Protecting Rainforest Through Education

Soon we hope to offer you more ideas for projects and activities that will help you help us save the rainforest and protect the natural wonders of our world where you live.  In the coming year we look forward to including more information that’s useful to teachers to help teach about the rainforest and to show you more about what students and other individual kids have done to learn more about the rainforest and to raise money to help the animals in the rainforest of Manuel Antonio today.  We can’t wait to show you more.  Kids have built amazing rainforest environments in their classrooms, done extremely successful and rewarding service projects donating thousands of dollars to help the animals of the rainforest and have been kind enough to dedicate all of their birthday or bat mitzvah dollars to KSTR.  These inspiring actions have continued to build enthusiasm and encourage a greater group of kids to learn why our rainforests are so important and why we should all work hard to save them.
We look forward to over the next months offering more material for teachers for service projects, rainforest curriculum and plenty of ideas for how kids can be meaningfully engaged in helping to save the rainforest.  Stay tuned


The rising demand for bio fuel and palm oil products for the food industry has resulted in Indonesia's rain forests being cut down for monocultures. On Sumatra about 80% of the native forest is already destroyed, but thanks to people like Dr. Peter Pratje there is still hope for the last remaining paradises on earth.

A talk about endurance, passion and fulfilled childhood dreams.

Manuela & Carsten: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to work here in Sumatra for the Frankfurt Zoological Society?
Peter Pratje: I started right after my studies to work professionally in conservation. I studied Biology in Hanover and moved to Munich to study wild animals, with an emphasis on applied conservation work in national parks. That was exactly what I wanted to do.
Afterwards I went to Borneo for 3 months and found a little project, where they wanted to release Orangutans, but the conditions were miserable. This was my first contact with local conservation work. After that, I tried to find out how these conditions could be improved. Through my network I heard about the project planned by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, to release Orangutans back into the wild, and applied for it. I got the job and in 1998 I came to Indonesia for the first time to prepare a feasibility study for this project.

M&C: What fascinates you most about the local work with animals?
PP: Well, of course the animals themselves. Animals that are rarely seen have a special charisma about them. It also fascinated me to be able to do something on a big scale. In developing countries the creative leeway is much bigger as there are still many unused and unexplored forests and areas that aren’t protected. In Germany spaces are very limited and some conservation areas are barely more than a big garden.
My motivation was to do something sustainable that gives meaning and goes beyond my personal life.

A this year’s focus is education. Nations frequently provide dismal education to indigenous communities. Youth often encounter discrimination, language barriers, inadequate resources (such as lack of textbooks), poorly trained teachers, few resources & low funding, culturally & linguistically inadequate education, geographic marginalization and outside stressors, such as encroachment on indigenous lands or violence.  For indigenous communities in the rainforest, the situation can be even worse: sometimes their communities lack access to schools altogether, and other times they are forced to travel for hours on foot each day just to attend school.