The Plight of Orangutans Reveals the Complexity of the Animal Crisis
Alice Crary and Lori Gruen
TikTok was recently abuzz with a video showing two Indonesian women screaming and flailing when they come across a plastic snake in the forest. The women were surrounded by baby orangutans at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Centre in Central Kalimantan. The babies are horrified by what they see – they cry, hug one another, and climb high into the trees. The short scene seems quite disturbing, but according to the group that posted the video, this is the method used to teach the rescued orangutans to avoid snakes if and when they are returned to the wild. Had the infants been able to stay with their mothers, it’s likely they would have learned about the dangers of snakes in a less dramatic fashion.
But these orangutan babies, like hundreds of others, were orphaned and are now in human care. The lush, uniquely diverse rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, home to tens of thousands of species, including snakes, sun bears, clouded leopards, forest elephants, and orangutans, are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Incursions into the forests, both legal and illegal, and weakened conservation laws have led to an increase in poaching and has wreaked havoc on the habitat of some of the world’s most threatened species.
The palm oil industry is one key driver of this destruction. Palm oil pervades the contemporary world and is an ingredient in roughly half of the food items in groceries stores, including vegan fare, snack food, and candies. Palm oil isn’t just used in foods. You can find it in most cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, in numerous medicines, in the production of plastics, inks, and paper products, in the manufacture of a wide range of electronic devices, and in the production of biofuels.
In order to grow the palm trees that produce the large fruits from which palm oil is extracted, native rainforests are bulldozed and burned. Orangutans and other non-human animals aren’t alone in suffering from this massive destruction. Fires used to clear the forests release smoke and ash, severely impacting air quality, resulting in many thousands of premature human deaths. Remnants of Indonesia’s violent colonial history persist in palm oil production. The enslavement of human beings that was integral to colonial systems reverberates in the exploitation of workers on palm oil plantations, and some workers today are actually enslaved. As Max Haiven observes in his recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire: “it is difficult to overstate the palm industry’s profound destruction and transformation of human and non-human life.” Yet the corporate practices that are the engine behind these shattering human and animal losses, and that include ‘green-washing’ by trumpeting allegedly ‘sustainable’ palm oil, are routine expressions of extractive capitalism’s pursuit of maximum profit.
The horrors of the palm oil industry represent just a fraction of the global environmental devastation threatening the planet. Meaningful interventions must be developed to address the complexity of the unfolding ecocide. We need to challenge social structures that commodify the bodies of animals and the rest of more-than-human nature as well as the labor of human beings. There is a lot of change needed: we need to shift away from thinking about animals and vulnerable humans as grist for the profit mill; we need to stop treating animals and workers as disposable; we need to respect the price-transcending dignity of humans and animals.
These may seem like unrealistic goals. Environmental and animal-oriented protests have historically had success getting corporations to make internal adjustments to their standard practices and stop more egregious destruction: lead is no longer used in gasoline; the ozone hole didn’t grow; acid rain stopped falling; many river estuaries around the world are full of fish and birds again. Such achievements generally came when corporations were brought to realize not only that continued reliance on toxic ingredients would be costly for them but also that they could substitute less harmful materials and turn a greater profit.
While eliminating significant harms, this strategy nonetheless supports and perpetuates a socio-economic system that is geared to continue commodifying and devastating nature. Green and pro-animal interventions designed to work within this system often wind up paradoxically displacing and magnifying the sorts of harms they are intended to alleviate, as has happened with efforts to develop electric cars which support mining practices that devastate forests in Myanmar and elsewhere.
It's difficult to imagine what humans can do to combat these powerful, destructive forces. Actions that disrupt business as usual, like blocking roads to slaughterhouses or oil plants, or tree-sitting in forests that will be clear-cut, or blocking whaling harpoons with one’s boat as Sea Shephard has done for decades, may temporarily stop harms. Their true power is arguably symbolic, inviting people to scrutinize ongoing destructive practices and to take seriously that they can be stopped.
Creating counter-publics is another possibility. Opening spaces for alternative, anti-capitalist projects, including community gardening, creating car-free zones, providing healthy food and safe housing for those who are food and housing insecure, and learning from multispecies communities about friendship, resilience, and care can help some people imagine another way to live. While small-scale, these projects are locally invaluable, and, like direct disruptive action, have great symbolic potency.
Setting aside ‘wild’ spaces free from corporate plunder may be another solution. One of the world’s leading experts on orangutan behavior and conservation, Birute Galdikas, helped create such a place. Galdikas and others were able to turn her field site at Tanjung Puting Reserve into a National Park. The government hasn’t consistently upheld the law protecting the area, so local people who work with Galdikas’ Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) patrol and protect the forests and the orangutans who live there. This kind of thoughtful and ambitious endeavor is required for the survival and flourishing of orangutans, such as the babies at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Centre.
In the face of such an enormous crisis, we must come together, in human and animal community, to forge solidarity resisting the global forces devastating the earth that is our common home.
Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York,
Visiting Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and an academic
advisor of opp. She is the co-author, with Lori Gruen, of Animal Crisis: A new critical theory, recently
out with Polity.
Lori Gruen is William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University and the current chair of the
Philosophy Department. She is also the founder and coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies.
