SOMETIMES you just can’t win. Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was accused of hypocrisy when it announced plans to airlift 48 orang-utans into a new wildlife reserve in Indonesian Borneo, as it was simultaneously preparing to destroy the apes’ habitat not far away with its Maruwai coal-mining project.
Now, two years on, it is coming under fire again in stories carrying headlines along the lines of “Hope of freedom for orang-utans dashed”. True, BHP is abandoning the airlift – but that’s because it is pulling out of the mining project too, citing a dramatic fall in world coal prices in…
