In 2001, a scientist began rebuilding a rainforest on about 5,000 acres of burned Borneo grassland; the restored habitat became a refuge for orangutans

In February 2009, a Dutch forest researcher named Willie Smits stood on the stage at a TED conference and told a roomful of strangers something that sounded almost impossible. He said he had regrown a rainforest on about 5,000 acres of scorched land in Borneo. His talk titled “How to Restore a Rainforest,” described a practical sequence rather than a miracle: Smits said he started with fast-growing pioneer trees, planted fruit-bearing species to attract wildlife, and built a water cycle by restoring shade and humidity. He argued that once the canopy returned, birds, insects and seed-dispersing animals could help the forest regenerate itself.

A market encounter that changed everything

In 1989, Smits worked as a forest researcher in Indonesia. One day, at a market in Balikpapan, he spotted a sick baby orangutan for sale. That experience led him to understand the importance of orangutan conservation. By 1991, he started the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation to rescue and protect orphaned and displaced orangutans all around Borneo.


But saving orangutans one by one was not enough. Their forests were disappearing faster than any rescue effort could keep up. Smits realized he needed to fix the bigger problem: there was simply no more room left for these animals to live.

Buying land nobody else wanted

In 2001, Smits and his foundation began purchasing a tract of heavily degraded land near the town of Samboja in East Kalimantan. It was not a pretty sight. It had been heavily logged and damaged by drought and fires. Almost all vegetation except for alang-alang, a persistent type of grass, had disappeared from this territory.

Forestry specialists were of the opinion that it would be impossible to turn that patch of land into forest within the next few decades. However, Smits, who has a doctorate in forest ecology, disagreed. What Smits aimed to do was reconstruct an entire ecosystem from scratch. He started doing so with a crew of approximately 100 people, according to the Ashoka Foundation.

Restoring forests one species at a time

Smits began his restoration work with tree nurseries, including some grown from seeds recovered from orangutan droppings. He also included the local community in the project, employing them to plant and take care of the land instead of destroying it. As compensation, locals were given a reliable income tied to the forest’s survival, giving them an incentive to protect the trees rather than cut them down.

The results took years to appear, but they eventually did. The study, ‘Diversity of Plant Communities in Secondary Succession of Imperata Grasslands in Samboja Lestari, East Kalimantan, Indonesia,’ published in the Indonesian Journal of Forestry Research, investigated the restoration of plant life in the former grassland area of Samboja Lestari. More than ten years after restoration work began on the degraded land, the scientists found that 164 species of plants belonging to 65 families were restored in the previously empty grassland area.

A second life for Borneo's orangutans

With increasing density of vegetation, the area had progressed enough by 2006 to begin functioning as habitat. The foundation's orangutan reintroduction program, previously based nearby at Wanariset, moved to the newly restored site, now called Samboja Lestari, in 2006, even as the forest itself continued maturing in the years that followed. Today the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation says the site cares for and supports over 120 orangutans, and a sanctuary for over 70 sun bears. The young orangutans attend what staff describe as Forest School, where they are taught how to build nests, locate food and identify natural predators, skills they would normally learn from their mothers in the wild.

Why this story matters now

This kind of restoration work is not just heartwarming. It is urgent. A 2018 study in the journal Current Biology estimated that more than 100,000 orangutans disappeared from Borneo between 1999 and 2015, mostly due to logging, industrial plantations and other loss of habitat. The Bornean orangutan was listed as critically endangered in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The more forest we lose, the more important restoration becomes.

Samboja Lestari alone cannot reverse that damage. But it shows something worth holding onto: land that experts once thought could take generations to recover can be brought back far sooner than expected if enough people believe that it is worth the effort. What began as a single scientist buying burned grassland has become a working forest and a refuge for hundreds of orangutans.

For readers worried about disappearing rainforests and wildlife, Samboja Lestari offers a rare and tangible kind of hope. It didn't happen overnight; it didn't happen by chance. This was because one person refused to accept that the damage was permanent, and because a community made the decision to protect a forest, rather than profit from its destruction. That blend of patience and local buy-in remains an important conservation model.