A former logging railway transports a member of the Borneo Nature Foundation (BNF) through the thick smoke haze to reach the Sebangau forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Indonesia’s peatlands, where most orangutans live, frequently experience devastating forest and land fires during El Niño induced droughts. In 2015, nearly 125,000 fire hotspots were detected in the peatlands of Sumatra, Borneo and the Indonesian part of Papua. The impacts of these recurrent peat-fires range from local to global scale. Large areas of forest burn down, which leads to biodiversity loss, release of huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, and toxic smoke haze that causes respiratory diseases and premature death, and disrupts local as well as regional economies.
In the 1990s, this part of the Sebangau tropical peat-swamp forest was a timber concession. The 12km logging railway enabled the timber company to extract wood from this waterlogged forest. People also dug canals to extract logs during times of high-water table. The logging and construction of canals changed the hydrology of the peat-swamp forest drastically. Having lost its natural sponge effect, the peat-swamp forest gets now heavily flooded during the rainy season and becomes extremely vulnerable to fires during the dry-season. Today, Sebangau is the largest National Park in Kalimantan. It is home to the biggest continuous protected population of Bornean orangutans (with 6,000 individuals). The former logging camp has been converted into a permanent research facility. Nowadays, the logging railway carries field staff, conservationists, researchers and supplies, facilitating new forms of human and more-than-human collaboration.

This device was created by indigenous Dayak villagers to keep orangutans and other animals away from a grove of fruit trees. A natural trickle of water is guided through one bamboo stalk into another, which tips over when full and hits a third bamboo stalk as it tilts back, resulting in a clacking noise. Human-orangutan conflict is not uncommon in rural Borneo, especially during the fruiting season. Even though many villagers express a liking for orangutans, when competing for valuable, seasonal durian fruit they feel conflicted between their fondness for orangutans and their fondness for durian. Successful human-orangutan coexistence therefore often requires humans and orangutans to remain out of each other’s sight, which this device aims to achieve through the medium of loud sounds.

A logging truck transports conservationists to the forest. Making conservation work on the ground often requires flexibility and strategic pragmatism, and sometimes leads to unexpected forms of collaboration between actors from seemingly opposing industries (in this case, logging and conservation).

A deliberately felled tree blocks the path to a protected area established on an indigenous village’s customary land. The creation of this conservation space—which aimed to protect orangutans and other endangered species—gave rise to land disputes, disrupted local logging, hunting and mining activities and generated tensions and disagreements within the community. More than an expression of protest, the person felled the tree with the ‘hope to be heard, raise the issue of unresolved boundaries, and meet those who can explain exactly where the boundary is’. As this quote suggests, rural Bornean communities do not resist conservation per se; however, the success of such schemes very much depends on how conservation actors approach sensitive issues such as land tenure, and succeed in building relationship of care, acknowledgement, and reciprocity.

Wood has long been, and still is, an important asset in Borneo. These planks were put down to facilitate the hauling of illegally harvested timber by wheelbarrow. But like logging infrastructure elsewhere, this path serves several other users. People heading to the river for fish often use the planks for quick transport by motorbike over the bogs. Now the path has also been co-opted by conservationists in an effort to mitigate wildfires. Vegetation on the sides of the path has been slashed and cleared to reduce the likelihood of fire crossing over the path which, at the same time, facilitates the movement of patrol teams and their equipment.

A patrol team documents an illegal logging operation in a village forest. Habitat protection and community empowerment are both crucial parts of orangutan conservation. Conservationists often seek to combine both through Indonesia’s social forestry program, which lets communities sustainably manage state forest. To succeed, such ‘village forests’ require collaborations between many different parties. In this image, the community’s forest management team joined forces with staff from a conservation NGO, a national park ranger, and an official from the forestry service. Photographs and GPS tracks, as well as written documentation, form evidence that forest protection is actively happening. Documents such as these have been instrumental in enabling this village forest to get a new funding agreement. However, recent instances of forest clearing point to the continuing challenges facing village forest projects, particularly those relating to lack of information, involvement or agreement among other villagers.

A member of conservation NGO HUTAN’s reforestation team carrying native tree seedlings to a replanting site—formerly an oil palm-growing area—in the Lower Kinabatangan area, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. HUTAN works with local communities to protect wildlife and manage human-wildlife interactions in the Kinabatangan—a heavily degraded and fragmented river basin that is also home to 800-1000 orangutans. The reforestation programme aims to create forest linkages in heavily anthropogenic (human-modified) landscapes to increase food sources and allow wildlife to move freely between forest patches and larger forest areas. Planting seedlings is only the first step of a long, demanding process of more-than-human care and collaboration. Planting sites must first be manually tended and regularly weeded by the team to promote the survival of seedlings. As more species enter and use the area, they effectively become nonhuman collaborators that help to introduce, disseminate and fertilise seeds and aid the establishment of the forest corridor.

Aerial footage of a forest corridor running through an oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Sabah’s rainforests have been extensively degraded and fragmented by oil palm plantations and industrial logging. These developments threaten the survival of orangutans, which have historically lived in large, unbroken areas of rainforest. However, recent research carried out in this area over two decades suggests that orangutans are more resilient and adaptable than previously thought, and are able to survive—even reproduce—in forest patches in anthropogenic (human-modified) landscapes. Forest corridors are strips of wooded jungle that connect these forest patches and larger forest areas. They allow orangutans and many other species to move across plantation and other anthropogenic landscapes, boosting their overall populations’ chances of survival. In this way, forest corridors facilitate various kinds of collaboration between nonhuman entities (notably plants and animals), while also requiring ongoing collaboration between two seemingly opposed sectors: corporations and conservationists.

Forest restoration projects aim to regenerate degraded or fragmented forests, restoring their ability to sustain a variety of life and ecological processes. Here, a member of the Orangutan Information Centre’s (OIC) forest restoration team cuts down illegally planted oil palms in the Cinta Raja Restoration Site within the Gunung Leuser National Park (GLNP), home to critically endangered Sumatran Orangutans. Clearing oil palms is a prelude to replanting the land with native trees that, it is hoped, will eventually restore forest cover and attract a variety of rainforest species, including orangutans, back to the area. Forest restoration could thus be described as a means of (re)creating multispecies collaborations in places where they had previously been destroyed. Fittingly, this image shows such work being carried out with a chainsaw—a tool popularly associated with deforestation and human-nature conflict, but that has been repurposed to redress such earlier damage. Since 2008, OIC has replanted over 2000 hectares of forest with around 2.4 million seedlings and 97 indigenous tree species.