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Dino Fitriza

I was born in Duri, Riau, Sumatra Island of Indonesia 28 years ago. I am a photographer. My educational background are : Master of Electrical Engineering and bachelor of Business Administration and... read more I was born in Duri, Riau, Sumatra Island of Indonesia 28 years ago. I am a photographer. My educational background are : Master of Electrical Engineering and bachelor of Business Administration and also bachelor of Environmental Engineering. I am also Al Gore’s The Climate Project Presenter When I was born, Sumatra was covered with dense rainforest. But in the same time, the deforestation was happening there. Every day, hundreds of truckloads of logs was passed in front of my house. I was too young to understand what happened back then. When i was kid, my mothertold me a story about orangutan. The title of the story was “the Man, Orangutans and Fire”. In ancient times, lived two brothers, Human and orang-utans. One day, human and an orangutan stole fire from the giant monster in the forest. Then, human and orangutan runaway. They were almost get caught. In the midst of despair, they made a deal, human can continue to run, and orang-utan would distract the giant. Orangutans remained in the woods, keep running to distracted the Giant. Thousands of years passed, Human began to lose hair on his body, and forgot the story. Humans have benefited from the fire. Time passed away, and no one else remember this story. Orangutans have been forgotten. When I was little, I liked this story. I always ask my mother to retold the story over and over again. When I was 15 years old, I have to leave Duri to Bandung on Java island to get a better education. All forest products and oil from the place I live were unable to provide a better education for local people. This situation, Made people like me, have to go far away and leave my home town to get a better education. An irony, our forests are cut down, but the people around the forest did not get anything. Most of them still live in poverty. Lots of young people in my neighbourhood can’t get better educations In Bandung, I studied Business Administration, Environmental Engineering as an undergraduate student. And Electrical Engineering as the student masters. I studied about water treatment, water distribution system, game programming, multimedia, economic models, business administration, photography, history, politics. I also active as Climate Project Presenters, one of student of Al Gore at The Climate Project Presenter. I am also Climate Generation from British Council. The more I learn the more I understand that deforestation can seriously damage human life and the earth. Yes, I always remember, the big trucks and the story of “The man, orangutan and fire”. The truck is part of deforestation, forests cut down for its timber and for the purpose of palm oil. Forest cut down and burned. This happens not only in sumatra, but also in Borneo. Over the past two decades, about 2 million acres of forest cut down or burned the island of Borneo. However, local communities get the negative impacts, and further the overall ecosystem. The fact that an orangutan or a person from the Forest is the closest human relatives, with 96.4% share its DNA with humans makes the story of “The man, orangutan, and fire” touches me more. What have people done for the past 60 years have actually been so damaging. Now there are only 6600 Sumatran orangutans and 40,000 to 50,000 orang-utans borneo and 7 billion people. That is, there are nearly 1 million people for every 1 Sumatran orang-utan. It’s an irony, If fairy tales were true, about the orangutan sacrificed to save human from the pursuit of a giant to get a fire. Now, We have turned into the most frightening giant monster ever, and we are killing orangutans with the fire that once we get with help from them.

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