Environment

TED2009 minutes from Ethan Zuckerman: Willie Smits is an orangutan hero

Posted by:

468971127_s09_smits_davidson_d72_6389.jpg
Willie Smits at TED 2009 Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Ethan Zuckerman has been liveblogging TED2009, sharing the experience in detail. Today he wrote about the talk delivered by Willie Smits, a conservationist passionately defending the habitat of orangutans in Borneo. The following is a snippet from Ethan’s blog:

“Smits tells us about seeing ‘the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen’ on the face of a baby orangutan in a cage in a Borneo market. Later that day, he found the animal, half dead, on a garbage heap – ‘of course, the cage had been salvaged.’ He nursed the orangutan back to life, and she lives in the sanctuary he maintains, with her children and grandchildren, some of the almost a thousand orangutan he cares for.”

Willie’s a true hero to these orangutans, and to everyone at TED as well.