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.
Go back to view gallery
Collaboration and Contestation
