Screenshot from Greenpeace's Dirty Palm Oil awareness campaign #ProtectParadise
We’ve written about the impacts of palm oil on tropical rainforests before. Prior to palm oil, the Amazon Rainforest’s main threats were cattle ranchers and soy producers in Brazil as well as gold, timber, and oil extraction throughout the Amazon.
The fallout of palm oil plantations have fallen hard on the rainforests of Southeast Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia have seen their tropical habitat leveled for monoculture plantations of palm oil that will generate short-term profits for few while destroying watersheds, flora/fauna habitat, and climate moderation capabilities the forests provide. In the past 20 years, over half of Indonesia’s forest cover has been lost. The air in cities as far away as Singapore have been choked with soot from the uncontrolled burning of forest and peatland.
Greenpeace launches new “dirty palm oil” awareness campaign #ProtectParadise
Greenpeace recently launched a new campaign directed at Proctor and Gamble, a massive multi-national corporation known only as P&G in Perú and other South American countries. Their campaign aims to shed light on the use of dirty palm oil sourced through unsustainable deforestation practices.
You can sign their petition calling on an end of using dirty palm oil in cosmetic products.
As international conglomerates seek to destroy the last of Indonesia’s rainforests for short term profit, these rapacious companies and investors are eyeing fertile new ground- the largest rainforest in the world – the Amazon Basin.
In the end, companies like Proctor & Gamble marketing products made with dirty palm oil depend on you, the consumers. They assume that when you go to the market to pick up a a container of shampoo or laundry soap, you will not be thinking about the rainforests, orangutans, tigers, or local indigenous peoples. That you will not think to ask where and by what manner it was produced, and for what true cost. By exposing the environmental destructive practices they support and demand they source palm oil from viable sustainable practices, we can slow deforestation in Indonesia and its expansion into the rainforests of Peru!