The following letter was written to the editor of Nature – an international weekly science journal – in response to an editorial published on 22 May 2008, titled “Two Symbols, One Solution.” It was penned by CIFOR’s Doug Sheil and The Nature Conservancy’s Erik Meijaard.

SIR – Your editorial cautioning against how condescending it can be to focus on species over people (Nature 453, 427; 2008) resonates with our experience in Indonesia. But symbols are powerful—perhaps what we need are a new set of symbols.

The appeal of charismatic animals and idyllic forests is not universal. Indeed criticising these western icons, which privilege animals over people, has become an easy rallying cry for local leaders the world over, tarnishing conservation as new colonialism. Recently a candidate for the Governorship of East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) commented that choices between people and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) should favour people. In Indonesia, where until 2005, 52.4% of the people lived on less than USD 2 per day (UNDP, Human Development Index; 2007) such politically pragmatic opinions are unlikely to change soon. Here the iconic images are of the noble fight against poverty—wild animals are largely irrelevant.

We all need to listen to learn. In one of our conservation programmes, local community members recently told us that they are the orang-utan (=forest people), “Why don’t you help us first?” In a democratic world we need to find other ways to answer such questions about conservation and development (M. Padmanaba and D. Sheil Biod. Cons. 16, 1137; 2007). People in developing countries are seldom anti-conservation per-se, though they often resent the conservation imposed on them. There is a need to develop a common language, as well as icons for environmental conservation that translate across cultures.

What can these icons be? Images to represent conservation practice might include people negotiating over maps—the idea of seeing how and where communities and governments are willing to support conservation. Another might be the dollar-sign— “$s” that the wealthy may need to pay for offsetting opportunity costs of their own kind of conservation. The symbol of knowledge represents the need to generate and transfer useful environmental science (D. Sheil and E. Meijaard Bull. Brit. Ecol. Soc. 38, 75; 2007). One more would be the ballot—the idea that conservation needs to have the same kinds of democratic checks and balances we require in other societal choices. These abstract process-based ideas are unfortunately less photogenic than fluffy animals, but they lie at the basis of reducing loss of tropical forests, and through that save orangutans and other species.