The race to protect the forests and wildlife of Sumatra's Thirty Hills

To reach one of the last great swaths of lowland rain forest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, you must drive for hours through land that has already been cleared and developed.

First, taking the busy Trans-Sumatra Highway out of Jambi City, you pass only small-scale stuff: rice paddies and plots of dragon fruit trees between brightly painted houses. As the houses thin, you start to see rubber plantations: rows on rows of pale, spindly trunks with buckets tied beneath the notches carved into their bark. Then the rubber trees begin alternating with oil palms. Phalanxes of the latter—squat trunks with spiky, pompom-like eruptions of leaves from their tops—cover the hillsides, and bunches of oil palm fruit appear in heaps along the road.

You also start passing trucks laden with timber and acacia logs, because you’re driving into the heart of Indonesia’s pulp and paper industry. And you might glimpse occasional chunks of coal along the roadside, each one a dark hint that mining is in vogue. After six hours, turning onto an old, unpaved logging road, you’ll climb steep slopes past more rubber and oil palm plantations—terraced into the hillsides now—and a coal mine gouged into the orange dirt like a wound.

Finally, if you have permission, you’ll pass through a guarded gate into one of the most biologically rich forests on Earth. Sumatran elephant tracks punctuate the muddy road and gibbon howls ricochet through the treetops. The buzzing of insects waxes louder than any of the industrial farm equipment you’ve passed. And everywhere you look, you’ll see green on green on green. Green to the nth degree.

This is Thirty Hills, or Bukit Tigapuluh in Indonesian. It’s one of the only remaining landscapes where elephants, tigers, and orangutans coexist. If its biodiversity is a wonder, so is its survival. The sole thing standing between this emerald island and the sea of extractive companies surrounding it is another company. A new company. A company laboring to prove that in Sumatra, it’s possible to profit from protecting these forests rather than cutting them down.

If Thirty Hills’ situation sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. There’s no subtlety in Sumatra’s deforestation crisis. There hasn’t been since 1985, when the production of palm oil—used in an astounding array of food and personal care items, from ice cream to lipstick—began rapidly spreading across the island.

Logging for pulp and paper production soon followed; coal mining picked up in the early 2000s. Since the ’80s, migrants from other islands have also flocked to Sumatra to clear land for small-scale farms. Between 1985 and 2014, the island’s forest cover plunged from 58% to 26%. And while Indonesia’s laws include punishments for illegal deforestation, law enforcement is still weak on the ground.

Those circumstances have made Sumatra an immensely difficult place for conservation. As deforestation became an existential threat to Sumatra’s rain forests, WWF-Indonesia and other conservation groups started lobbying the government to establish a national park to protect Thirty Hills. “They finally created Bukit Tigapuluh National Park in 1995, but they only put the hilliest area in it,” says Jan Vertefeuille, senior director of advocacy for WWF-US. “Loggers don’t want those hills. But neither do elephants or orangutans.”

Then, in the mid-to-late aughts, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP)—a major deforestation culprit in Sumatra—applied for a license to clear-cut the lowland forests around the park and replace them with pulpwood plantations. “We wanted to stop them,” says Aditya Bayunanda, WWF-Indonesia’s policy director for sustainability transformation. “But the only way was to apply for an ecosystem restoration concession on the same chunk of land.”

At the time, Indonesia’s government had just created ecosystem restoration concessions, or ERCs, as a tool to combat deforestation. Anyone who operates one is required to reforest degraded lands within it. But there are steep barriers to entry: For example, ERCs can only be owned by for-profit companies—and those companies must pay 60 years’ worth of land taxes up front to secure the 60-year license.

To clear those hurdles, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation helped WWF, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, and The Orangutan Project raise initial funds for startup costs. WWF-Indonesia and partners also created a commercial company called PT Alam Bukit Tigapuluh (ABT). ABT then applied for an ERC, and for years competed neck and neck with Asia Pulp & Paper for Thirty Hills’ lush forests.

