10.9.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebeccah Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September
October twenty twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the first article titled an

(00:23):
Orangutan sanctuary in Borneo is giving the endangered primates a
second chance just when they need it most. The critically
endangered species gets a helping hand from an Indonesian facility
as the island's human population is about to explode. By
Helen Sullivan, the baby orangutans were trying to stall before bedtime.

(00:49):
One reached out to grab a particularly long leaf through
the bars of its cage, encouraging a human to play.
Then employed a classic Toddler sabotage technique, needing. Eventually, the
orangutan relented, climbing up a jungle gem like structure in
an otherwise empty if messy room. The floor was littered

(01:10):
with sticks and pieces of wood. The baby orangutan settled
into a small hammock and pulled a large leaf over
its body as a blanket. In the wild, orangutans build
new nests every night, weaving leaves and branches together and
curling up in the tree canopy. But this was not
the wild, not quite. This was the site of the

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world's largest orangutan conservation organization, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation
or b O s F, based in the Indonesian part
of the island also known as Collimanton. The day before,
I had watched an adult female, standing on a concrete
platform on a lush artificial island surrounded by water, hold

(01:57):
a large palm frond over her body to shield herself
from the rain. A permanent resident, she was too tame
to be released back into the wild, and independent enough
not to have to live in a cage. Near by,
a large male conducted high level negotiations with his keeper,
who was trying to get him to eat his carrots

(02:19):
before a dessert of dragon fruit, resplendent and impossibly sleek,
long and unmatted orange fur. He poked a stick into
the deep water between himself and the keeper. If you
don't give me the dragonfruit now, he seemed to be saying,
I'll just have to come over there and get it myself.

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Orangutans share ninety seven percent of their DNA with humans.
Somewhere in that missing three percent was the transparency of
the orangutan's bluff. The keeper knew that the orangutan couldn't swim.
If you haven't been to Borneo, you may imagine it
as a lamb and of dense tropical jungle and strange

(03:02):
living things, giant flowers, abundant leeches, venomous snakes dangling from vines.
In his nineteen eighty four memoir Into the Heart of Borneo,
the English writer Redmond o'hanlan described it like this, two
hundred foot high trees crowded down the slopes of the
hills almost to the water's edge, an apparently endless chaos

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of different species of tree, every kind of green, even
under the uniform glare of a tropical sun. At the time,
three quarters of Borneo was covered in rainforest. Now almost
half of that land has been cleared. The view from
my plane as I descended was of coal barges fanning

(03:47):
out from the coast. The airport is a large, gleaming
white and silver building with the dunkin doughnuts inside the
arrival's lounge, but Borneo's remaining forest has some of the
highest species diversity on Earth, according to the World Wildlife
Fund for Nature, with one area of Lambeir Hills National

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Park in Sarawak, Malaysia holding the world record for tree
diversity more than one thousand species and one hundred twenty
five acres in. Each of these holds its own great
diversity too. Scientists have found one thousand species of insect
and a single tree. Overall, Borneo is home to six

(04:30):
percent of the world's biodiversity. Nearly ninety percent of all
orangutans in the world can be found there. The rest
are on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Because orangutans spend
almost all their time up in the trees, the island's deforestation,
mainly from palm oil farming and mining, is the biggest

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threat they face. Borneo's orangutan population had between nineteen ninety
nine and two th thousand fifteen from three hundred thousand
to one hundred fifty thousand. In the decades since then,
the population has declined by another third to one hundred
thousand today. A two thousand twenty two study predicted that

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more than a quarter of today's population could be lost
to deforestation by twenty thirty two. All of this makes
bosf's work more crucial than ever. Since the foundation was
established in nineteen ninety one, it has released five hundred
thirty three orangutans, and it maintains three hundred fifty nine

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permanent residents that are too tame, diseased, or disabled to
live in the wild, depending on their circumstances. These residents
live in cages or on artificial islands. In the foundation's
two centers in East and Central Kalimantane, there are twenty
orangutans with diseases living in one set of time cages,

