It gave me a bit of the same feeling as The Gods Must be Crazy one of my favorite films. Everyone working in conservation should read it and heed it. It s a thought-provoking read, enjoyable and absorbing. Numerous news reports resonate with the fictional people and situations in Redheads, a comic eco-adventure novel by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski. Redheads is about a Swiss shepherd who encourages the tribal Penan of Borneo to rebel against timber companies that are destroying the Penan forest homeland, schizophrenic orangutans facing extinction in the wild, orangutan researchers who will do almost anything to keep their work permits, and corrupt government officials in the fictional Sultanate of Manusia.
Redheads is fiction, but the conservation issues in Borneo are real.
When he left Sarawak in 1990, through Brunei, he returned to Switzerland to create the non-profit Bruno Manser Fonds, which fights for tribal rights and an end to logging. In 1999 he returned to Sarawak and paraglided onto the front lawn of Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud. Manser offered Mahmud a truce in exchange for the government creating a biosphere reserve for the Penan. The Swiss man with the impish grin and John Lennon glasses was deported. Experts predict that orangutans will be extinct in the wild in five to 10 years if rainforest destruction continues at its present levels.