The last illness of the season caught me out and changed my weekend plans. The only roaming I did was through a new book about orangutans of Indonesia and the rescue work led by Willie Smit. Twenty years ago, the forest ecologist’s life changed when he stopped at a rubbish heap in a market and picked up a sickly infant ape left to die.

Thanks to Smit’s efforts, that female called Uce, along with many others, now has a life again in the rainforest. She also has a baby of her own. The book’s photographer, an overseas stranger, befriends Uce by offering instant Polaroid photos of her with her baby. She recognises the images and is clearly excited. When heading back to the forest, she entrusts the photos to the local ranger. Months later, when she visits, she wants to see the photos again.

Smit and his team of local Dayak people agree that the red apes can understand at least several hundred words of both Indonesian and the local dialect. An ape child, living in close physical contact with the mother for five years, learns to monitor a thousand different species of jungle plants and to select food as it ripens. These days, with populations decimated by several hundred years of hunting, its adult life is rather solitary. Sometimes, certain foods become abundant. This brings apes together.

Disaster also brings the orangutans together. Plantations of African palms offer a poor diet but apes find stripping the young trees is some food anyway. The crops, grown for palm oil, could be grown in the plains. But these are planted in cleared rainforest because there is more money to be made with that initial logging, however illegal. When the starving apes converge on these palms, they are shot dead. Any babies still living are caged for possible sale as ‘pets’.

The cleared rainforest is also a disaster for local people. In Samboja Lestari the Dayak found their food, water, shelter and herbal medicines were all ruined. Though they had given up head hunting, they started again so as to scare off the invading palm farmers. But fires burned vast hectares. Drought set in. Rain, when it came, was catastrophic and caused floods greater than ever known before. The people became ill and further impoverished.

The palm farmers still came. Some of their markets are guaranteed by contracts with EU nations using palm oil as biofuel for new power stations. The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), directed by Smit, asked the EU people for the funding to buy almost two thousand hectares of the devastated land. Working with the Dayak, BOS has replanted the land with food trees important to both apes and humans.

As the rainforest takes hold again, the local climate improves. It’s not so hot and the rains are more regular and mild. More food crops, including sugar palm, are grown around the perimeter of the jungle itself. Many of the Dayak also work directly in the rescue and rehabilitating of orangutans. Ecology classes are held for the children and adults.

As the Dayak begin to prosper again, they all guard against any attempts from outside the community to kidnap and kill their apes. They accept that if any ape is missing, all of their household payments are suspended for one month. As their chief Sina Sinam says, ‘We realise the orangutan and we are fellow-sufferers. We too, will not survive without the rainforest.’

Shared pain motivates the Dayak, who, by planting trees and caring for animals, are re-establishing their close relationship with nature. To replant with native plants for the sake of wild animals is the same challenge now facing the million people of Tucson, Arizona.

Last month, the Arizona University team, led by Michael Rosenzweig, launched the metropolis-wide revegetation initiative. They also began a new service matching each property with the plants best suited for that soil and microclimate.
Rosenzweig says we can rebuild relationships between people and nature. The urban sprawl can be reinvented as a wildlife corridor which includes humans with other species. He describes this endeavour as ‘reconciliation ecology’.

At the same time, but closer to us, the mayor and council of Tweed are shocked that koalas in their area now number less than two hundred. Last week, the mayor talked about starting a sanctuary. But koalas, like many other animals, don’t take to life on reservations.

At Samboja Lestari and Tucson, people are creating a new standard of living. They are redefining what are acceptable habitats and decent lifestyles. Their new landscape designs consider the pain and trouble that other species experience and work to avoid it.

What koalas need, as homes, food and safety, are well known. The Tweed area developments and lifestyles, like any other throughout Australia, can be entirely readjusted. Human flexibility has seen us through millennia.

But is there time for the koalas, orangutans, Tucson mountain lions and us? Rosenzweig says, in reconciliation, we need only to meet nature halfway. Do we Australians really know, as Sina Sinam does, how we share in the suffering? Do we feel shame?

For all our folly, can we learn? Look at New Brighton beach. At one point last week, the massive bulldozers scraping tonnes of sand from the shore onto the dunes were stopped short of their goal. Here, some tiny birds, weighing about eight grams, were busy raising chicks in a burrow dug into the side of the dune.

They are natives called pardalotes. For the next couple of weeks anyway, their home is safe.