“When you realize the value of life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”
Dian Fossey
Camp Fossey
Dr Gunther had described the camp as plain, rustic, and basic. Those were the adjectives he used. He emphasized the nature of the challenge, never once did he over-sell the place. The reality came crashing home in all its plain, rustic, basic simplicity that this was it. This was home for the next year, or more. He knew that his mentor, who gave the brief introduction the previous evening, had finished his teaching duties the previous semester at the University of Toronto and would now dedicate his time to the Fossey program.
On a professional and personal level Mathias was friends with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, until her untimely death at the hands of poachers. Gunther had renamed his own Borneo research camp in her honour. Camp Fossey, was more than a field post in a remote section of Indonesia. It was sanctuary, laboratory, research centre and political statement rolled into one and carved into the heart of Kalimantan.
At the core of the centre stood a cluster of hand-built, meaning by the locals from mainly local materials, wooden structures raised on stilts. This was the custom out of necessity to build raised off the loamy ground level for flood control, safety and predator control including insects. The largest structure, in Dayak design was the central lodge with mosquito screens for many of the interior walls and a corrugated tin roof that sang out during the hard and frequent rains. It was here in this building, the largest amongst the collection of buildings that the researchers gathered to share data, analyze hours of video and written field notes representing hours of observations. Here the members of the team came to exchange their stories and anecdotes, tell stories of home, console each other when lonely and argue late into the night about potential extinction rates, animal cognition, land ethics, government interventions and so much more.
Adjoining, was the larger rehab building, a long open-air hall-like structure with bamboo partitions. It was in this structure where young orangutans, many orphaned, some sick, a few traumatized beyond easy healing, came for rehabilitation and recreation. Some swung, and climbed it well enough, from ropes and vines fastened from the rafters. Their names were written in chalk on small slate boards each with a brief note concerning diet, temperament, training level and progress trajectory. For healing orangutans and eager students this was generally a happy place for each for different reasons.
A few meters down a muddy track, dusty in dry season, was the infirmary, which also doubled as a quarantine hut and on occasion a birthing chamber. Foreign graduate students, like the recent three from Germany often worked here under the quiet supervision of Camp manager Lila Watanabe, veterinarian with a Tokyo diploma and a jungle soul. Many of the workers here put in many volunteer hours. Gunther had grant money from various universities, including his own and several zoos, a few philanthropists and public donations. Each time a movie like Every Which Way but Loose, or Any Which Way You Can, featuring Clint Eastwood and Clyde played by an orangutan, Manis, donations were more generous. Following an international story about orangutans in captivity abused in a Thailand circus or elsewhere involving a heroic and glorious repatriation to Borneo, also proved helpful in bringing in a rash of donations. In between celebrity status and crisis generally people didn’t care much about the status of orangutans, endangered species, loss of habitat or even knew where Borneo was in the world.
The funding at Fossey was sketchy at the best of times. The Indonesian government paid lip service to conservation as they viewed it as an impediment to progress. Therefore, the need to have research/volunteers constantly moving into the camp from various parts of the world was essential to the survival of the institution. With each student came some grant money, some media attention, if only locally, needed valuable research and more awareness. Gunther had founded this facility, Fossey, on a whim and a prayer and it was through his own notoriety, publications and promotional efforts, that he was able to keep this boat afloat.
Around the outskirts of the camp past the dormitory buildings and the mess hut, were paths that led to a series of feeding platforms stocked daily with fruit and leaves designed as part of the transitioning process or re-wilding process of the guest orangutans. The platforms allow orangutans the opportunity to seek more independence providing them the opportunity to leave the main camp on their own yet near enough to find the security they require. At the platforms food is available because orphaned orangutans lack the skills to find their own food, often dependent on their mothers for up to eight years before forced out of the nest by their mother’s to seek their own jungle independence.
Further into the jungle were temporary camps about one or two days trek outside the main camp perimeter, where researchers further observe transitioning orangutans. In some cases as a young orangutan is ready for self-directed jungle life, away from human contact navigating the jungle environment with fading traces of dependence, they eventually stray from the more distant camps and may not be seen for days at a time, then come back and stay until one day they are gone to find their own territory and life of solitary, fruit gathering and nest building and hopefully mating and reproduction.
Mark joined Mathias on the porch of his cabin as the sun dropped behind the rainforest ridge a few kilometres distant from the camp. The heat still clung to the verandah boards like something alive. Mathias had his cabin designed in miniature replica of his own cottage in the Muskoka country north of Toronto, where he spent time in retreat on his lake fishing and writing. On this evening the crickets started before the parrots finished and the humid air carried a faint scent of diesel from the generator humming out by the supply shed.
Mathias eased backed in his bamboo chair, boots up on an over turned crate, his favourite chipped enamel mug sweating beside him . He had the unhurried posture of a man who had once lived in cities, then rejected everything cities promised and could not deliver.
“Back then Mark, in the decades of the sixties and seventies,” he said, thumb grazing the grey line of his jaw, “no one wanted to hear the word warming. You said it and were ignored, or at best people assumed you were talking about blankets, not the planet.”
