“We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite — fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful — the financial resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society — while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.” – Naomi Klein, Author/Activist, REVEL Awardee

Tomorrow, many of the RAN staff will be out of the office. We will be shutting off our computers, leaving our desks, and joining hands in the streets of Oakland. We will be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds who identify with the Occupy movement and Occupy Oakland’s call for a ‘General Strike.’

We’ve been getting questions about why an environmental organization concerned with protecting forests, their inhabitants, and our climate would be supportive of a movement calling out the systems and institutions that maintain our country’s wealth and power inequality?

Here’s why.

Rainforest Action Network believes the social, economic, and environmental crises sweeping the planet are inter-related symptoms born of the same root causes.

Put simply, unchecked corporate power is dangerous and destructive to both people and the planet. Mother Earth is as much a member of the 99% as any one of us.

Central to RAN’s mission is the analysis that in order to protect the environment we must strike a balance between economy and ecology. Since our start in 1985, we’ve found that the same institutions and the same logic that is destroying our economy is also destroying our environment, and that the most effective way to protect the world’s natural resources is by challenging those corporations whose business models rely on this environmental destruction.

So long as corporations are granted free reign to pursue short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health of our environment, our economy and our communities, there will continue to be a race to the bottom where environmental and social costs are externalized and benefits are concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer.

But what if that business model did not exist? What if corporations valued our environment, our health, and our well-being? What if our government worked not for the highest bidder but for the highest interests of its people and the planet? What if people from all walks of life joined together to say we’re ready for a new system because the one we have is not working? That is the promise and potential that Rainforest Action Network sees in the Occupy movement.

At RAN, we are fighting for a world where corporate accountability matters. Where our food system does not include ingredients derived from the destruction of rainforests and Indigenous communities. Where our financial system is just and does not unjustly bankroll industries, like the coal industry, that are poisoning communities and our climate. If we are going to win, if we are going to achieve these goals, we cannot do it one commodity at a time, one bad act at a time, or even one company at time. We need a broad movement willing to ask for what the world needs, and unwilling to settle for anything less.

A few weeks ago, author and activist Naomi Klein told RAN staff and supporters that what she sees with the Occupy movement is a moment that proves we are “more popular than we could have ever imagined.” It is a moment to dream big and feel what is possible. It is a moment to realize that our demands for ecological and economic sanity are not unreasonable, they are essential, they are popular, and they are one and the same.

And it is not only that the problems of economic inequality and environmental destruction are inextricably connected; the solutions to these problems are intertwined as well. The key to protecting our environment and protecting each other is the same. The key is us.

We are the people who can redefine the underlying values that govern our society and rebuild our economy based on long-term needs, not short-term greed. We are the innovative people willing to take risks and to do what’s needed. We are all part of the same movement.

So whether your primary concern is rainforest destruction, climate change, home foreclosures, the concentration of wealth, or corporate power, this is your fight. You are invited. You are needed.

Rainforest destroying palm oil is an ingredient in roughly 50% of all packaged goods sold on grocery store shelves. It is used to make a wide variety of food products from cookies to breakfast cereals as well as cosmetics, soaps and detergents, and is largely responsible for the decimation of Indonesia’s precious endangered forests. In fact, the expansion of palm oil plantations is one of the biggest causes of rainforest destruction and carbon pollution in the world today.

We need these forests far more than we need palm oil. That’s a fact.

The infographic below shows exactly how pristine rainforests get turned into palm oil plantations, how they make their way onto our grocery store shelves and into our homes, and what we can do about it.

Click to view full-size infographic

Until recently very few people had even heard of palm oil — much less understood its connection to deforestation, species extinction and climate change. As public awareness about the problem with palm oil gains momentum, agribusiness giants like Cargill are starting to feel the pressure to transform how business is done in the palm oil industry. But the truth is, most people still have no idea that a huge percentage of the products they bring into their homes contain palm oil connected to the destruction of rainforests.

