By Carolyn Beeler for Public Radio International PRI
When Edward Tang was a boy, he used to hunt durian fruit in the jungle near his house in western Borneo.
On expeditions into the forest, he’d often see orangutans swinging from branch to branch above his head.
Tang is 40 now, and as a conservation educator, he still spends a lot of time in the forest. But he almost never sees orangutans anymore.
“The impact of forest destruction in Indonesia has been immense,” Tang says.
The sprawling archipelago nation of Indonesia has lost about a quarter of its forests in the past 25 years.
Orangutans, which live in the wild only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, have been some of the most visible victims of that deforestation.
This excerpt from a news article appeared in and is courtesy of PRI and can be read in its entirety here.