(06:01):
raised off the ground and set apart from one another.
As we approached these cages one morning, a female, wanting
to get a closer look at us, moved down a
rope with the agility of a pole dancer. Farther up
a sloped pathway was a network of ten silver cages
on stilts high above the ground. There, one of the

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long time residents, an orangutan named Coprol, who lost both
of his arms after being electrocuted and could not survive
in the wild, did a forward flip from one end
of his cage to the other, the animals face a
formidable new test. Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country

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after India, China, and the United States, is moving its
capital from the sinking island of Java to a planned
city called Nusantara on Borneo, forty miles from b O
s F's east Kalamantan centerruduction began in twenty twenty two
and is scheduled to finish in twenty forty five. The

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government hopes one point nine million people will live in
nu Centaura by twenty thirty five, Indonesian Borneo's population will
grow from seventeen million to twenty million. Indonesia's government says
nu Centaura will be a green forest city, with all
its energy dron from renewable sources and residents mostly traveling

(07:28):
by foot, bicycle, or public transportation. The government says the
city will be carbon neutral by twenty forty five. Still,
it is hard to counteract the environmental impacts of the
construction of an entire city in a place where there
had only been trees. Last year, workers took a video

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of an orangutan crossing at construction site for a road
leading into the new city. It would be truly remarkable
if such large scale infrastructure development did not negatively affect
threatened species. Andrew Marshall, a tropical ecologist at the University
of Michigan who has studied orangutans in Borneo, told me

(08:10):
in an e mail such projects always do. He added,
there are good reasons related to human welfare for moving
the capital to Calimantan. It is an understandable move, but
it is likely to have considerable downsides. There are always
trade offs. It takes diplomacy to keep the Foundations sanctuary

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going in a place where so many people are struggling.
Across Calimantan's five provinces, almost two thirds of the population
live below the poverty line. Caring for a single orangutan
costs five hundred dollars a month, according to jermartin Sea Height,
a conservationist and one of b O s f's trustees.

(08:56):
But b O s f's web site invites overseased owners
to symbolically adopt an orangutan for as little as ten
dollars a month. That's because local Indonesians, who earn an
average of three hundred fifty dollars a month, might turn
against conservation efforts. If they felt that orangutans were earning
higher salaries than they were, they will say, how could

(09:19):
you put money to the orangutan not to us? She said,
to make people not look at an orangutang as their competitors.
This is a part of the strategy. What are the
traits we share with our large orange relatives. Orangutans treat
their wounds with medicinal plants. They make tools and keep

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their favorites for future use. But there are many traits
we don't share. Their arms are one and a half
times as long as their legs, which helps them climb
from branch to branch in what's known as quadruminous scrambling.
They are the most solitary of great apes, a group
that includes gorilla as Bonobo's, chimpanzees, and us. When their

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genome was sequenced in twenty eleven, scientists discovered orangutans have
changed very little in the past fifteen million years compared
with people and chimpanzees. Orangutans have the longest birth interval
of any land mammal. They have a second child only
once the first is independent, which takes about seven years.

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Producing so few young is one reason they struggle to
rebuild their populations. Like humans, female orangutans can get postpartum depression,
particularly those who lost their own mothers in traumatic incidents.
When the baby is crying just because it's a newborn baby,
the mother doesn't want to hug it, doesn't want to breastfeed.

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Aegis Erwanto, one of the foundation's veterinarians, said, if a
mother doesn't show interest within three days, the baby is
taken from her. Mothers don't seem to notice a baby's absence.
Teaching a baby urrangutan to survive requires years of close attention.

(11:09):
Urwanto laughs when he talks about Jungle School. The school's
technicians teach the orangutans how to climb, what to eat
and how to find it, and how to make a nest.
Because orangutans learn by imitation, the technicians act out these activities.
The animals tend to bond more with some technicians than others.