Knowledge is power. Please share this infographic with your friends and family so we can build the necessary consumer demand for change. Email it, blog it, tweet it, Facebook it. Thank you.

Not only was it one of the largest banners we have ever made, but now Twin Cities Indymedia says it was amongst the top 10 most-viewed articles on their site in 2010!

The recent article, “Resistance in Review,” has the scoop.

Check out the campaign launch video, “Does Your Breakfast Cause Rainforest Destruction?”

What an honor to stand with all of the strong change-makers listed in Twin Cities Indymedia’s Resistance in Review. Thanks to everyone holding it down in Minnesota!

What we found out is that fractals are:

A. Very cool

B. Are becoming a valuable tool in measuring things that were once thought to be unmeasurable, such as the exact length of a coastline or the carbon stocks of a rainforest.

You can watch the entire episode on PBS’s website, but if you want to skip right to the part where it talks about rainforests it is near the end, starting around the 44 minute mark.

Sidenote: The episode was partially funded by ExxonMobil and and the David H. Koch Foundation, two organizations known for their funding of climate change denying organizations, yet this episode repeatedly refers to global warming as an accepted scientific fact. An interesting contradiction, don’t you think?

General Mills Moves Away from Rainforest Destruction!

It is with much gratitude, excitement and hope for our world’s remaining forests that I announce the end to Rainforest Action Network’s General Mills palm oil campaign. Our Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign has come a long way in 2010 with your help. Check out some campaign “best moments.”

Eight months ago, 42 activists braved the freezing cold weather of January to unfurl a massive banner reading “Warning: General Mills Destroys Rainforests!” on top of the frozen lake in front of General Mills’ Minneapolis Headquarters. At the time, not a single U.S. food company had a comprehensive palm oil policy.

Kids Thank General Mills: "We Can Eat Cheerios Again!"

Today, America’s favorite food company took a crucial step to protect rainforests.  General Mills (GIS) released a new palm oil policy that limits the company’s exposure to an increasingly controversial commodity. The company’s new policy, along with previous actions to eliminate problematic suppliers like Sinar Mas Group, puts them in the front of efforts by the U.S. food sector to address deforestation resulting from palm oil. Kraft and Burger King have also announced initial steps to ensure that they are not sourcing ingredients that damage the rainforest.

The new palm oil procurement policy includes specific commitments on critical issues including respect for the rights of Indigenous communities, prevention of further destruction of endangered rainforests and protection of peatlands, a major source of climate change causing emissions from palm oil production. In addition, General Mills has set a goal of “sourcing 100 percent responsible and sustainable palm oil” by 2015, setting a new bar for the American food industry.

See General Mills’ new palm oil policy in it’s entirety.

We hope that General Mills’ actions will serve as a wake-up call for others in the food industry, especially Cargill. America’s largest importer of palm oil, Cargill, has yet to take sufficient action to meet this demand or to clean up its own palm oil supply chain. Although the agribusiness giant has taken initial steps to do so in Europe, it has failed to bring RSPO certified segregated palm oil to the United States, and it continues to source palm oil from some of the worst suppliers in the business.

Today General Mills Sets Forward on the Right Path, Away from Rainforest Destruction; Now It's Cargill's Turn. Photo: David Gilbert

As a company with some of the most beloved brands in the nation, including Cheerios, Betty Crocker and Hamburger Helper, General Mills’ decision to address deforestation in its supply chain is a major industry signal that unsustainable palm oil expansion practices are a problem that can and should be addressed. RAN will continue working with General Mills on the ongoing implementation of the new policy.

Read General Mills’ press statement here.

RAN Report: Cargill's Problems with Palm Oil

Since the release of our report on Cargill’s problems with palm oil in Borneo, Cargill has been scrambling to clean up their palm oil supply chain. Cargill has been engaging with customers including Kraft and General Mills; announced a supply chain audit in collaboration with WWF; and just last week announced that the assessment of their Harapan Sawit Lestari (HSL) plantation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia will begin in August. These are all great steps we’ve been recommending since 2007 to Cargill on how to clean up their palm oil supply chain, but they still have a long way to go to stop the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands.

