THE BACKGROUND: When Spalding began her "follow" of orangutan researcher and conservationist Birute Galdikas, Indonesia's President Suharto had been in power almost 30 tears. The "Indonesia" Spalding visited was a police state that treated people (as well as orangutans) as expendible. Individuals who dared to question government policy, on the world stage (East Timorese nationalists) or the local level (the story of Spalding's friend Riska's mother), took their lives in their hands. Under this regime thousands of Indonesians were summarily executed; thousands more were forcibly "relocated" to remote islands such as Borneo; and an unknown number were arrested without trial, imprisoned, and torture. In Indonesia, such government actions were perfectly legal.

Combining political repression with "crony capitalism," Suharto, his family and friends amassed huge personal fortunes--in large part by raping Borneo's ancient tropical rainforests. Millions of acres of forest were destroyed to produce plywood and paperpulp and to make way for palm oil plantations. Indonesia was the ONLY country in the world to ENDORSE clear-cutting (not selective logging) of primary forests in the name of development! In 1998-99, Borneo went up in flames, engulfing much of Southeast Asia in toxic smoke for weeks at a time. Most of the fires started in land owned by timber and palm oil concessionnaires who used El Nino as an excuse to clear still more forest--with the government's blessing. In Suharto's Indonesia, ministers and timber tycoons were one and the same.

To this government, orangutans (and their advocate, Birute Galdikas) were at best a nuisance. To handle the "orangutan problem" Indonesian officials devised a new rehabilitation/conservation policy. By decree, all orphaned orangutans were to be sent to a facility in East Borneo (or in a few cases to untrained park rangers). This rehabilitation site--conveniently located in remote, unprofitable forests--was a "smoke screen" for a program of removing endangered orangutans from profitable forests, which could then be opened to still more commercial exploitation (according to an article in the respected ANIMAL WELFARE INSTITUTE Quarterly, Fall 1998). Perhaps the "new" policy was also designed to discredit Birute Galdikas and her work. Or to convince naive outsiders to do so.

SPALDING'S VERSION: Given this background, to characterize Galdikas as a "fallen angel" is ludicrous. It's as if Spalding took everything evil the world knew about Indonesia, dipped her arrow in this poison, and aimed at Galdikas, who is small game (and easy prey) in the global political-economic jungle.

But Spalding wasn't interested in the big picture; she wanted a close-up shot (with herself in the picture). So she limited her "research" to brief trips to Tanjung Puting National Park and its surroundings. She talked to local people and officials and asks readers to take them at their word, as if they could speak freely without worrying that someone (the boatman?) might overhear and report the conversation to officials. If only to protect their jobs, her informants were bound to endorce the "party line." Likewise, the few scientists Spalding interviewed had to be careful if they wanted the government to renew their research permits--surely one reason Dr. carey Yeager demanded that Spalding sign a "waiver" and Dr. Anne Russon's affiliations in Borneo are vague. [Galdikas is an Indonesian citizen (a fact Spalding neglects to mention), does not require entry permits, and so is freer to speak her mind and to act according to her conscience.] Yet Spalding asks readers to believe that the rumors and heresay she collected are the "true story." One can almost hear Indonesians chuckling over another North American's naivete.

In an epilogue, Spalding recounts a raid on Galdikas' house in the village of Pasir Panjung and prints parts of the government report that followed as well as selected "internal" memos and correspondance. (How she got them is a mystery, but supposing she worked with someone who worked for the Suharto government....) She asks readers to believe that these officials were motivated solely by "concern" for orphaned orangutans and that their report was totally "objective." Anyone with experience in Indonesia can read between the lines: the investigators "found" what they were asked to find, and with their jobs secure, went home to dinner. Never mind that (a) this government deceived officials of the World Bank and IMF (among others) for more than a decade; and (b) that Suharto was overthrown a year before A DARK PLACE was published. Spalding doesn't tell readers that the authors of these allegations, along with most of the ministers, officials, and policies she endorses in her book, were replaced by Indonesia's interim President Habbibie soon after he took office. Or that the Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine opened in January, under the codirection of the orangutan Foundation and Indonesia's CURRENT Forest Ministry....Or that the only place Galdikas has been charged with anything is in Spalding's own article and books.


AN IMPORTANT BOOK   June 10, 1999
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Critics of this book claim that Spalding has not backed up her allegations against Galdikas. Leaving aside the fact that those allegations are not the point of the book, let me quote from the Indonesian government's own recent report about Galdikas, which Spalding has included as an epilogue:

"Based on the results of this assessment, at this time in the house of Dr. Birute Galdikas were found 89 orangutans, which were held in four secret lodges placed in the forest behind the house...The condition of the place for accomodating the orangutans does not meet health standards. Isolation cages were made of metal measuring 1.5 meters x 1 meter x 1 meter. One such pen would be occupied by 3-5 orangutans. The isolation cages are placed in wooden sheds measuring 10 meters x 4 meters, each holding approximately 10 isolation cages. At the time of the inspection, the floors of the sheds [were] covered with fruit peels and feces, including diarrhea. Two of the sheds were located close to chicken pens owned by other people, and there were two dogs roaming the sheds....Wandering around were several baby orangutans with diarrhea. In one pen occupied by 3-5 baby orangutans, these babies were not free to move about, and their cages also had feces in them. Three young orangutans were found in a hut without ventilation and light, being cared for by a German tourist. One baby orangutan was feverish, while another was wearing a diaper for its diarrhea."

