Lucy did amazing stuff. Acrobatic, tightrope-walking, gravity-defying stuff. Quite literally. From an early age she specialised in causing disbelief, experimenting first with her parents. Lulling them, both doctors, into a false sense of her predictable career path, Lucy completed a degree in geology and archaeology at Bristol University. She then took off.
Lucy’s post-O-Levels early gap year on a kibbutz in Israel was nothing compared to her post-degree globe-trotting, taking in Australia and India along the way. After the airport hugs and tales of adventure over the family reunion dinner, Lucy’s relieved mum and dad were curious to know about their daughter’s first real career move. Of course she would help out her brother and their band as their tour manager. That went without saying.
But what Lucy was going to do, if they really wanted to know, was train in circus skills. The training would be in Bristol and London to start, but the je ne sais quoi of mastering the art of a flying trapeze artist in Paris appealed to her. As a general rule in life, what Lucy decided Lucy did, with or without a safety net. Lucy, the geologically trained independent traveller would become a circus performer.
At first she didn’t entirely turn her back on her university education. After crewing a yacht to Barbados she didn’t head home or to the beach. Realising that the island nation lacked an organisation to find its hidden past, she remained to establish the Barbados Archaeological Society.
But Barbados couldn’t hold her. Lucy’s energy and talents demanded performance. Naturally enough, she found what she was digging for in a quarry outside of Rimini in Italy. Lucy joined a curious and quirky collection of acrobats, musicians, sculptors and designers whose creations and performances focused on the recycling of everything from cars to cranes to planes. The tours of The Mutoids, as they were called, across Italy, Spain and Germany, only stopped for Lucy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994.
Surgery meant an end to Lucy’s life in her beloved caravan in Rimini, but the beginning of a new adventure as a volunteer at the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre at Bohorok in Sumatra. Lucy saw it as the ideal way to recover. As she soon discovered, an orphaned orangutan, whose mother had been shot, who had been sold into, and then rescued from, the pet trade, required time, love and care to recover as well.
It didn’t take Lucy long to realise that the young orangutans longed for something else, something more to rediscover confidence in their natural instinct and behaviour, something she could show them. They needed swing time.
In the months that followed, Lucy set an example for her charges, climbing vines, leading them up, across and through the forest canopy, tree to tree. Her recovery became the orangutans’ recovery. The orangutans’ rediscovery of swinging skills became Lucy’s release. She would let go of everything to save them. Her swing time with the orangutans had taught her not to hold on for any safety net of approval, target bank balance, retirement pot or perfect health. Lucy would become a philanthropist by letting go.
By 2001 Lucy’s philanthropy had taken shape as the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS). Her deep dive into issues beyond pet trade persecution of individuals took Lucy to a better understanding of the orangutan extinction threat posed by deforestation, logging and palm oil plantations. Rubbing shoulders with primatologists and absorbing all she could learn from conservationists, she turned SOS into a formidable force. Led by Lucy, the SOS branch network expanded in the UK, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.
Nearly 25 years later, the SOS-led centre in Sumatra alone has saved more than 200 orangutans. SOS has also been at the forefront of tree-planting initiatives to protect orangutan habitats, succeeding in planting over 2,000 hectares with two million trees. Added to that, working alongside farmers, local organisations and communities living along the forest edge, SOS estimates that it has engaged more than 7,000 people in conservation action. For all of its endeavours to save and protect orangutans, SOS is now raising in excess of £800,000 each year.
Lucy Wisdom died in 2009. In the five years that she lived without cancer, orangutans became her joy, her focus, her mission, her philanthropy. In the last eight and a half years of her life when the cancer returned, the orangutans’ survival continued to mean everything to her and, as treatment allowed, she worked tirelessly on their behalf.
Two years before Lucy died, the SOS-inspired-and-influenced Governor of North Sumatra asked for an environmental education curriculum for schools to be developed, the focus of which would be the importance of orangutan habitat for the ecosystem. As a result, thousands of secondary school students have had their opportunity to find out why orangutans matter and how they change lives. A privileged group of pupils at Bukit Mas know better than most, lucky as they are to be taught at the Lucy Wisdom School, dedicated to the memory of a swinging philanthropist who did amazing stuff.