It is no secret that orangutans are threatened with extinction because their rain forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Ten years ago, Shawn Thompson, a writer, former journalist and university professor, set out to chronicle the threat to orangutans in a book released in March 2010. The book is called The Intimate Ape: Orangutans and the Secret Life of a Vanishing Species. The book spends most of the time talking about the nature of orangutans and the relationships between orangutans and people. But the ultimate underlying message is there about the source of the peril to orangutans and the solution. Thompson says that the problem of saving orangutans has to do with communications and human nature.

Brazil and the United States have signed an agreement to worth together to reduce deforestation as part of an effort to slow climate change.

The memorandum of understanding signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Brasilia last Wednesday comes as talks on REDD, a proposed climate change mitigation mechanism that would pay tropical countries for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, move forward despite the lack of a formal climate treaty.

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0307-brazil_us_mou.html

NUSA DUA - It is blamed for everything from deforestation to threatening the extinction of the orangutan, but palm oil is a vital source of income for many developing countries, the crop's producers say.

Mankind's closest living relatives - the world's apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates - are on the brink of extinction and in need of urgent conservation measures according to Primates in Peril: The World's 25 Most Endangered Primates, 2008-2010.

Australia has joined forces with its neighbor, Indonesia, to aid beleaguered forests in the Jambi province on the island of Sumatra, reports Reuters.

The A$30 million ($27 m) project aims to address the underlying drives of deforestation in Jambi, a province that has lost more than two-thirds of its forest as a result of logging, conversion for oil palm and pulp plantations, and subsistence agriculture. The initiative would fight deforestation, rehabilitate and reforest degraded land, and provide alternative incomes to locals, thereby raising the province's capacity to store carbon in its rainforests and peatlands.

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0303-australia_jambi.html