A Dark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans, and Human Nature

Follow writer Linda Spalding to Borneo's threatened jungles on the trail of orangutan researcher Birute Galdikas and discover the unholy mix of foreign scientists, government workers, tourists, loggers, descendants of Dayak headhunters, Javanese gold miners, and half-tame orangutans vying for control of the jungle. Galdikas, along with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, formed the famed trio of "angels" Louis Leakey encouraged to study great apes in the wild. In 1971 she went into the jungle to study orangutans and decades later emerged with a run-down empire crumbling around her. Along the way, as poachers and timber barons slaughtered orangutans by the thousands, Galdikas evolved into Ibu, the crusading mother of orphan orangutans, blurring the line between ape and human, tourist and scientist, Eden and everything else. To the orangutans, this was perhaps the cruelest blow of all. Spalding's quest to know this woman takes her from the offices of Galdikas's foundation in Los Angeles to the Sekonyer River in Borneo, where she confronts the sad failure of a woman trying desperately to mother a species to survival; the dangers and temptations of eco-tourism; and the arrogance of our inclination to alter the things we set out to save.