How can Galdikas pretend to be against the private holding of orangutans, when she has been found to blatantly violating that law herself? She may claim that she is rehabilitating those orangutans, but her theories on that subject have been thoroughly discredited by the conclusions of the international scientific community, and by the rehabilitation work of Herman Rijksen and Willie Smits.

I, too, have worked with the orangutans in Borneo. Why will no one mention the fact that Galdikas has not published _any_ new research in almost 20 years? Why has no one mentioned the fact she lives in a veritable mansion, that I and my fellow volunteers had to pay many thousands of dollars to help her "research," only to find out that our "research" notebooks were recently found rotting in piles? Why has no one mentioned that the Indonesian government recently yanked away Galdikas's title "consultant"?

I suspect that the critics of this book are members of the Galdikas cult that tolerates no criticism of Ibu. Witness the online wars that erupted last year on various primate discussion groups; everytime anyone proposed that we wait and see what the investigation into Galdikas concluded, they were shouted down and threatened by rabid, illogical and unreasonable supporters of Galdikas.

I for one, welcome this beautifully written book, and will be making it a required book for the curriculum I teach. Spalding may be criticized for pursuing her project against the will of Galdikas, but if every journalist were cowed by the wishes of their subject, then corruption and madness would never be exposed. This book is indispensable to understanding the awful, destructive power of the human ego.


Imagination Gone Wild   June 7, 1999
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In A Dark Place in the Jungle, novelist Linda Spalding concludes that ex-captive orangutans do not know who they are, apes or humans. Likewise, when I finished this book, I didn't know what I had read. This isn't a novel. In his lyrical, spellbinding The Woman and the different intelligences and realities of humans and other species through a relationship between a woman and a great ape. A master storyteller, Hoeg does not need to "name names," much less dig up dirt. Spalding talks about the same ideas (and waxes poetic), but her subjects are real people, actual animals, serious conservation issues, and a species in danger of extinction. Was she trying to write a modern, real-life sequel to Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (given her not so subtle title)? The result is more parody than classic. This isn't journalism. A journalist checks and rechecks her sources and facts, and attempts to be objective--as in Deborah Blum's The Monkey Wars, based on a series of investigative reports on the controversies surrounding the use of monkeys and apes in experiments, for which Blum won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. I talked with Deborah after she spoke at the Museum of Natural History. Her eyes teared when she recalled the monkeys and apes she had seen at LEMPSIT and other laboratories. But in her book, Blum introduces individual scientists and advocates and represents different sides of the issue in a responsible (and highly readable) way. That's journalism. rehabilitation of orphaned orangutans. Not only does she fail to interview Galdikas (her background lament); she doesn't talk with any major figures in orangutan/great ape conservation (why not Jane Goodall, for a start?). She chooses not to join an Orangutan Foundation tour, which would have allowed her firsthand observation. Instead, she travels around the edges by kletok, talking to whomever she meets (and is willing to talk) and guiltily spying on Galdikas' home in town and small house at Camp Leakey. Spalding never questions the motives of the informants she trusts, all detractors, while all Galdikas supporters are ill-mannered, snobbish, or pathetic. In her epilogue, she cites a government report -- issued by ministers of a military dictatorship with one of the worst records for corruption and environmental pillage of any on earth--as if it were honest, objective, and beyond scrutiny. (Apparently she did not notice that this government was overthrown, and these ministers replaced, a year ago. Just as she did not notice, or forgot to say, that Galdikas is an Indonesian citizen . ) That's not journalism. A Dark Place isn't a serious "science and nature book" either. Spalding knows as much (or little) about Indonesian and Dayak culture, conservation, and orangutans as any casual tourist. After three brief trips to Borneo, she concludes that Galdikas (who has lived there for 30 years and is married to a Dayak) is culturally insensitive. She makes much the appellation Ibu, as if Galdikas sees herself as a "Mother Superior" of an orangutan cult. In fact, Ibu is equivalent to Madame in French or Seqora in oblivious to the fact that almost everything she says about orangutans derives from Galdikas' research. True, she splices in oblique references to other scientists -- but they are unexplained, undigested, apparently thirdhand. Every other "science and nature" book I've read has a bibliography or reference notes--e.g., Masson's When Elephants Weep, even Michael Crichton's popular novel, then movie, Congo. Not Spalding's. Finally, this book is not an autobiographical travelogue like Tracy Johnston's fine book Shooting woman-to-woman, a mid-life passage. Like Johnston, Spalding is the main character in her book and goes on about her feelings, her relationships, her man ("Michael"), her dreams and anxieties, but she isn't looking for herself, she is looking for a guru. What does she find? First, Galdikas is controversial. Second, Galdikas does not appreciate her devotion/obsession--and that makes Spalding angry enough to write three books and an article on being rejected! Combining the imagination of a novelist with a tourist's "insights," an imitation "follow," pop science, non-investigative journalism, confessional autobiography, and a scandal sheet, Spalding mixes genres--and succeeds at none.