Willie Smits

An Encounter That Changed Everything

Willem Frederik Smits was born in 1957 in Weurt, a small village in the Netherlands. He studied forestry and tropical ecology, and in 1985 moved to Indonesia to work as a forest researcher in East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. It was there, in 1989, that a chance encounter altered the course of his life. Walking through a market in the city of Balikpapan, Smits found a dying baby orangutan lying on a garbage heap, abandoned and emaciated. He picked up the infant, nursed it back to health, and named it Uce.

That single act of rescue grew into a lifelong mission. Smits founded the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) in 1991, which has become the largest primate conservation organization in the world. Through BOS, he established rescue and rehabilitation centers that have cared for more than a thousand orphaned and displaced orangutans. But Smits quickly realized that saving individual animals was futile without saving their habitat. The rainforests of Borneo were being destroyed at a staggering rate, cleared for palm oil plantations, logging, and mining.

The Samboja Lestari Project

In 2001, Smits launched his most ambitious project: Samboja Lestari, meaning "Everlasting Forest." He acquired roughly 2,000 hectares of severely degraded land near Balikpapan, an area that had been repeatedly burned, logged, and reduced to barren, grass-covered wasteland dominated by the invasive alang-alang grass. Fires swept through the area annually, temperatures were extreme, and the water table had dropped dramatically.

Smits developed an innovative three-phase restoration strategy. First, he planted fast-growing sugar palms along the perimeter as firebreaks. Sugar palms are fire-resistant and produce a sweet sap that can be harvested by local communities for sugar and bioethanol, creating immediate economic incentives for conservation. Second, he planted a diverse mix of native tree species in carefully designed patterns that mimicked natural forest succession. Third, he introduced fruit trees and other species that would provide food for orangutans and other wildlife.

The project employed hundreds of local Dayak people, many of whom had previously earned their living through logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. Smits offered them alternative livelihoods tied to the health of the forest: tending nurseries, planting trees, harvesting sugar palm sap, and working in ecotourism. Within a few years, the degraded grassland began to transform. Tree canopy returned, streams that had been dry for years started flowing again, local temperatures dropped by several degrees, and rainfall in the area measurably increased.

Innovation and Lasting Impact

By the mid-2010s, Samboja Lestari had become a thriving ecosystem supporting over 1,300 tree species and a wide variety of wildlife, including sun bears, clouded leopards, and dozens of bird species. A forested island within the project serves as a pre-release sanctuary for rehabilitated orangutans being prepared for return to the wild. The project demonstrated that tropical rainforest restoration is achievable even on severely degraded land, and that it can generate economic benefits for local communities while sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

Smits's approach was notable for its integration of ecology, economics, and social welfare. He showed that conservation does not have to come at the expense of local livelihoods. His sugar palm model has been studied and replicated in other parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He has received numerous international awards, including the Order of the Golden Ark from the Dutch royal family and recognition from the United Nations.

Smits continues to work on forest restoration and orangutan conservation in Borneo. He has become an outspoken critic of the palm oil industry and deforestation-driven development models, advocating instead for what he calls "green economics," an approach that values intact ecosystems as productive assets rather than obstacles to growth. His work at Samboja Lestari stands as one of the most comprehensive demonstrations that restoring tropical rainforest is not just ecologically necessary but economically viable.