TED Tuesday: Restoring a rainforest

I have written about the speaker, Willie Smits, and his incredible work in sustainably replanting the rainforests in Samboja Listaria before. It was in connection with the RTR09 fundraising campaign that I was volunteer blogging for at the time. I had watched this talk that time but I didn’t start the TED Tuesday till much later. So today I’m sharing that fascinating talk with my readers. And also a few words from my previous post about him,

What made Dr. Smits stand out as different from others for me was his reaction to the audience’s claps when he mentioned that there were a 1000 Orang-utans in the conservation centre he ran. The audience found this an impressive achievement and began clapping. Dr. Smit immediately interrupted, “No, no, no! Wrong!!! This is an indication of our failure to sustain their natural habitat.” This told me that here was someone who really cared about the ecosystem and not about his achievements in saving it.

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vfuCPFb8wk]

Write a comment