Qualla: Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julielangford, CC BY 3.0. When Willie Smits proposed to his first wife in Tomohon, North Sulawesi, in 1980, the dowry surprised him: six sugar palms. A mature sugar palm ready for tapping cost about as much as a chicken. Smits, a young Dutchman who had arrived in Indonesia with little more than a forestry degree and an obsessive curiosity about trees, could not understand why the locals prized these particular trees so highly -- or why they were so cheap. Decades later, having founded the world's largest orangutan conservation organization, regrown 2,000 hectares of dead forest, and built a palm sugar factory powered by geothermal steam, he would look back at that dowry and call the sugar palm a magic tree. The answer to the mystery had been there all along. Smits just needed thirty years of work in Borneo to understand it.

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Image: Julielangford | CC BY 3.0

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: Hungry Boy, Wounded Owl

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VoDeTan2 Dericks-Tan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Smits was born on February 22, 1957, in Weurt, a small village in the Gelderland province of the Netherlands. His father was a farm worker, his mother a dressmaker, and the family of five shared a space of roughly two by two meters. They often went hungry. Smits struggled with au...

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Image: VoDeTan2 Dericks-Tan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: A Dying Orangutan in a Market

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julielangford, CC BY 3.0. In 1985, Smits arrived at the Wanariset Tropical Forest Research Station near Balikpapan in East Kalimantan. He was there to study mycorrhizal fungi -- the underground networks that connect tree roots to nutrients in the soil -- and completed a PhD on the symbiosis between these ...

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Image: Julielangford | CC BY 3.0

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: Growing Forest from Nothing

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julielangford, CC BY 3.0. In 2001, the BOS Foundation began buying degraded land near Samboja -- 2,000 hectares of clay soil covered in alang-alang grass, with underground coal seams that spontaneously combusted in dry weather. This was the land nobody wanted, and Smits could afford it precisely because i...

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Image: Julielangford | CC BY 3.0

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: The Magic Tree

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julielangford, CC BY 3.0. Smits' work extended far beyond orangutans. Through the Masarang Foundation, which he co-founded and chairs, he attacked the economic pressures driving deforestation by offering communities alternatives. His answer was the sugar palm -- the tree that had appeared in his wedding d...

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Image: Julielangford | CC BY 3.0

Willie Smits: The Dutchman Who Regrew a Rainforest: Death Threats and Dedication

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Serenity, CC BY-SA 3.0. The work has never been safe. Confiscating illegally held orangutans from homes is inherently confrontational, and Smits has received numerous death threats. He once spent three days in a hospital on chemotherapy to fight lungworms and other parasites contracted from the animals ...

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Image: Serenity | CC BY-SA 3.0