“Eventually we launched a public campaign about what APP was doing,” says Bayunanda. “So they withdrew their application, and in 2015 we got the land.”

ABT had secured 94,000 acres of lowland rain forest around the park. But now, they had to prove that their brand-new business could protect those forests for the long haul.

On a sweltering evening in October 2017, in the deepening dark, Isong (who, like many Indonesians, does not use a last name) grasps a bamboo-pole ladder and starts to climb. Against the tree trunk he looks tiny, squirrel-sized. This is no ordinary tree. It’s a sialang—a colossal dipterocarp named for the beehives hanging from its branches—and tonight Isong and two other climbers are ascending it in search of honey.

It’s easy to get caught up in the human complexities of the concession and ABT’s plans there. Easy, that is, unless you’re a veterinarian for more than 100 Sumatran orangutans also living in Thirty Hills. That’s Andhani Widya Hartanti’s job. Hartanti—a slight, cheerful 24-year-old from the island of Java—works for the Frankfurt Zoological Society’s (FZS) orangutan rehabilitation center, which rescues illegally captured orangutans and prepares them for release in Thirty Hills.

Early one morning at one of the center’s camps, Hartanti dons a raincoat over her hijab and hikes into the forest to check on several of the apes. After 20 minutes, she abruptly stops and points upward. It’s not hard to find the orangutan she’s spotted; the whole tree is swaying under its weight.

“That’s Alda. She’s about 22 years old,” Hartanti says, as the orangutan languidly shifts her long limbs and blinks down at us.

Alda spent her first 20 years of life as an illegal pet. Now, after being rescued, she’s one of the center’s dozens of orangutans learning to climb trees, build nests to sleep in, and live off wild fruits and plants.

Only between 6,000 and 10,000 wild orangutans remain in Sumatra, and most live in the island’s north. FZS aims to reestablish a new population in Thirty Hills. (The organization believes the apes used to live there—they appear in local stories—but they’ve long been absent.) So far, they’ve successfully released 170 rehabilitated orangutans; the goal is to reach 350, the minimum requirement for a healthy population, in the next 20 years.

“Orangutans need a relatively large habitat, ideally lowland rain forest,” says Peter Pratje, the director of FZS’s Bukit Tigapuluh Program. “That’s why they’re competing with humans for space. It’s also the best land for agriculture.”

Pratje launched the rehabilitation program for FZS in 2001. When he was looking for a place to establish it, Thirty Hills caught his eye for its size—which, he says, is exceptional given how much deforestation Sumatra has already seen. The government had also committed to protecting the landscape, if only partially, by creating the national park at its core. Now, through the ecosystem restoration concession, Thirty Hills’ orangutans could have the room they need to survive long term.

“The orangutan carrying capacity in the park was about 700,” Pratje says. “With the concession, it’s nearly a thousand.”

Sumatra’s tigers and elephants roam even more widely than its orangutans. Despite all the protected land the concession has added to Thirty Hills National Park, that land lies within two disconnected blocks. To travel between them, both species must pass through a rubber plantation with little forest cover to hide them.

“Just getting this concession in the first place was a huge victory,” Vertefeuille explains on the drive out of Thirty Hills. She’s encouraged, she adds, by everything she sees happening in these early stages of ABT’s development: the relationship-building with the Talang Mamak, the business experience that Pak Arus brings to the table, the talks being held with illegal encroachers, the food company’s interest in buying sialang honey. She’s also constantly aware of how much work remains ahead for this model to succeed.

“It’s incredibly complicated to start a company and try to manage your own forest concession, but it’s probably our only chance of saving this forest,” Vertefeuille says. “And if you think about how Thirty Hills is home to some of the last critically endangered Sumatran tigers, critically endangered Sumatran orangutans, and critically endangered Sumatran elephants, along with these unique indigenous groups, how can we not take the risk and try something completely new?”