the catalyst for Samboja Lestari. “We were busy trying to save as much forest as possible. One night we went to save my research plot from fire and drilled a water hole. When the first muddy water came out we were overrun by at least 10 wild boars that bumped us over and started to drink the muddy stream. There was a deer standing still and I could touch it and noticed its legs had burned. Then she fell.” The deer died soon after. “An owl sitting on a branch fell dead. Those pictures of what happens in those forests that are drying out—a process that is worsening with climate change—are some of the most dramatic images I still carry with me.” Smits says it is images like these that make him attempt the near-impossible. “In Samboja Lestari, when I stood on that barren hill in the afternoon, I was watching the most extreme consequences of those fires and forest destruction—the vastness of yellow grass, just grass eerily silent. Not even insects! I wanted to see a damp forest again and hear the voices of birds.”