Words by Tess Becker
Human intervention has wiped out swaths of habitat for animals all across the world. Take the Indonesian island of Sumatra – home to a host of creatures like the Sumatran tiger, elephant, and orangutan who have become critically endangered to habitat loss.
According to the World Wildlife Foundation, about 12 million hectares of forest in Sumatra have been cleared in the past 22 years. That’s nearly 50% of all the forest in Sumatra.
Because of all that habitat loss, conservationist Leif Cocks took a particular interest in the region, first working to support the Sumatran orangutan with his organization The Orangutan Project.
The organization was founded in 1998 and built on Leif’s work in establishing successful breeding colonies for orangutans to be self-sustaining.
The projects themselves are far-ranging and encompassing, covering everything from animal rescue and rehabilitation to forest habitat protection and regeneration, education, research, and local community partnerships.
Orangutans are what’s considered an ‘umbrella species’ or a species whose conservation is expected to confer protection to a large number of naturally co-occurring species, and that’s one of the reasons why, to Leif, they were so important to protect.
This work then started expanding, eventually leading to two more organizations, the International Tiger Project, and International Elephant Project, with another project coming soon with a focus on helping indigenous communities and people who rely on the drastically shrinking land.
To Leif, everything is connected. When you can focus on the economic outcomes and livelihood of the people in a region, conservation becomes a lot easier.
“The environment, economy, and conservation are all the same thing,” Leif tells Smiley News. “The best outcome for all three of those things is to look after all living beings and support the whole ecosystem.”
You have to care for every part of the system or your plans may fall short, he adds.
“If you leave one piece of the jigsaw puzzle out, your plan becomes faulty and starts cracking up,” he says. “We're all in the same boat together, and we're all interconnected. So all good conservation involves a holistic plan, which includes the environment, the economy, and all species, and obviously, humans are one of those.”
One big part of the work Leif does through his organizations is helping populations of people or animals support themselves now that they’re fragmented and living on unsustainable land, aiming to supplement the lost space and resources.
But it hasn’t been easy and didn’t happen overnight. “It's been a great journey,” Leif says. “My main skill is my ability to collectivize and bring on board talented and wonderful people into the cause.
“I say as individuals, we're not very good or not very effective or even smart. Humans really only achieve something of significance through collectivization, so it's been a fantastic journey of working with wonderful people and achieving great things.”
While the outlook for the future may be a little bleak, Leif still maintains hope.
“We hope in the next decade, which I call the most important decade in human history, which will not only determine the survival of orangutans as a species, but the survival of the rainforest as a whole and to a great extent the planet so we're hoping to turn things around.”
Find out more and support The Orangutan Project.