On Friday I received a letter from Cargill inviting RAN to provide comments on our concerns regarding HSL plantation to BSI Group- a certification body that is auditing this plantation. This is one of the plantations, or group of plantations I should say, that was highlighted in our report on Cargill’s problems with palm oil that is operating in violation of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Principles and Criteria, Indonesian law and Cargill’s own palm oil commitments.

Rainforest Action Network appreciates the invitation to share our ongoing concerns of violations of both the RSPO Principles and Criteria and Indonesian law. We will formerly submit our comments and concerns to BSI Group, while encouraging affected communities and NGO allies to do the same.

Indonesian Rainforest Destruction: Photo by David Gilbert

We remain concerned that Cargill continues to deny the findings in our report and say that our allegations are “unfounded.” RAN confidently stands by our findings. If all of our allegations are unfounded as Cargill says, I have a few burning questions. Why is HSL plantation and associated plantations missing permits required for operation under Indonesian law? Why didn’t Cargill publicly disclose that Indo Sawit Kekal (ISK), where clearing and burning of forests took place just this last year, as one of their plantations? I can go on and on.

We look forward to participating in this process and continuing to move Cargill towards a supply chain that is completely free of rainforest destruction.

In the meantime, Cargill still needs to hear your voices of encouragement and concern. Take action today to join the nearly 1,500 people who’ve recently sent letters to Cargill’s executives and board members, without which this invitation might not have occurred at all.

To all of you who’ve written Cargill already, great work!

Read our formal response to Cargill below.

July 28, 2010

Mark Murphy
Assistant Vice President, Cargill Corporate Affairs

Mark,

In response to your letter dated July 22, I am writing to ask for clarification of the process to involve stakeholders and the public in the pre-assessment and audit required for RSPO certification of Cargill’s HSL plantations.

While RAN appreciates the invitation to share our ongoing concerns of violations of RSPO principles and criteria and Indonesian law as outlined in our report with BSI, the certification body doing the audit, we are wondering if there is a formal process for stakeholder participation in this audit. Can you please clarify? We highly recommend that stakeholders from frontline communities and NGOs in Ketapang have the opportunity to be fully consulted in a fair and transparent way as part of the public assessment and final audit. It is our hope that exemplary stakeholder engagement and participation be a part of both the assessment/audit of Cargill’s HSL plantations, as well as the supply-chain audit being conducted in collaboration with WWF.

RAN looks forward to providing our input and concerns about Cargill’s problems with palm oil in these assessments/audits. As mentioned above, we will submit concerns about Cargill’s violations of RSPO P&C and Indonesian law and hope that our concerns are addressed and clarified with transparency and accountability.

While Cargill continues to deny the findings in our report and say that our allegations are unfounded, we stand by our findings. Clearing and burning has taken place in the last year at Cargill’s Indo Sawit Kekal (ISK) plantation, and the lack of proper permits to operate plantations West Kalimantan is rampant. We acknowledge that some of our findings may be based on outdated or lack of information from local government offices, and encourage Cargill to clarify this information to the public and your customers. It is our hope that this information will be clarified through the upcoming assessments/audits of Cargill’s HSL plantations and entire supply chain.

I look forward to your response.

Leila Salazar-Lopez
Agribusiness Campaign Director

2010 Earth Day Poster Contest:

Name: Kayla Smith
Grade: 6th
Teacher: Amy Cole
School: Thompkins Middle School
Location: Evansville, IN

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Congratulations to Brandon and our Honorable Mentions below!  Everybody who participated in RAN’s 2010 Earth Day Poster Contest is a winner. Why? Because when the planet wins we all win . Please view all of these wonderful posters created by kids and youth that are making a difference. The winning poster’s class will receive a $75 gift certificate for materials or a class party.

