Petitions will make no difference, and neither will companies change, because they do what they do in order to make a profit: sorry to disappoint you. It is the whole Culture of Maximum Harm that is the problem. I strongly recommend you read A Matter Of Scale (http://www.amatterofscale.com) and pass it on to your friends. As humans, we have to remember our place in nature, otherwise we die.

Thank you for such an inspiring post. Here in the US, a lot of people are unfamiliar with palm oil– and totally unaware of its devastating effects on orangutans. We are finally starting to spread the word — and I think you serve as a great example for people who want to do their part to save orangutans, protect the forest and stop these insidious palm oil corporations from permanently destroying the earth.

I’ve put up your post and a link back to your site on the Orangutan Outreach blog: http://redapes.org

Keep up the great work! Rich

Richard Zimmerman
Director, Orangutan Outreach
http://redapes.org
Reach out and save the orangutans!

Deforestation is responsible for 20% of global emissions. Rainforest clearance for oil palm plantations is a major driver of deforestation. For political reasons, the Kyoto Protocol actually excluded protection for forests. In hindsight, this was a grievous exclusion, particularly when we consider the amount of rainforest that has been destroyed in recent years. While delegates at the UN climate change meeting in Bali last December agreed to discuss including protection for forests in the post-2012 climate change agreement, forests remain unprotected and vulnerable during the period 2008-2012.

In March 2007, Australia launched its $200 million Global Initiative on Forests and Climate. During the Bali meeting, Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, announced that his country was prepared to increase its support to prevent deforestation in developing countries to more than US$500 million a year. Norway’s Minister of the Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, said that “an initiative in this area in the next few years can bring about substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions while the world is seeking to put in place a new, more comprehensive agreement on climate change.” http://www.norway.org/policy/environment/avskoging_eng.htm

It would be fantastic if Australia and Norway could collaborate on addressing the problem of global deforestation, and invite other like-minded countries to join a focused alliance to offer practical and immediate support to rainforest countries to reduce deforestation during the critical period 2008 – 2012.

I admire the work you are doing, but I completely disagree that greed and selfishness are human nature. It is the lust for wealth and power, generated by a few influential individuals at first, that have brainwashed the majority of people in industrial civilization into thinnking this is the only way to live. Tribal cultures have no concept of greed or selfishness — that would be suicidal: they only take what they need, and must co-operate in order to survive. Our, so-called, development as humans is not evolutionary — it is addiction, and there is a way back.

Keith

Thanks for all you are doing.

Do you think the time will ever come when government officials stop employing every ruse under the sun to protect the selfish interests of over-consumers and hoarders, and start by choosing to do the right thing?

Life and human institutions like national economies are utterly dependent upon the Earth for existence; but too many of our leaders view the Earth as some kind of thing to be manipulated, dissipated, and ravaged secondary to their adamant practice of a religion called Endless Economic Growth. This clear and obvious object of their idolatry is the soon to become unsustainable expansion of the leviathan-like, global political economy. What a colossal sham. What a shame. What a shambles for our children to confront.

Always with thanks,

Steve