Forest Keepers
Fighting to save the forests of Borneo—a biodiversity epicenter home to the endangered orangutan and other rare species
Text by Matt Miller | Issue 3, 2025
As I step off the boat onto the boardwalk, my eyes immediately catch movement in the nearby trees. Flashes of fur, long tails swaying. In the dense tropical forest, it’s difficult to get a clear view. But as I scan deeper into the brush, a face suddenly appears right before me: a monkey.
Soon, others appear, occasionally stopping to give me an inquisitive look, but mainly gamboling through the trees, alternately playing and fighting.
I travel along the path, enjoying their antics, when my eye catches a slower movement in a forest clearing. A monitor lizard—4 feet in length—flicks its tongue as it heads toward some of the camp’s breakfast leftovers.
Farther down, a large handmade sign emblazoned in block letters says: “Welcome to the Jungle.”
I’m in Kutai National Park in the province of East Kalimantan, located in the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo—which is known as Kalimantan. A career nature and science writer, I’ve always dreamed of coming here, and I’m excited by the possibility of seeing an orangutan in its natural habitat. But I’m also here to learn firsthand what the future holds for orangutans and Bornean forests.
I’m traveling with a group of nine others from The Nature Conservancy, corporate sponsor Arhaus and Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara (YKAN), a national foundation that took over TNC’s operations and conservation programs in Indonesia in 2020. Arhaus has made a significant financial commitment to YKAN in its efforts to support the Indonesian government, companies and communities to protect and sustainably manage the forests in Kalimantan.
Borneo is the world’s third-largest island, and it is known for its exceptional biodiversity. This includes more than 15,000 plant species, well over 600 birds and more than 220 mammals. Over the past several decades, habitat has been lost to logging, infrastructure development, mining and agriculture. As a result, orangutan populations have declined precipitously. Still, Kalimantan holds roughly three-quarters of the world’s remaining orangutans, and East Kalimantan has some of the most significant tracts of forest remaining.
I’m in East Kalimantan to see how community-led conservation efforts are protecting the forest and wildlife, including the iconic orangutans. To date, the effort is protecting orangutan corridors within more than 1.3 million acres of important habitat, and the community-led approach is a model for helping achieve the protection of millions more acres of Indonesian forest. National parks, community-protected areas and logging concessions, I’ll soon learn, all have a role to play.
Kutai National Park
We’re beginning our tour at this national park, which hosts one of East Kalimantan’s largest orangutan populations. As our group watches monkeys, one of our guides, a fit man in his 20s wearing shorts and sandals, motions me over; an orangutan has been spotted nearby. A minute later, he waves us to head down the forest trail. The group takes off at a trot. I am constantly scrambling to keep pace. A guide up ahead signals he has spotted an orangutan. Our pace quickens and we head off trail.
I slip on mud, trip over roots. Indonesia’s forests are around 140 million years old—the second-oldest tropical forests on Earth. They’re a biodiversity hot spot, home to not only orangutans but also a diversity of primates and other rainforest mammals. They’re also under enormous threat. According to David Gaveau, founder of The TreeMap and Nusantara Atlas—an organization that compares historical and modern satellite data to track deforestation—Indonesian Borneo lost 11 million acres of old-growth forest between 2001 and 2023, with additional acres destroyed each year.
My quick-dry pants shred on thorns from the undergrowth. We pad through the forest, listening as the guides softly hoot back and forth to each other. We are getting close.
We approach a large tree, and Priscilla Christin, YKAN’s communications director, points to a branch 50 feet above and whispers, “It’s up there.”
I look, and … there. An arm. A long, red, very hairy arm reaches out and plucks something off a branch. I pull my binoculars to my eyes to focus on a large male orangutan. We catch a longer view as he swings through the trees.
The orangutan doesn’t reciprocate our awe. After a few minutes, he starts dropping branches on us. This appears to be more an act of annoyance than rage. He continues his routine, moving through the trees and plucking fruits. The guides smile at each other. They know the orangutans here, and this one has a reputation for being grumpy. I find the animal amazing: Despite its large size, it moves nonchalantly through the trees.
When we hear thunder, the guides signal that it’s time for us to return to the main camp. I take a moment for one last look. The orangutan’s arm extends out and chucks a particularly large branch. It lands with a thud, eliciting low chuckles from our group. The orangutan looks down, showing his bowl-shaped face.
Then there’s more thunder, now closer, and drops of rain. The orangutan swings through the trees. We’re going to get soaked. It’s time to head back.
Wehea Protected Forest
Well-managed national parks like Kutai remain vital for orangutans. But as we drive to our next stop, Ruslandi, YKAN’s terrestrial program director, tells me that nearly 80% of orangutans in Kalimantan are found outside protected areas. And many of those are found around villages.
To conserve orangutans, he notes, you need healthy forest, but just as important are partnerships with local communities. We’re now on our way to visit one such community-led conservation project.
The roads today are lined with plantations that produce the palm oil commonly found in processed foods. Many hillsides have been converted to coal mines, somehow reminiscent of my youth in Pennsylvania’s anthracite country. But Ruslandi reminds me that large, connected cores of intact habitat remain. If protected, they would be enough to ensure the orangutan’s future survival.
We soon come to the guard station of Nehas Liah Bing, the largest village of the Dayak Wehea community.
“The Wehea forest has one of the healthiest populations of orangutans in East Kalimantan, comparable to Kutai National Park,” says Ruslandi.
That is why YKAN supported the village in its efforts to protect 71,000 acres of Wehea forest, as well as sustainably managing 1.3 million acres of forest in a wider landscape. The organization works with the community on monitoring, research and enforcement. A key element of the forest protection is a team of forest guardians.