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They're picky. Erwantos said, trial and error has shown that
women are much better at the job. The Foundation suspects
that is because in many cases the orangutans mothers have
been killed by men whose deep voices then scare them
Once the orangutans graduate, they are placed on a small,

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semi wild island several acres of land hemmed in by
constructed canals. The iranguans must prove that they can be independent.
It is time for tough love, which Irwanto sums up
in two heartbreaking sentences. We don't hug them, We don't
say their name. If the orangutans are able to climb,

(12:15):
build nests, find food, and interact with other orangutans, they
are fitted with telemetric chips and placed in cages for
their release. The three release sites managed by BOSF are
twelve hours from the sanctuary by car. BOSF researchers spend

(12:35):
the next year monitoring the newly wild orangutans. As the
animals enjoy their freedom, some of them roam out of
the range of radio signals, which means the monitoring team
has to search the jungle on foot to find them.
The hardest thing about this, one young researcher told me later,
is how sore your net gets from staring up at

(12:58):
the canopy. The building that houses bo SF's visitors resembles
an orangutan, though I was told this was not by design.
Three stories tall, it has large arm and leg like
orange wooden pillars, and it dispatched with a material that
has the texture of long, dark hair. That's the thing

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about orangutans. Once you have seen one, it is hard
not to recognize them in all sorts of things. During
my visit, Aldrianto priya Jati, the habitat's deputy director, gave
a presentation in the open air dining room. As he began,
heavy drops of rain landed loudly on the large, bright

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leaves behind us. Priya Jatti changed slides and gestured at
the surroundings tall thin trees covered in long tangled vines.
On the screen was a photograph of how the land
had looked twenty years ago, all grassland with no trees.
In the early two thousands, b O L began restoring

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almost five thousand acres. First, it planted seven hundred and
forty native tree species. Local residents were offered a deal.
As long as they helped protect the trees, they could
use the land to grow fruit. The fruit trees attracted bats,
birds and other animals that spread seeds without the need

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from more digging. Since then, the foundation has been purchasing
fruit from the farmers to feed its animals, which eat
more than two tons of it daily. The land also
houses one of the world's largest sunbaar sanctuaries, also run
by b O s F. The reforested area was too

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large to fence. For now, there is something of what
Priyagati called a natural unnatural fence made up of coal mines.
Borneo provides sixty percent of Indonesia's coal exports. Illegal mining
is also rife, and estimates of the scale of illegal
mining are difficult to find, but in twenty fourteen, Indonesia's

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government estimated that at least fifty five million tons of
coal were mined and exported illegally from the country. For now,
most of the land owned or managed by BSF has
been designated a conservation area because of BSF's success in
regenerating forest. The Indonesian government is consulting with the sanctuary

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on how to redevelop lands around the new capital, which
is built largely on rainforest that was cleared for plantations
Sea Heights said. BOSF is advising the government on which
tree species plant and lobbying for more rainforested land to
be legally protected. Still, Marshal of the University of Michigan

(15:53):
is concerned secondary negative effects of infrastructure development will likely
be considerable and spread far from the site itself. He
told me. Massive projects such as this nearly always have
unanticipated consequences. After sunset one evening, I drove to Nucentaura

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with an orangutan researcher named Amanda Rama. The journey, which
should have taken an hour and a half, took almost
four hours as we spent much of it behind slow
trucks carrying cement mixers, industrial pipes and water tanks. Forest
gave way to low buildings, then suddenly there were tall
apartment blocks and a half finished hospital. Forklifts and bulldozers

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roamed like dinosaurs after dark. The dust reminded Rama of
her visits to landscapes destroyed by mines and palm oil plantations,
she said, but even she was not immune to the
splendor of a city built from scratch. The Garuda, she yelled,
as we drove farther into what had at first looked

(16:59):
like a construction sight ahead of us was a giant
building shaped like Garuda, a divine eagle from Hindu mythology.
It wasn't finished yet. Sparks flew as construction continued late
into the night. The light appeared to drip off its
outstretched wings like shining feathers. In April, the Foundation released