Congratulations to everyone who entered the poster contest. We received over 60 entries and over 400 posters! Every poster had a powerful message, and together, these youth are making a huge difference for our world’s rainforests. Many of the posters had messages about protecting the last 20 percent of the planet’s remaining rainforests and their endangered inhabitants like orangutans and Sumatran tigers. Many of the posters also called on one of America’s most famous cereal brands, General Mills, to stop destroying rainforests for palm oil. Youth in Minneapolis delivered these posters to General Mills on Wednesday, April 28 in honor of youth working together for Earth Day from around the world. We have uploaded photos of this delivery to our online gallery.

Together, we can help General Mills to remember what’s really important: our future. Thanks for voting! Stay involved with our campaign by signing up for updates at www.theproblemwithpalmoil.org

View an of more incredible Earth Day Posters.

Honorable Mentions:

Name: Amina
Teacher: Kirsten Butler
School: Mill Creek Middle School
Location: Dexter, MI

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Teacher: M. Martin’s Art Class
Grade: 3rd & 4th
School: Ventnor Elementary School
Location: Ventnor, NJ

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Name: Cameron Cox
Teacher: Mrs. Parson
Grade: 3rd
School: Ashley Hall School

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Teacher: Suzan Yildez
Grade: 3rd
Location: San Francisco, CA

A string of reports have shown that Sinar Mas is actively clear cutting Indonesia’s forests, home to the endangered Orangutan, Sumatran Tiger, and Elephant, in violation of Indonesian law. Not only is Sinar Mas’ palm oil dirty and dangerous, it is also illegal.

Sinar Mas is clearing rainforests in Borneo without proper government approval

With the world’s major buyers of palm oil, including Uniliver, Kraft, Sainsbury and now Nestle cutting  ties with Sinar Mas, Cargill’s support of Sinar Mas’ rainforest destruction and  chain of illegalities has become all the more unacceptable.

The world’s CEOs, environmental groups, and local Indonesian communities all agree: Sinar Mas is a critical threat to the world’s forests, forest peoples, and the climate. Those companies who buy from Sinar Mas have acted, and Sinar Mas is reeling from tens of millions of dollars of contract cancellations.

Sinar Mas built this logging road in primary rainforest without government approval, violating Indonesian law. PT WKS, Riau, Sumatra

Yet Cargill continues to stand by Sinar Mas. The Minnesota based agribusiness giant sells Sinar Mas palm oil worldwide, turning a profit as Sinar Mas illegally burns carbon rich peat forests and forcibly evicts local communities to make way for palm oil. Cargill has repeatedly refused to disclose the size of their palm oil contracts with Sinar Mas subsidiaries and affiliates, contracts  insiders believe Cargill pays Sinar Mas tens of millions of dollars a year for their dangerous palm oil.

Although Kraft and Nestle have canceled their contracts with Sinar Mas, these companies are still not free of Sinar Mas’ palm oil in their global supply chains. Both Kraft and Nestle are large buyers of palm oil from Cargill, and Cargill continues to supply palm oil to the global market from Sinar Mas. Until Cargill cancels with Sinar Mas, Nestle, Kraft, and USA companies such as General Mills, will be forced to support Sinar Mas’ untenable palm oil operations in Indonesia.

Business as usual has become unacceptable for buyers of palm oil. The top management of Unliver, Kraft, and Nestle have all acknowledged that systemic change is needed in Indonesia’s palm oil sector. But Cargill, with their business based on unsustainable clearing and burning of rainforests, refuses to act on the demands of their customers.

Over the past months, Cargill has repeatedly told RAN that they will change their ways if they ‘hear it from our customers’. Well, Cargill’s customers have spoken, and Cargill management must disassociate themselves with Sinar Mas, other worst-of-the-worst palm oil producers, and put an immediate end to deforestation at their own palm oil plantations, or risk being the next palm oil supplier that Uniliver, Kraft, and Nestle cut all ties with.

David Gilbert is a forest program research associate with RAN. He has lived and worked in the forests of the Amazon and Indonesia. He has a special focus on Indigenous rights and tropical forest conservation.