Our group spills out into an open meadow, and we’re each greeted by community leader Ledjie Taq and his daughter, Yuliana Wetuq, who is a leader in the forest guardians. Ledjie welcomes us to the community as brothers and sisters, performing a ritual to ensure we have a good visit.
The forest guardians leading our group through the forest today are young community members who protect the forest from poaching and illegal tree clearing. They also serve many other roles, including monitoring wildlife, participating in research and guiding visitors.
“Rangers make a huge difference,” explains Eddie Game, lead scientist and director of conservation for TNC’s Asia Pacific Region, when I return from the trip. “In a forest without rangers, you often have little areas of forest being cleared for agriculture. This adds up.”
A guardian points up into the trees: not an orangutan this time, but a sign of one. Leaves and branches have been constructed into a sort of platform high above the rainforest floor. It’s an orangutan nest. One of our guides says that the apes build these nests daily, leaving a verifiable sign of their presence.
Our hike is once again interrupted by a sudden, dramatic rainstorm. Soaked through our rain gear, we make our way through the forest back to our eco-lodge.
As I pull off boots at the lodge’s entrance, nearly every part of my leg gushes blood down to the floor. Leeches, apparently, are a fact of life in the rainforest. These little blood suckers perch on the leaves of plants, then attach to animals (including humans) as they brush by.
That evening, Ledjie Taq and Ruslandi pull out a laptop and show us footage from the camera traps researchers set around Wehea. The cameras reveal lots of images of orangutans along with even more elusive creatures like sun bears and clouded leopards. A camera trap set up here a couple of years ago captured an image of a Miller’s langur, a monkey species that was believed to be extinct two decades ago. The forests here were dense and remote enough to support the last few holdouts. Subsequent research efforts proved that a population of this species remains in the Wehea forest.
I wake up early in my little room to a crescendo of whooping calls outside. Nearby, gibbons are doing their morning routine of calling to one another while swinging
through the tree canopy above. Their feet never touch the ground, and it illustrates to me how so much life here depends on connected forests. When forests become too thin to allow this kind of movement—or are completely clear-cut—the primates will leave the area.
Gunung Gajah Abadi Concession
It’s evident as we pull up to the next camp, a short drive away, that our morning is going to change course.
A group of men dressed in workwear asks us to put on hard hats and orange safety vests. They grab chainsaws as we walk toward an opening in the forest. There’s a road lined with trucks and other equipment from logging operations. In a small clearing, two men cut down a very large tree. It smashes into the muddy ground, sending an impact that reverberates through the soles of my bruised feet.
Our group is silent for a second. As a conservationist, I used to think of logging as the bane of the rainforest’s existence, so seeing that giant tree fall comes as a shock. But what I’m seeing is as much a part of the orangutan’s future as national parks.
We’re at Gunung Gajah Abadi, a logging concession operated as a sustainably managed forest. Ruslandi explains to me that each year, only one of 30 forest blocks is available for harvesting. In that block, he says only four to seven trees per acre are cut, which allows for some economic benefits from logging while keeping the forest relatively intact for wildlife.
A few years ago, due to changing timber markets, some private logging concessions across Borneo simply ceased operations. Good news for the forest, right? Not quite.
Research found that when these closely monitored logging companies moved out, illegal logging, poaching and land clearing for crops accelerated on much of the same land.
“It becomes no one’s land,” says Edy Sudiono, who has seen these effects firsthand over more than 22 years working for TNC and YKAN. “When logging concessions became inactive, it resulted in even more forest [and biodiversity] loss.” In some cases it actually led to creation of small palm-oil plantations.
“This is the core starting point that made us realize that managed logging concessions had to be part of the future here, for the forest, for the community and for orangutans,” Sudiono says.
Concessions like this one are certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council, which has strict standards on how the forest is harvested and also has regulations that ensure worker safety, restoration and wildlife protection. Donations like the one from furniture company Arhaus will enable funding for YKAN to work with communities and the Indonesian government to protect additional critical orangutan habitat.
“Evidence shows that if we are able to protect a few of these concessions plus Wehea, you pretty much guarantee the survival of this subspecies of orangutan,” says Sudiono.
Merabu Village
Our final stop has us traveling up a forest river via motorboat. As we round a bend, two Asian small-clawed otters frolic along a riverbank.
We’re visiting Merabu village, one of TNC’s first community-led conservation projects developed in collaboration with YKAN. It’s become a model for shaping what community-led conservation can be, says Ruslandi.
For centuries the forest has sustained the Merabu community. Today, residents sustainably harvest forest products, including wild honey and medicinal plants for sale. They have also developed an ecotourism program that includes caves with ancient human handprint paintings and hikes to limestone cliffs and Nyadeng Lake, a site on today’s agenda.
Our guides lead us through a forest to the lake, a stunning turquoise body of water surrounded by trees. I stare into the aqua-clear depths. Schools of fish dart around.
I also reflect on the past few days and the different conservation strategies I’ve seen in action. Borneo’s forests face significant and well-publicized threats. Addressing them will require this multifaceted approach. Sustainable logging and selling wild honey, employing forest guardians and developing ecotourism, research and monitoring—all play a role. And most of all, the forest protection must be led by local communities and reflect their own aspirations for the forest.
Our group is sitting, relaxing after a few busy days of travel. Ruslandi smiles as he sees me enjoying the stunning scenery. “The communities are the leaders here. They are the key to the conservation of Borneo’s forests and biodiversity,” he says. “We are here to support them. We can provide science and help them shape what they want their future to be. But this is the reflection of their dream.”
About the Author
Matt Miller lives in Idaho and serves as The Nature Conservancy’s director of science communications. He is a regular writer for the Cool Green Science blog.
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