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six orangutans into the wild. Three of them had taken
more than fifteen years to rehabilitate. They'd arrived at the
center as Toddler's before. The city of Nusentara was their
twinkle in the Indonesian government's eye. By then, I was
back home in Sydney, Australia, where my own toddler reminded

(17:41):
me of an orangutan more often than I wanted to admit.
I kept thinking about the fact that the enormous animals
I had seen had changed so little in fifteen million years,
and yet a city had been conjured from scratch in
just three years, in the time it would have taken
an orangutan mum to raise two offspring. From nineteen ninety

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nine to twenty fifteen, half of the Islands orangutans had died.
The species urgently needs saving, and yet none of the
work can happen quickly. From shutting down an illegal coal
mine that could raise hundreds of trees in a few hours,
to teaching an orphaned baby to dig for termites. Humans

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still have time to restore what our developments have destroyed,
but it will be so much easier to prevent the
destruction that's yet to come. Next, Frank Cameni helped chart
a path to liberation for millions of gay Americans. Personal
notebooks reveal what life was like for the Washington activist

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who spent decades advocating for equal rights in the federal
government and elsewhere. By Brandon Tensley. In nineteen fifty seven,
Frank Camini, a thirty two year old dame astronomer with
the Army Map Service, was on a work trip to
Hawaii and the West Coast when he was told to
report back to Washington, d C. For questioning. There, civil

(19:11):
Service investigators asked him to respond to reports that he
was gay. I don't see how it's relevant to any
rational concern or business of the government. Kameni, a World
War Two veteran, recalled answering. He was soon fired. The
official cause cited was that he had falsified his job

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application an official government document by downplaying his arrest for
lewd behavior with another man the previous year. Kameni told
a government he'd been arrested for disorderly conduct, a less
grave sin in those days. At the time, the government
deemed gay Americans to be security risks and effectively banned

(19:54):
them from federal service. These were the days of the
lavender Scare, which drew out of the anti communist panic
of the nineteen forties and fifties. Camini appealed his dismissal
in various courts, and in nineteen sixty one petitioned the
United States Supreme Court to take up his case. The

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court declined to review it. Furious, Cameni would devote his
life to fighting homophobia. We are here to stay. We
are part of American life in society, and you will
be seeing a lot more of us, he declared in
a nineteen sixty nine letter. Born in New York City
on May twenty first, nineteen twenty five, to a Jewish family,

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Camini became a trail blazing activist for gay rights. In
nineteen sixty one, after his fruitless petition to the Supreme Court,
Cameni co founded the Washington, d c. Chapter of the
Mattachin Society, a pioneering organization with what was then called
the homophile movement. The priest Stone Lay Campaign for Gay

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Equality four years later, the group led the first recorded
gay rights picket of the White House, protesting the government's
banning of gay Americans from the federal service. Homosexual citizens
want to serve their country too. Sexual preference is irrelevant
to federal employment. These were radical messages for the Erakameni

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neatly captured his ethos and the slogan gay is Good,
which he coined in nineteen sixty eight, inspired by the
Black Power mantra black as beautiful for those within the community,
the phrase certainly instilled some pride to counterbalance the rhetoric
of gays are going to hell, says Franklin A. Robinson Junior,

(21:46):
an archivist with the National Museum of American History, and
Kameni aptly linked the struggle for gay rights to other
battles for equality. We are interested in obtaining rights for
our respective minorities, as negroes, as Jews, and as homosexuals,
he proclaimed at a nineteen sixty four public meeting at

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Freedom House, a Washington based nonprofit. In nineteen seventy one,
Cameni became the first openly gay person to run for
US Congress, as he vied to serve as Washington's delegate
to the House of Representatives. He presented himself as a
candidate who had something to offer everybody. I was very

(22:29):
conscious of running a double barreled, double issue campaign, he
recalled to Washingtonian Magazine in twenty ten. If you're going
to run for public office, you have to become an
expert on trash collection, road repair, and all the things
that concern people. But I was running a parallel campaign

(22:50):
on gay issues. While Cameni lost his bid, he played
a big role in pressuring the American Psychiatric Association to
remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and disorders
in nineteen seventy three, and some two decades later, he
lobbied President Clinton to sign a nineteen ninety five executive

(23:13):
order banning anti gay discrimination in federal security clearances. In
two thousand nine, two years before he died, the US
government issued an apology to Kameni for his nineteen fifty
seven termination Caameni's idealism is especially vivid in the pages
of five notebooks he kept beginning in the nineteen fifties.