Mark sat opposite his mentor, notebooks closed for once in this more relaxed and impromptu opportunity to talk with Gunther. Mark’s voice sounded polite with a Canadian lilt that sounded almost apologetic when he spoke. “So you just what…started up a camp?
“No,” Mathias grinned. “I started a nuisance. Camp Fossey came much later.”
A toucan, or Rhinoceros Hornbill as they are called in Borneo, croaked somewhere in the distance under the canopy, like a saw-blade catching on metal, allowing Mathias a moment to formulate his next thought.
Mathias leaned forward, the porch light catching the deep furrows around his piercing, alert eyes. “In the earlier days, the formative days, you had to be loud. We faxed politicians, lobbied, sneaked photos from the days of Love Canal, chemical contamination, industrial negligence, nuclear power accidents, like three Mile Island, the Santa Barbara Oil spills, or the Cuyahoga River fires. One disaster after another. We tried to document it all. Get justice, or at least some accountability. I begged grants out of people who didn’t know a rainforest from a potted fern. Awareness was the major battle long before conservation was even a thing. It was frustrating, corporations do not take kindly to accountability and environmental responsibility. They generally do what they want to do and usually sanctioned by their boards with government approval. All very demoralizing. I didn’t know any more if I was anthropologist or environmental activist. The lines had blurred. These days, with age, or senility I am more focussed. Camp Fossey became the true focus. It’s here I can combine primate studied, habitat depletion and the effect on indigenous life styles. I have my porch, my enamel mug and Civas Regal on a quiet night.” He paused taking a long indulgent swig from his mug.
“In terms of Camp Fossey, as simple and crude as it first appears, and I suppose actually is. I annoyed everyone rich enough to feel guilty,” he said laughing quietly. “Foundations, universities, trust funds. I speak at conferences, tell stories and make corporate boards squirm until they give. You never ask them directly to save the world. You ask them to join the story be part of the narrative of saving it. They like being part of positive stories. It's all about marketing.
Mark wrote that sentence down in his head, he could feel it settling there, sticky and important. The night deepened. A breeze moved through the porch posts, rattling the tarps rolled above.
“There’s a philosophy to this,” Mathias continued, lowering his voice, almost confessional. “We are not educating people on the environment. Everyone knows the environment is collapsing. What they don’t know is where hope factors into the disaster. There’s a narrow line between despair and momentum. You have to teach both. A subtle message is usually best, but even I will admit sometimes stronger measures are needed.”
Mark swallowed. “Do you think it’s winnable? This…ecological war?”
Mathias took a long sip of his ”tea” He didn’t answer at first.
“Quite frankly Mark, I think large parts of it have already been lost,” he said softly. “Species are gone forever. Glaciers that won’t come back. Children will grow up never seeing a coral reef except in archival footage. This is hopelessness.”
Mark felt a hollow pressure in his stomach, wondering how this all impacted his time at Camp Fossey and his own career path now in its formative stages.
“But,” Mathias said, leaning forward again, eyes sharpening with that stubborn spark, “everything that remains is hope. Forests still standing. Rivers not poisoned. Indigenous communities still fighting. And every person who shows up, like you, is proof of that.”
Mark glanced towards the camp perimeter, where the jungle began. Something moved out there, a rustling, urgent, alive.
“You’re grooming me for something?” He asked quietly. They had circled around this topic all week, but Mathias had been cryptic.
Mathias nodded once. “I won’t be running Camp Fossey forever. I’m passing operational control soon. To a rising star, someone with grit, someone who doesn’t bore through their empathy and leave only cynicism.”
Marked blinked. “I hope I’m in the short list.”
Mathias smiled in that infuriating, knowing way. “Your stay here Mr Penner is but an audition. Make no mistake the world needs leaders, not armchair activists. Someone who can stand in front of cameras, summon media attention, raise funds, find donors and say the truth without flinching.”
Mark let the words settle. He suddenly felt the weight of the porch, the camp, the forest. It felt heavier than any other responsibility in his life. He thought of his tidy little Mennonite life back home, of his crowded university office, the cafes, the winter hockey games and all of a sudden those things seem so small.
Mathias tapped his mug on the rail. “Mark there will be days that you feel unstoppable,” he said. “And days you feel stupid and naive and utterly pointless. That’s the real war. Not against corporations or carbon. Against giving up.”
Mark finally smiled, uncertain, but real. “You think I’m ready for that?”
“No one is ever ready,” Mathias said, standing stretching out his weathered frame. “Some people just decide to begin anyway.”
For all its rustic charm, Fossey bristled with quiet urgency. It was a place built on borrowed time, holding the every changing line against extinction, encroachment and the ever increasing advance of heavy destructive equipment owned by self-absorbed men who had never looked into the orangutans eyes or seen the intelligence behind them.
Each morning while Gunther was in residence he would sit sedately on the veranda of his private cabin, sipping his “tea” from a dented camping mug, watching the morning mist dissipate over the canopy ceiling as if waiting for the forest itself to speak.
