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Dr. Biruté Galdikas in Vancouver, 1993
SPEAKING TO A NEAR-CAPACITY crowd at the Vogue Theatre, the world's foremost protector of orangutan habitat and a surrogate parent to 100 rehabilitated orangutans, as well as a mother to three human children along the way, looks tired, vaguely beat. Twenty-two years of living in the Borneo jungle, battling poachers and loggers, enduring malaria, typhoid, leeches, toxic tree sap bums, dengue fever and former headhunters who eat orangutans will do that for a person...
We knew in advance, thanks to a CBC- TV documentary called "The Third Angel", that Galdikas no longer resembles the Madonna-with-orangutan featured in Evelyn Gallardo's new biography for young readers, Among the Orangutans: The Birute Galdikas Story (Chronicle/Raincoast $8.95/$17.95). At the podium for the inaugural fundraiser of the newly formed Orangutan Foundation of Canada, Canada's wild woman of Borneo is surprisingly circumspect, almost dour, as she dutifully narrates her slide show.
It's a culture shock to find someone on a stage not trying to be liked. Her potentially worshipful audience is hoping for humour or inspirational anger, and will get neither. A former National Geographic cover girl, Galdikas has become a hard-core realist. "Being an ecologist or a biologist is almost irrelevant to conservation," she says, "Increasingly conservationists must be political."
Galdikas, a lecturer in primatology at SFU, recently received a United Nations Global 500 Award in Beijing and a 1993 Chevron Conservation Award. She's a bona fide global eco-star. But even with her reputation as one of 'Leakey's Primates' or 'Leakey's Angels', Galdikas has to watch her step in, of all places, Vancouver. In the audience tonight is a representative from the Indonesian consulate. Galdikas praises the Indonesian government for its cooperation. East Timor isn't mentioned. Her audience doesn't know, and isn't told, that Galdikas has yet to be re-issued her annual permit from the Indonesia Institute of Science to continue her research in September.
Galdikas notes the Indonesian government has now declared its number one priority is 'jobs' and she leaves it at that. The logging companies don't want her back in the 300,000-hectare Tanjung Puting Reserve. She shows us one slide of the Korea-based logging consortium that has moved into her peninsula jutting into the Java Sea. She is only obliquely critical. She can only afford to be blunt about humankind in general. "One thing we know for sure is that humans don't relinquish power very easily," she says, "Human capacity for greed is an almost inexhaustible commodity."
Local emcee Gamet Hardy has spent two weeks at Galdikas' remote Camp Leakey compound, 30 miles up the winding Sekonyer River from the town of Pangkalan Bun, in Borneo. He repeatedly refers to Galdikas as ' the professor' . One gets the impression 'the professor' is not always a happy camper. Nonetheless Galdikas is willing to make a perfunctory fuss about the City of Vancouver's proclamation of 'Protect Orangutan Day' on July 8. She must play every angle. "All I can do is squeak piteously in the dark," she says.
The professor's audience waits politely for Galdikas to finish so they can buy souvenir t-shirts in the lobby. Copies of the book will be snapped up, too. But before they go, Galdikas lets slip something which reveals something of the fierceness of her character, and the depth of her scientific but also moral vision. "AIDS", she says, "is probably directly related to the degradation of the environment of this planet." Galdikas apparently accepts the green monkey theory. Monkey brain eating. Retrogression. The rapaciousness of humankind. Coupled with her earlier reference to orangutans still inhabiting the Garden of Eden, this remark indicates Biruté Galdikas has a great deal more to say about humankind than she's willing to share during the course of a slide show. No doubt Dr. Galdikas can sometimes be prickly, circumspect, stubborn, tired, arrogant and not much of an entertainer. Thank God she's on the planet.
BCBW AUTUMN 1993
We knew in advance, thanks to a CBC- TV documentary called "The Third Angel", that Galdikas no longer resembles the Madonna-with-orangutan featured in Evelyn Gallardo's new biography for young readers, Among the Orangutans: The Birute Galdikas Story (Chronicle/Raincoast $8.95/$17.95). At the podium for the inaugural fundraiser of the newly formed Orangutan Foundation of Canada, Canada's wild woman of Borneo is surprisingly circumspect, almost dour, as she dutifully narrates her slide show.
It's a culture shock to find someone on a stage not trying to be liked. Her potentially worshipful audience is hoping for humour or inspirational anger, and will get neither. A former National Geographic cover girl, Galdikas has become a hard-core realist. "Being an ecologist or a biologist is almost irrelevant to conservation," she says, "Increasingly conservationists must be political."
Galdikas, a lecturer in primatology at SFU, recently received a United Nations Global 500 Award in Beijing and a 1993 Chevron Conservation Award. She's a bona fide global eco-star. But even with her reputation as one of 'Leakey's Primates' or 'Leakey's Angels', Galdikas has to watch her step in, of all places, Vancouver. In the audience tonight is a representative from the Indonesian consulate. Galdikas praises the Indonesian government for its cooperation. East Timor isn't mentioned. Her audience doesn't know, and isn't told, that Galdikas has yet to be re-issued her annual permit from the Indonesia Institute of Science to continue her research in September.
Galdikas notes the Indonesian government has now declared its number one priority is 'jobs' and she leaves it at that. The logging companies don't want her back in the 300,000-hectare Tanjung Puting Reserve. She shows us one slide of the Korea-based logging consortium that has moved into her peninsula jutting into the Java Sea. She is only obliquely critical. She can only afford to be blunt about humankind in general. "One thing we know for sure is that humans don't relinquish power very easily," she says, "Human capacity for greed is an almost inexhaustible commodity."
Local emcee Gamet Hardy has spent two weeks at Galdikas' remote Camp Leakey compound, 30 miles up the winding Sekonyer River from the town of Pangkalan Bun, in Borneo. He repeatedly refers to Galdikas as ' the professor' . One gets the impression 'the professor' is not always a happy camper. Nonetheless Galdikas is willing to make a perfunctory fuss about the City of Vancouver's proclamation of 'Protect Orangutan Day' on July 8. She must play every angle. "All I can do is squeak piteously in the dark," she says.
The professor's audience waits politely for Galdikas to finish so they can buy souvenir t-shirts in the lobby. Copies of the book will be snapped up, too. But before they go, Galdikas lets slip something which reveals something of the fierceness of her character, and the depth of her scientific but also moral vision. "AIDS", she says, "is probably directly related to the degradation of the environment of this planet." Galdikas apparently accepts the green monkey theory. Monkey brain eating. Retrogression. The rapaciousness of humankind. Coupled with her earlier reference to orangutans still inhabiting the Garden of Eden, this remark indicates Biruté Galdikas has a great deal more to say about humankind than she's willing to share during the course of a slide show. No doubt Dr. Galdikas can sometimes be prickly, circumspect, stubborn, tired, arrogant and not much of an entertainer. Thank God she's on the planet.
BCBW AUTUMN 1993
Submitted on June 6, 2004 in By David.
