Let's lobby to have the bridge renamed Orangutan Arches

Richard Zimmerman of Orangutan Outreach and I may have been showing signs of fatigue as we chatted about orangutan issues for an hour on Skype today, he in New York City and I between mountains in British Columbia.

I say fatigue because Richard has been travelling the globe a lot lately in the service of orangutans and the ideas were beginning to flow with the kind of slippery giddiness that you get from too many security scans in airports.

We were discussing how to seize the popular imagination and popularize the plight of orangutans as an endangered species. There is so much to worry about in the world, orangutans sometimes seem like a drop in the ocean. How do you get people to think about orangutans? How do you even understand how the world is changing in terms of reaching out and contacting people?

Richard and I decided that popular culture now belongs to young women. Certainly you get that if you watch what is happening through the popular media and through the new social media like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr and so on.

Richard says that young women are among the most helpful and committed in his organization. His word for the younger ones is "oranguteens," although the whole group apparently spans women between the ages 15 and 30.

Richard and I talked some more about what kind of figure might be needed to bring orangutans crashing into the popular imagination and then his video image seemed to fall apart on Skype and we were yanked back into our different time zones.

I was thinking of more ideas afterward, like asking the city council in San Francisco to rename the Golden Gate bridge the Orangutan Arches.The bridge is already reddish, like orangutans, so that it wouldn't needed to be painted, a real cost saving for taxpayers. And San Francisco is an innovative place. It already has gay pride, so it could have pongopride too. (The word "pongo" seems to have originated in the Congo word for ape.)

The point of pongopride is that human beings, orangutans and the other apes are all descended from a common ancestor, a progenitor or avatar who I think should be called ur-angutan.The word Ur comes from an ancient city in Sumeria that predates others. We are all members of the ape family, so we are ur-angutans.

My other idea was to lobby a singer like Feist to put the word "orangutan" in one of her songs. A simple act like that would raise the consciousness of orangutans among the rulers of the new social media, the young female pongogirl, and have a twittering ripple effect.

I wanted to leave a message for Feist on her website tonight, but I couldn't find a button, which made me feel frustrated and a bit of an orangugran too.