For Janie Dubman venturing into the jungles of Borneo was like finding home - not in a personal, biographical sense, but for all of humankind.

"Tropical rainforests are our ancestral homeland. This is where primates evolved, and only after that have we started spreading across the globe," says Dubman, a budding SFU biologist who's majored in conservation with a focus on primate evolution.

In ancient times, tropical rainforests were home to our primate ancestors, some of whom eventually left the forests for the drier, more open grasslands of the African savannah, Dubman explains. But before we became land dwellers with a complex social structure, we lived in the trees and gathered our food from the jungle, Dubman says.

"This was our most ancient lifestyle," she says.

And it's in the tropical rainforests where Dubman, 22, has joined the fight for endangered, orphaned orangutans, creatures whose habitat is being destroyed by encroaching deforestation.

Dubman got involved in saving orangutans while studying with SFU primatologist Birute Galdikas, founder of Orangutan Foundation International.

Galdikas has four decades of experience researching the Borneo orangutans from a camp in the Tanjung Puting National Park in the southern Indonesian part of the island.

In the late '90s, she opened a rehabilitation centre for orangutan orphans. In 2008, when Dubman was just 19, Galdikas invited her to the rainforests.

Dubman went in 2009 and has been every year since.

"I felt like it was sort of meant to be," Dubman says. "I was ecstatic. It is an incredibly rare opportunity. Not many people get to go volunteer there."

D ubman sees primates and their habitat as extremely relevant to our planet and our own heritage.

"Primates are our closest relatives, so to understand them is indispensable if we are ever going to understand where we came from. But tropical rainforests themselves are among the most ancient living systems on the planet and the most biologically rich, so to conserve rainforests is of primary concern of all biologists, because they contain most of the land species-richness in the world," she says.

According to Dubman, Galdikas is the world's foremost authority on orangutan research. In 1971, she went to Borneo to research the elusive apes, when the area was beyond remote.

Galdikas soon came to see the importance of conservation because the orangutans were threatened by semi-legal logging activities, Dubman explains.

As time went on, deforestation increased as global demand for timber, especially tropical hardwoods, was high. The palm oil industry also started encroaching on the orangutans' natural habitat. The cheap, plant-based oil is used in everything from chips and cakes to shampoo and yogurt. Ninety per cent of the world's palm oil supply comes from Borneo and the neighbouring island of Sumatra, Dubman points out.

"Palm oil is part of the reason 50 per cent of original rainforest in Borneo has been cleared. You can drive through plantations in Borneo, even in the Malaysian part - for up to seven hours and not see anything but palm trees and monoculture. In those conditions, orangutans and no other wildlife can really survive. When those orangutans wander out of the plantations, the workers are afraid of them, and so they shoot the mother and either keep the babies as pets or sell them on the black market or surrender them.

The lucky ones make it back to a care centre."

The motherless babies would be raised and released back in the wild between the ages of seven and 10 years old. The rehabilitation centre started with less than 20. Now they've helped more than 330 orphans, Dubman says.

Dubman says. rangutans are a Ospecies of ape, but they are different from other great apes, because they spend most of their lives in the trees. The

males sometimes travel on the ground, but the females sleep, eat and give birth in the treetops. Orangutans are solitary, which sets them apart from their more social counterparts. The only stable social unit is the mother and her offspring, Dubman says.

"There's absolutely no hope for an infant to survive without its mother because they have extremely complex feeding patterns (and) because they are selective about their food. They need to learn how to forage properly. They also need to learn how to climb," Dubman says. "They can't wander around by themselves. They need a mother. For the first two years, they rarely let go of her fur. They cling to her.

She also nurses and takes care them for up to seven or eight years in the wild."

Dubman says the centre takes in orphans as young as three months or as old as five to six years, the age when they become too strong to control.

"Our guiding philosophy is to never train them and never tame them.

o adventure We want them to stay as wild as possible and to learn as many forest skills, so we have a small army of local caregivers who live in the village and work in the care centre. They take the orangutans out, as much as possible, almost every day, to the forest and let them run loose so they can climb, they can socialize with their peers and they can sample wild foods.

They develop their strength and coordination. This is how we try to recreate the training a wild mother would have given them," Dubman says. "When they are released into the forest, we monitor and track them, make sure they are settling in. And if they are not ready, we would teach them some more and bring them back and teach them some more."

According to Dubman, the rehabilitated orangutans tend to fare well in the wild.

"If they know how to build nests, how to climb and forage, they have an extremely good chance of surviving," she says. But the orphans in the centre are acutely aware of their circumstances.

"We know that they see their mothers murdered in front of them because at that age they cling to her. That means that for them to be (separated) she has had to be shot, and they have to be peeled off her dead body.

That is how it happens," Dubman says. "A lot of them are very traumatized, and that trauma comes out in various ways. Some of them won't eat or drink, some of them are terrified of humans, and some others are extremely clingy. They often cry at night. In the nursery, there's 24-hour care.

They kind of whimper and they whine. It's very clear they are

expressing extreme distress and extreme grief."

Working in the centre is also emotional for Dubman, who describes the experience as bittersweet.

"You know if they made it to this care centre, they have a second chance at life. On the other hand, we shouldn't be giving them a second chance. We had no right to take away their first," she says. "You're glad you can help them, but you're grieved that they need help them in the first place. They have beautiful, wonderful natural mothers, who do a much better job than we ever could. But we try."

A s the orangutans get older, they become less interested in their caregivers and other orangutans, and more interested in food, climbing and other independent survival behaviours. Releasing the grown babies back into the wild can be harder on the caregivers than the orangutans, but the scarcity of natural habitat is an increasing problem.

"There used to be so much forest. The challenge was to raise them. Letting them go was easy. Now, we have a great infrastructure and great care centre, (but) we're completely over capacity. We know how to do the rehabilitation part, but there's almost no safe forest left to release them.

So we have all of these orangutans past their due date, essentially, and we morally can't release them, because we aren't sure we can give them a safe place to live," Dubman says.

N ow back in Canada after her latest fivemonth stint in the rainforest, Dubman has her sights set on a master's degree in green energy and its ecological impacts from SFU in Burnaby.

Dubman also leads workshops and presentations about the orangutans to help fundraise for the cause.

She encourages people to volunteer for Orangutan Foundation International; either as a summer shortterm volunteer or through a competitive internship program that lets people help with the care centre and other field programs.

The organization also needs donations for the rehabilitation program and the forest protection program.

Dubman says the most helpful things people can do are to stop buying products that contain palm oil, donate to help buy forest land, or hold a fundraiser for Orangutan Foundation International. There's also an eco-tourism program where people can go on field tours with Galdikas for a week, and partial proceeds help the orphans.

For Dubman, protecting the orangutans is also about understanding ourselves.

"Like any living creature in the forest, orangutans have a right to exist. But they are also very important to our own, human identity: they can help us understand what our ancient heritage looked like. They are a clue to our past, a living historical clue. To lose them would be like losing a cousin that can never come back. They're part of our family."

For more information on orangutan and rainforest conservation, visit www. orangutan.org. For events or presentations, contact Dubman at jda9@sfu.ca.