‘S.O.S.’ carved out of former plantation shines a light on palm oil-driven deforestation

JAKARTA — An artist working with environmental activists has carved out a distress call from a stand of thousands of oil palm trees in a former plantation on the edge of a protected area in Sumatra, Indonesia, to highlight the destruction of the country’s rainforests. The letters “S.O.S.” stretch half a kilometer (1,600 feet) in a 100-hectare (250-acre) plot in Bukit Mas, North Sumatra province, near the Leuser ecosystem — the last place on Earth where orangutans, rhinos, tigers and elephants coexist. “From the ground, you would not suspect anything more than just another [oil palm] plantation,” Ernest Zacharevic, a Malaysia-based artist from Lithuania, said in a statement. “[T]he aerial view however reveals an SOS distress signal.” The work is in collaboration with the U.K.-based conservation group Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS) and the cosmetics company Lush, which together raised funds to buy the one-time plantation through the sale of 14,600 orangutan-shaped soap bars last year. The goal was to completely reforest the land, which is now owned by SOS’s Indonesian sister organization, the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC), with native tree seedlings, and eventually link up the area with a nearby OIC reforestation site. Before clearing the oil palms and reforesting, though, the group recruited Zacharevic to put out the distress call to the rest of the world. “Ernest shared a really bold, creative idea with us at the time, and it just so happened that the land we had just bought was the perfect canvas,” SOS said on its website.…

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