Biruté Galdikas
(born 1946)
Biruté Galdikas was born in London, Germany, on May 10, 1946, while her parents were en route from Lithuania to Canada. She grew up in Toronto, Canada.
When Biruté was 12 years old she loved to go into the wilder sections of High Park in Toronto and pretend she was a Huron or Iroquois native slipping through the woods, at one with nature. She would spend hours like this, quietly and secretly observing the wild animals in the park. Ever since she was 5, Biruté wondered where human beings came from. She knew they evolved from a common ancestor of monkeys and apes but she wanted to know more. When she went to university, she combined her love of nature with her curiosity about the great apes and studied psychology and anthropology. At 22, while she was working on her masters degree in anthropology at the University of California in Los Angeles, Biruté met Dr. Louis Leakey, who is famous for discovering fossils of early humans in Africa. Leakey and the National Geographic Society helped her to set up a research camp in Borneo to study orangutans.
Biruté arrived in Borneo with her husband, Rod Brindamour, in 1971. They had to live in primitive conditions. Within a few years, she gave birth to a son, Binty, who was raised among the orangutans and dubbed "the child of the rain forest". Biruté had to make difficult choices in the years that followed. She made the agonizing decision to remain in the rain forest when her marriage ended. Her son Binti returned to Canada with her ex-husband. Later she remarried and had two more children.
From March 1996 through the end of March 1998 under a special decree, Biruté served as a senior advisor to the Minister of Forestry on orangutan issues. In June 1997 she won the prestigious "Kalpataru" award, the highest award given by the Republic of Indonesia for outstanding environmental leadership and activity. Biruté Galdikas was the first person of non-Indonesian birth and one of the first women to be so recognized by the Indonesian government.
Biruté is uncompromising in her defense of wild orangutans and the preservation of tropical rain forests, which constitute the orangutan species' only natural habitat. She has always had grassroots support and the continued support of the Indonesian government, even in transition, in her pioneering research and effort to conserve and protect orangutans and rain forests as well as the support from numerous conservation groups around the world. Many of these organizations have honored Biruté with environmental awards.
The support by the Indonesian government manifested itself in the speed with which the local government and the Secretary of State approved the OFI Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine built near Pangkalan Bun. The Care Center opened in 1999, just in time to take care of the numerous orphaned orangutans resulting from the devastating Borneo fires of 1997 and 1998 and the continuing destruction of the Bornean rain forest. Also, this support was evident in the creation of the 76,000 hectare wildlife reserve in 1998 based upon Biruté's detailed recommendation to the Governor of Kalimantan Tangah province and to the Ministry of Forestry. Biruté currently heads the Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine, an official cooperative program between OFI and Indonesia's local Nature Conservation Agency. She also serves as advisor to the Head of Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesia.
In cooperation with local people and in educating local youth, Biruté has worked hand-in-hand with the native communities, respecting the value of the indigenous aboriginal people of Borneo. As Jane Goodall once commented, it is not surprising that Biruté Galdikas, who protects orangutans and forests, has to struggle daily against hatred and greed of those who make millions of dollars by destroying the forest and against the complicity of people who put their egos above the needs of orangutans, native people and forests.
Nowadays Biruté lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she lectures at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. At least half of the year is spent in Borneo studying and working with orangutans.Her current husband Pak Bohap, a Dayak rice-farmer in Borneo, is a tribal president and co-director of the orangutan program in Borneo.
Credits
The sources
used for creating this biography are Science.ca,
the website of the Orangutan
Foundation International and the website of Life
& Times.
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