A politician who cares

Orangutans have a rare and genuine political ally in Angelina Sondakh.

The thirty-one-year-old politician won her second term in the Indonesian parliament in the 2009 election with the ruling Democrat party, even with her vehement campaigning to save orangutans and the rainforest.

That's not a particularly popular stand to take in Indonesia where the economy has piority over the environment and Angelina draws senseless criticism for talking about orangutans rather than the poverty-stricken of her country.

Yet when I sat down to talk to her for two hours today at her office in Jakarta, she pointed out that voters still strongly support her. She came eleventh in votes out of a parliament with 560 seats now.

You can't help but be impressed by this politician.

Her office is filled with orangutan posters and she isn't shy about speaking out, doing it years before she ran for political office in 2004.

Born in a family from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi where serious issues of the environment and politics were discussed at home, she was active in environment projects while still in high school.

I wouldn't feel like mentioning that she also won the Miss Indonesia beauty contest, except that someone will notice if I skip it. But it hardly seems relevant for a woman who did a master's degree in political communication which helped her forge her political strategy. Popularity only accounts for 15.7 per cent of the chance of being elected, she told me. Not beauty contests.

So, with the combination of an environmental ethos and political savvy, this is a politician to watch in Indonesia.

I think she might be able to find wide support for orangutans and the rainforest in the women of her country. If you look around the world, it is women who have taken these issues to heart, like Kenya's Wangari Maathai.

Angelina knows that the real progress is to be made in the implementation and enforcement of Indonesian's substantial environmental legislation.

She tried to get a petition among parliament members to create legislation to prohibit trafficking in wild animals. In Indonesia, a proposal for new legislation requires support from one third of the members of parliament and she didn't get that. But she isn't deterred.

We have to think of the future now, Angelina told me, and that sentiment seemed even more relevant for a woman expecting her first child, a daughter named Keanu, meaning "cool breeze of the mountains."

"If we can save the forest, it means that we can save human lives," she told me.

In the meantime, she is pressing the Indonesian parliament for a room where a female politician can breast feed her child.