and somebody stuck a cage in my face.

And in between those slits

were the saddest eyes I've ever seen.

There was a very sick orangutan baby, my first encounter.

That evening I came back to the market in the dark

and I heard "uhh, uhh,"

and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap.

Of course, the cage was salvaged.

I took up the little baby,

massaged her, forced her to drink

until she finally started breathing normally.

This is Uce.

She's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain,

and this is Matahari, her second son,

which, by the way, is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued, Dodoy.

That changed my life quite dramatically,

and as of today, I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers.

(Applause)

No. No. No. Wrong.

It's horrible. It's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild.

It's not good.

This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing.

Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together,

just now like victims for every baby,

six have disappeared from the forest.

The deforestation, especially for oil palm,

to provide biofuel for Western countries

is what's causing these problems.

And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat,

the largest accumulation of organic material in the world.

When you open this for growing oil palms

you're creating CO2 volcanoes

that are emitting so much CO2

that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world,

after China and the United States.

And we don't have any industry at all --

it's only because of this deforestation.

And these are horrible images.

I'm not going to talk too long about it,

but there are so many of the family of Uce,

which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest,

that still have to go through that process.

And I don't know anymore where to put them.

So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her

but also a solution

that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests,

to get their hands on the last timber

and that are causing, in that way,

the loss of habitat and all those victims.

So I created the place Samboja Lestari,

and the idea was,

if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of

where there is really nothing left,

no one will have an excuse to say, "Yeah, but ..."

No. Everyone should be able to follow this.

So we're in East Borneo. This is the place where I started.

As you can see there's only yellow terrain.

There's nothing left -- just a bit of grass there.

In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there.

There was a huge amount of crime.

People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water.

There was no agricultural productivity left.

This was the poorest district in the whole province

and it was a total extinction of wildlife.

This was like a biological desert.

When I stood there in the grass, it's hot -- not even the sound of insects --

just this waving grass.

Still, four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people.

The climate has changed. I will show you:

no more flooding, no more fires.

It's no longer the poorest district,

and there is a huge development of biodiversity.

We've got over 1,000 species. We have 137 bird species as of today.

We have 30 species of reptiles.

So what happened here? We created a huge economic failure in this forest.

So basically the whole process of destruction

had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm.

But we saw the same thing.

We had slash and burn agriculture;

people cannot afford the fertilizer,

so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there;

the fires become more frequent,

and after a while you're stuck with an area of land

where there is no fertility left.

There are no trees left.

Still, in this place, in this grassland

where you can see our very first office there on that hill,

four years later, there is this one green blop on the Earth's surface ...

(Applause)

And there are all these animals, and all these people happy,

and there's this economic value.

So how's this possible?

It was quite simple. If you'll look at the steps:

we bought the land, we dealt with the fire,

and then only, we started doing the reforestation

by combining agriculture with forestry.

Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary.

But we made sure that in every step of the way

the local people were going to be fully involved

so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that.

The people would become the defenders of that forest.

So we do the "people, profit, planet" principles,

but we do it in addition

to a sure legal status --

because if the forest belongs to the state,

people say, "It belongs to me, it belongs to everyone."

And then we apply all these other principles

like transparency, professional management, measurable results,

scalability, [unclear], etc.

What we did was we formulated recipes --

how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing

to a target situation.

You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control,

whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice.

And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out.

Now in this recipe you also have the cost.

You also know how much labor is needed.

If you can drop this recipe on the map

on a sandy soil, on a clay soil,

on a steep slope, on flat soil,

you put those different recipes; if you combine them,

out of that comes a business plan,

comes a work plan, and you can optimize it

for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have,

and you can do it.

This is how it looks like in practice. We have this grass we want to get rid of.

It exudes [unclear]-like compounds from the roots.

The acacia trees are of a very low value

but we need them to restore the micro-climate, to protect the soil

and to shake out the grasses.

And after eight years they might actually yield some timber --

that is, if you can preserve it in the right way,

which we can do with bamboo peels.

It's an old temple-building technique from Japan

but bamboo is very fire-susceptible.

So if we would plant that in the beginning

we would have a very high risk of losing everything again.

So we plant it later, along the waterways

to filter the water, provide the raw products

just in time for when the timber becomes available.

So the idea is: how to integrate these flows

in space, over time and with the limited means you have.

So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples

and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees,

the crop fertilizer. Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops,

for the people, but also helps the trees. The farmers have free land,

the system yields early income, the orangutans get healthy food

and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration

while even saving some money.

So beautiful. What a theory.

But is it really that easy?

Not really, because if you looked at what happened in 1998,

the fire started.

This is an area of about 50 million hectares.

January.

February.

March.

April.

May.

We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months.

This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires

that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States.

And once the soil gets dried, you're in a dry season -- you get cracks,

oxygen goes in, flames come out and the problem starts all over again.

So how to break that cycle?

Fire is the biggest problem.

This is what it looked like for three months.

For three months, the automatic lights outside did not go off

because it was that dark.

We lost all the crops. No children gained weight for over a year;

they lost 12 IQ points. It was a disaster

for orangutans and people.

So these fires are really the first things to work on.

That was why I put it as a single point up there.

And you need the local people for that because these grasslands,

once they start burning ... It goes through it like a windstorm

and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients

to the first rainfall -- going to the sea

killing off the coral reefs there.

So you have to do it with the local people.

That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution.

So what we did is, we created

a ring of sugar palms around the area.

These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant --

also flood-resistant, by the way --

and they provide a lot of income for local people.

This is what it looks like:

the people have to tap them twice a day -- just a millimeter slice --

and the only thing you harvest is sugar water,

carbon dioxide, rain fall and a little bit of sunshine.

In principle, you make those trees into

biological photovoltaic cells.

And you can create so much energy from this --

they produce three times more energy per hectare per year,

because you can tap them on a daily basis.

You don't need to harvest [unclear]

or any other of the crops.

So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics,

which is still unexploited, and doing it in combination with technology.

But also your legal side needs to be in very good order.

So we bought that land,

and here is where we started our project --

in the middle of nowhere.

And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area

is divided into strips that go over different types of soil,

and we were actually monitoring,

measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares, 5,000 acres.

And this forest is quite different.

What I really did was I just followed nature,

and nature doesn't know monocultures,

but a natural forest is multilayered.

That means that both in the ground and above the ground

it can make better use of the available light,

it can store more carbon in the system, it can provide more functions.

But, it's more complicated. It's not that simple, and you have to work with the people.

So, just like nature,

we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that,

we grow the slower growing, primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity

that can optimally use that light. Then,

what is just as important: get the right fungi in there

that will grow into those leaves, bring back the nutrients

to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours.

And they become like nutrient pumps.

You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen,

and without those microorganisms, you won't have any performance at all.

And then we started planting -- only 1,000 trees a day.

We could have planted many, many more, but we didn't want to

because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable.

We didn't want to lose the people

that are going to work in that plantation.

And we do a lot of work here.

We use indicator plants to look at what soil types,

or what vegetables will grow, or what trees will grow here.

And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space.

This is what it looks like in reality;

you have this irregular ring around it,

with strips of 100 meters wide, with sugar palms

that can provide income for 648 families.

It's only a small part of the area.

The nursery, in here, is quite different.

If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe, for instance,

from the Urals up to England, you know how many?

165.

In this nursery, we're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species.

Can you imagine