One year old orangutan by Jean Kern

It's in the Koran, apparently.

I was talking to Niel Makinuddin in blustery Balikpapan today. I say "blustery" because Balikpapan is an oil city in Kamimantan Borneo where the wind and surf blowing ashore all day give this place a different feeling for the tropics.

Niel is the forty-five-year-old Kamlimantan manager for the Orangutan Conservation Service Program of the international environment group the Nature Conservancy.

I was trying to figure out where Niel's passion for the environment came from and he started talking about being born in a farming village of a thousand people in a mountain valley of east Java where there were no cars or electricity when he was a child in the late 1960s.

Niel said his father was an influence -- and the Koran too. Niel is a devout Muslim and he told me that the Koran has a number of passages that speak of doing no damage to the land and wildlife. That made an impression on him. "God ordered us not to destroy the environment," he said. That's impressive, particularly since the Koran was written centuries before we woke up to the disastrous way we are destroying the natural world.

In fact, religious leaders, Catholic, Protestant and Muslim, are enlisted to give an environmental message to their flock in Indonesia.

Niel is optimistic, too, about the chances for saving the rainforest habitat of orangutans, which is the only way that orangutans can be saved as a species.

Many of the scientists and conservationists that I have talked to believe, to the contrary, that the rapidly dwindling numbers of wild orangutans and the rapid conversion of rainforest for palm oil plantations, pulp and paper and mining, mean the end of orangutans. These people don't have much faith in politics.

However, Niel told me that there is some hope between the powerful federal anti-corruption agency(Komisi Pemberantantasan Korupsi) which has put some prominent politicians in jail for being involved in the conversion of rainforest, and the federal government's National Orangutan Action Plan, launched in Demember 2007 with the help of the Nature Conservancy.

That ambitious plan would save by 2017 all the habitat needed for the survival of the orangutans, Niel told me.

However, he added that it would be a good idea to have a ministerial decree to give the plan more power as a government regulation.

As in all things political, you have to wait and see, but it was only a few days ago that I was in Jakarta talking to the remarkable orangutan campaigner Angelina Sondakh, who is an elected member of the Indonesian parliament. I had the feeling that Angelina isn't the average politician in Indonesia, but she has as much bluster as the sea wind I'm feeling here in Kalimantan.