Did Not Survive pays off

I'm pleased to say that I recently received my first royalty check from Did Not Survive and, as promised, I donated it to conservation. Let me hasten to say that the check was modest--it takes time and luck to establish a mystery series and mine is still new.

Here are the organizations and the reasons I selected them:

Health in Harmony, for their program to provide local jobs reforesting Gunung Palang National Park, an employment alternative to illegal logging.

Center for Biological Diversity for their efforts to save natural areas by suing to enforce US environmental laws.

Asian Elephant Support for their efforts to help both wild and captive Asian elephants.

WildAid for their campaign to reduce consumer demand for wildlife products in Asia.

What would be your choices? Let me know what organization and why. I'll consider them when the next check comes around.



Thanks for thinking of us, but bigger would be better. Go sell more books.

Former House Guest Wins Conservation Award!

File this under "Good News." Dr. Hotlin Ompusunggu, an Indonesian dentist, received the Whitley Award, presented to her May 12, 2011, by HRH The Princess Royal (that would be Princess Anne). Hotlin is co-founder of Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI),an Indonesian organization that links the health and well-being of rainforest villages with important wildlife habitat in Gunumg Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The US fundraising arm of ASRI is Health In Harmony, which you may have read about in this blog. (Click HERE to refresh your memory.)

I met Hotlin when I hosted a fundraiser at my house. She's a short, energetic, charming woman who showed me how Indonesians cook rice: boil water, add rice, boil until done. Too much water? Drain some off. Not enough? Add more. Perhaps I've made too much fuss about rice...

She and Dr. Kinari Webb established ASRI to provide health care to some of the poorest people in the world and have linked the health of people to the health of the environment. I was especially impressed that they asked the villagers what they needed, rather than announcing the services they chose to deliver. ASRI is innovative in many respects, including helping to protect and restore Gunung Palung and its orangutan population. Orangs are not doing well at all as Indonesian is deforested for palm oil plantations and other crops, so this is important.

Give a thought to ASRI as one of the charities you support. You get two bangs for your buck--healthcare for people, habitat for a multitude of tropical species. Can't beat that!

Saving Orangutans and Much, Much More

I recently stumbled on a program that is simultaneously addressing health care for impoverished people, deforestation, global warming, and orangutan conservation. That’s quite a gift basket for a conservationist who also cares about social justice. Listen up!

In October, Dr. Kinari Webb gave a talk here in Portland, Oregon, about a health clinic she runs in Indonesia on the border of Gunung Palung National Park. This park is home to a healthy population of orangutans. In case you haven’t been watching this species, conservationists are predicting that we will see the extinction of wild orangs in the next decade or so as Indonesia de-forests and converts natural landscapes to palm plantations and other agriculture. This massive deforestation, incidentally, is a huge contributor to global warming.
(http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/17975, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/14/1175)

A national park is a safe haven for wild animals, right? Not necessarily. Setting up a “paper park” is often a feel-good exercise in public relations. Who, exactly, is going to prevent illegal logging and other detrimental activities? An under-funded park service going against well-armed profiteers? It’s no surprise that logging within Gunung Palung has been a huge problem. And when the trees go, so do the orangs and a thousand other benefits of undisturbed forest.

Here is what Dr. Webb is doing. She runs a small clinic under a program called Health In Harmony. The clinic serves the 22 villages that ring the park. She delivers quality health care to very poor people on a tiny budget. Patients pay in cash if they can. If they don’t have cash, they are not turned away, but neither are services given for free. They pay with labor, manure for the organic garden, baskets, or other trade items.

But she goes beyond medical treatment. She links health care to the environment.
* Illegal logging—Health In Harmony offers health care incentives to villages who go “green.” The Park Bureau classes villages as “red” or “green” based on ground and aerial surveys. Red villages show evidence of illegal logging within the park near their boundaries. Green villages don’t. Green villages get mobile clinic visits, low-cost ambulance service, organic gardening training and additional discounts at the clinic.
* Organophosphate poisoning from ignorant and excessive use of pesticides—clinic staff teach organic farming and practice it at the clinic vegetable garden.
* Underemployment—Health in Harmony is researching options for a program that would pay locals to reforest the logged portions of the park.

One of the characteristics of Dr. Webb’s approach that impressed me the most is that she asks the local villagers and their leaders what their priorities are. Are they open to alternatives to illegal logging? (Yes. Logging is dangerous and poorly paid.) What extra services would they want in exchange for green certification? (They wanted a mobile clinic, supplemental ambulance service, and—surprise—training in organic farming.) She doesn’t hand out what we or she think these people need. She asks them and melds their answers into broader goals. Let me add, that the Indonesian Park Service has become an important partner, or none of this would be possible.

The more she said about her program, the more enthusiastic I got and I ended up writing a check for more money than perhaps I should have, but no regrets!

Check it out and see if you don’t find this a wise, compassionate, and effective approach to multiple environmental and health problems: http://www.healthinharmony.org/index.html And then send these people some money. They are doing work we desperately want done.

More sites with information about orangutans and Gunung Palung.

Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program: http://www.savegporangutans.org/
Gunung Palung Orangutan Project: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~gporang/index.html
Gunung Palung National Park: http://www.geocities.com/rainforest/4466/palung1.htm
Tim Laman Photos, Orangutans: http://www.timlaman.com/main.php
A map of the park: http://encarta.msn.com/map_701581664/gunung_palung_national_park.html


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