I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.
Aug. 23, 1996
By Devlyn Brooks
Staff Writer
The job of a conservation officer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is to protect the state's wildlife and resources. However, recently, Bemidji DNR officer Mike Doubet found himself in Indonesia helping to protect the almost-extinct Javan rhino.
Doubet and fellow conservation officer Joel Mikle of Worthington, Minn., took part in sort of an "adopt-an-Indonesian-ranger" project, with the goal of helping to train Indonesian park rangers to better protect the endangered rhino, as well as other species.
The DNR officers spent two weeks in May teaching defensive tactics to rangers of Ujung Kulon National Park on the island of Java, one of many islands comprising Indonesia, and Way Kambas National Park on the island of Sumatra.
The mission was supported by the DNR's Division of Enforcement and sponsored by the Minnesota Conservation Officers Association, which established a goal five years ago to help the Indonesian park rangers any way it could. In those five years, the association has raised $10,000 for the rangers and has supported two trips by conservation officers to the parks, Doubet's being the second.
The Minnesota organization has taken an interest in parks halfway around the world because the Indonesian park rangers, who are trying to protect the 40 to 60 Javan rhinos thought to exist, are tremendously out-manned and frightfully out-gunned.
Doubet said the problem is that humans are encroaching on the parks. Indonesia has a small land mass that is home to a large population. The parks' land value is increasing, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the space set aside for wildlife refuges.
"It's an entire ecosystem in jeopardy because of encroachment," Doubet said. "Indonesia is small and heavily populated. It's like if you took everybody in the United States and put them in Florida."
Adding to the problems, most Indonesians are poor, and the horn of a poached rhino can be worth up to $100,000 on the black market. Also, the people try to hunt and fish in the parks and try to cut down the parks' trees.
Doubet said the park rangers are kept busy with a difficult job. They work in shifts of three weeks in the jungle and have one week at home with their families. They barely have any equipment because the government cannot afford to supply it, and they often face poachers who have guns when the rangers only carry machete-like knives.
The officers delivered 40 pairs of stand handcuffs, 20 packages of nylon flexcuffs and a number of portable radios and chargers, Doubet said. The radios, which are taken for granted in the United States, are very important to the Indonesians because it can take days to walk apprehended criminals out of the jungle. With the radios, the rangers can establish a meeting place with a park boat to speed up the criminal extraction.
"These folks just don't have anything," Doubet said. "They were even grateful for pens we brought over. Their department doesn't pay for pens, and it could cost a couple days of wages to buy the pens we gave them."
He said it was important to show the park rangers that what they are doing matters. The rangers are dedicated but have little support from their government. So the help they receive from other countries is a morale booster.
"These guys have a very important job, and sometimes they don't see the big picture," Doubet said. "This is not simply something that is only affecting Indonesia. If something is destroyed that only lives in one area, for example the Javan rhino, it is gone."
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