The Failing Fight to End Illegal Animal Trade and Trafficking in Indonesia

Illegal trafficking, trade, and poaching of endangered wildlife in Indonesia are not new problems, but these disgusting practices that blatantly violate animal rights and the law have been drawing more attention than usual in international media lately. Although it gives me hope that more people are paying attention to this rampant problem and that new [...]

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Land Lost in Lies: Smallholder Schemes Gone Wrong

I’ve spent the past week visiting our partners in Indonesia and interviewing frontline communities directly impacted by the palm oil industry. The stories I’ve heard are haunting — tales of human rights abuses, negligent environmental destruction and the criminalization of Indigenous Peoples for trying to maintain some connection to their ancestral lands despite degradation caused by [...]

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Mr. Page: Future Generations Are Counting on You

Last week, over a dozen local Twin Cities community members, including members of the Walker Church social justice chapter, children, and concerned parents, paid Mr. Page – Cargill CEO – a visit.  The group went all the way to the CEO’s home in Wayzata, MN to deliver hundreds of letters, many hand-written, from children around [...]

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Cargill customers cancel with Sinar Mas while Cargill continues to support rainforest destruction

Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has become the latest major multinational to cancel their palm oil contract with Sinar Mas, one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates and a leading producer of both palm oil and wood pulp for paper and packaging products. A string of reports have shown that Sinar Mas is actively [...]

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RSPO Dispatch: Duta Palma destroys rainforests and lives

On the first day of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Pak Jamaluddin was quiet. He said the air conditioning of Kuala Lumpor gave him the flu. He seemed lost among the groups of palm producers, with their Blackberries and dark suits. Exhausted from the canoe rides, bad roads, the concrete maze of Jakarta, [...]

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RSPO Dispatch: Oil palm is not development

The RSPO is the world’s largest annual meeting of oil palm industry, environmentalists, human rights advocates, and, most importantly, community members. Today, I watched as a community member from Borneo stood up in front of oil palm producers, NGOs, and technocrats, identified himself as a victim of oil palm expansion, and tore apart the falsity [...]

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By golly, that IS a different species!

An entirely new species of cat has been discovered on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Scientists just recently confirmed that the clouded leopard is not the same species as its close relative on the mainland of Southeast Asia. The good news here is that, yes, in fact we have another species of big cat [...]

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