(23:38):
They held information about places across the US that were
gay friendly, from bars to restaurants to hotels. Two of
the notebooks are in the Archives Center of the National
Museum of American History. Kamini described the Sports Lounge in Springfield, Massachusetts,
as the best in town Sam's Place in Chicago. Apparently

(24:00):
he drew a younger crowd and over in the resort
town of a Gunquit, Maine. While the owners of the
Tides Hotel were non members, they were sympathetic to gay travelers.
It's a mystery what Kamenie intended to do with the notebooks.
Written in terse language and sometimes hard to decipher. Robinson

(24:21):
speculates it's possible Camenie wanted to publish them, in which
case they would have been precursors to Bob Damren's Address Book,
popular guides published starting in the nineteen sixties that allowed
gays and lesbians to find sites of acceptance and community,
essentially gay versions of the Green Book, which black motorists

(24:42):
used to avoid discriminatory businesses and potential violence under Jim Crow.
If Robinson's speculation is correct, the notebooks illustrate just how
determined Kameni was to help his fellow gay Americans find
places where they could live in safety, even joy. Finally,

(25:04):
institutional knowledge. The letter from Lonnie G. Bunch the third Secretary,
Beyond the Mall. What began as a local outreach program
now brings the magic of the Smithsonian to learners across
the nation, occasionally to the chagrin of my team. I
enjoy sneaking out of beatings and wandering around Smithsonian buildings,

(25:28):
sometimes the galleries of the nearby Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
sometimes my old stomping grounds at the National Museum of
American History. I once even visited the feather identification lab
at the National Museum of Natural History, where I learned
how its scientists attempt to stop birds from flying into aircraft.

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Whether our curators are sharing an impromptu lesson on entomology
or seventeenth century portraiture, I always reflect, Wow, there really
is nowhere else I could do this. I am not
the first secretary to have this thought. Sixty years ago,
then Secretary s. Dilon Ripley wanted to share that same
feeling of discovery, not only with visitors to our museums,

(26:13):
but also with folks in our own backyard. So, in
honor of James Smithson's two hundredth birthday, Ripley created the
Smithsonian Society of Associates now known as Smithsonian Associates, to
create educational and enlightening programming that connects our exceptional resources
with the Washington d C community and beyond. The Earliest

(26:35):
opportunities included scholarly tours of local landmarks, including Lafayette Square
and Saint John's Episcopal Church. Some pursuits were precursors to
activities that now fall under our broader educational umbrella, such
as zoo tours for children. Smithsonian Associates also launched the

(26:56):
legendary Washington Kite Festival, held every spring and Falling the
release of the two thousand nine movie Night at the Museum,
Battle of Smithsonian founded Smithsonian Sleepovers, where pajama clad visitors
participate in educational activities before dozing off on their own
air mattresses. Smithsonian Associates now covers myriad topics from color

(27:20):
theory to computer science, fulfilling Ripley's dream of the institution
becoming a cultural hub for the region. As a former professor,
I see it as a college town for the entire country,
a place to get to know your neighbors and learn
from them. For its sixtieth anniversary, Smithsonian Associates has been
holding special events throughout the year, culminating in a celebration

(27:43):
this fall. Whether you want to expand your appreciation for
Shakespeare's poetry or ignite your curiosity with the mysteries of
the Space Shuttle, I invite you to help us toast
sixty wonderful years. I look forward to many more. This
concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day. Your

(28:04):
reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and
have a great day.