Nine years ago, in Sangkulirang, East Kutai, a team from the East Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) found a baby Bornean orangutan. Its body was frail, its umbilical cord was still wet, it had not yet grown teeth, and it was gasping for breath. The baby was then named Popi. Since that day, Popi has lived at the Borneo Orangutan Rescue Alliance (BORA) rehabilitation center in Berau, fighting just to grow into herself. Her mother was never found. She was forced to live a miserable life, all alone.
Popi's story is just a small portrait of a much larger tragedy befalling the orangutan.
Indonesia bears a very heavy responsibility to protect them. Of the approximately 71,800 orangutans on the planet, more than 60,000 live in the forests of the archipelago. Its three species (Pongo abelii and Pongo tapanuliensis in Sumatra, and Pongo pygmaeus in Borneo) are all classified as Critically Endangered. The Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), only identified as a separate species in 2017, is now left with fewer than 800 individuals.
Scientists agree that the primary cause of this population decline is habitat loss due to deforestation. Orangutans are highly dependent on intact forests, yet Indonesia lost nearly 9.5 million hectares of primary forest between 2002 and 2019, mostly in Sumatra and Kalimantan. In the last three years of that period alone (2016-2019), more than 739,000 hectares of orangutan habitat were lost.
Meanwhile, conservationists add poaching and the illegal wildlife trade to the list. This factor is, in fact, still connected to deforestation. As the forest shrinks, orangutans are pushed out of their habitat, forcing them into direct contact with humans. They damage gardens, are considered pests, and are then killed. Data shows that each year, approximately 2,200 Bornean orangutans are killed due to conflict or poaching.
These explanations are correct, but unfortunately, they still leave a gaping hole. They can explain how orangutans die, but they fail to sufficiently dig into why it all continues to happen, even after we know the dangers. It is as if this massive problem were just a series of ecological accidents that need to be patched up with rehabilitation and patrols. Meanwhile, the machine that keeps these causes in motion is left to run, unidentified.
Here, I wish to name that "machine" as "structural violence," a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung.
Structural violence helps us see how harm can be produced by a system, without anyone needing to raise a weapon or pull a trigger. This type of violence infiltrates policies, markets, and even social norms, working slowly but surely to deprive victims of the life chances they should have had. And although this concept was originally designed to narrate human suffering, I am dismayed that its accuracy in explaining the erosion of orangutan existence is astonishing.
Just as people die of starvation, orangutans do not always die because someone is directly firing a bullet at them. There is no official decree ordering their extermination, just as there is no law that openly "legalizes" starvation. Yet, people can die because of a socio-economic structure that fails to provide food, or because of policies that make prices unaffordable.
In the case of orangutans, they are pushed to the brink by a series of decisions, policies, and market forces that cause them to lose their homes. The forest, their home, is licensed away. Every plot of land cleared, every concession granted to a company, and every road that splits the forest is the result of a signature on a legal document. In a sense, ironically, orangutans die because of decisions made in offices far from the forest.