He can be reached at davidgilbert AT ran DOT org

Copper Mesa, until last year, was the owner of a two mining concessions in the Intag. But the company ran into a strong, organized opposition from communities, local government and, eventually even the national government, which eventually stripped Copper Mesa of its concessions in the country.

Now the Toronto Stock Exchange, which had been sued by 3 Intag activists, has delisted Copper Mesa from the exchange.

DECOIN organizer Carlos Zorrilla wrote in an email to Intag community supporters:

“This is a key victory in Intag’s very long and exhausting battle against mining interests. So big in fact, that I still find it difficult to believe. After all, this has been a dream of ours and something we’ve been working on for almost six years.”

Copper Mesa’s shares lost about 60% of their value in the 48 hours after the TSX delisting.

Why is the maker of such powerful brands as Cheerios, Haagen Dazs, Progresso soups, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury – that cater mostly to parents and kids across the U.S. – stalling on taking action to protect our world’s forests increasingly threatened by big Agribusiness’ industrial palm oil plantations?  What will it take to get them to listen?

I know of one thing that got their attention- a massive, bright yellow 30 x 70 ft. banner getting unfurled in the snowy, wintery morning light at their Headquarters in Golden Valley, MN! At 11:11am 42 people inspired by the prospect of getting General Mills to wake up and be a leader in the food industry held the huge message: “Warning: General Mills Destroys Rainforests” up high in the air for General Mills executives watching from their desks above to see. And that they did!

General Mills: Take Action!

Our campaign launch was an effective way to inform General Mills that we don’t have any time to waste – we need them to take action now as a company with a unique ability to affect the palm oil marketplace, both by changing its own consumption habits and by publicly taking a stand against rainforest destruction from palm oil.

So why General Mills, you may be asking?

General Mills has a very close relationship with Wayzata based Cargill, Inc. and purchases all of their palm oil from them, among other commodities. Cargill is the most powerful agribusiness and commodity trading group in the world, and as the largest privately owned corporation in the U.S., it’s also among the most secretive companies on earth. It owns plantations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where it grows oil palm on freshly cleared rainforest land. It is also a major global trader of palm oil and the biggest importer of palm oil into the United States.

Over 100 of General Mills’ products in total contain palm oil. By purchasing from Cargill, General Mills is directly contributing to the destruction of Indonesian rainforests. We’re asking General Mills to stop buying palm oil from Cargill and we need your help – please take action by sending an email to General Mills CEO Ken Powell!

General Mills at a Crossroads

Be part of the solution: Join RAN in pressuring General Mills to become an advocate for change in the palm oil industry!

Check out Mongabay’s article highlighting our action!

For more information, visit theproblemwithpalmoil.org.

UPDATE: On September 22, 2010, eight months after the launch of this campaign, RAN welcomed the release of General Mills’ new palm oil policy, one of the strongest palm oil policies to date. The food company pledged to “help ensure our purchases are not associated in any way with deforestation of the world’s rainforests.”

General Mills committed to source 100 percent of its palm oil from responsible and sustainable sources by 2015, to support the call for a moratorium on peat forest conversion, to require Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) from impacted communities, and to cancel contracts with controversial suppliers deemed such during an audit.

Under intense pressure from Greenpeace and allies, Unilever has canceled their 33 Million dollar a year palm oil contract with the dirty, destructive, and dangerous palm oil producer Sinar Mas. Sinar Mas is Indonesia’s largest palm oil producer and also owns Indonesia’s largest timber company Asia Pulp and Paper.

Pressured by Greenpeace in the UK and Europe back in 2008 to clean up their palm oil supply chain, Unilever took the positive steps of calling for an moratorium on palm expansion in Indonesia, taking a leadership role in the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and commissioning a third party audit of their oil palm suppliers world-wide.

The results of the audit have not been made public, but allies report that they uncovered bomb-proof evidence of palm oil producers in Indonesia illegally destroying biodiverse primary rainforests, draining and burning carbon-rich peat forests, using intimidation and violence to subdue local indigenous communities, and partaking in corruption to obtain illegal land permits to establish new oil palm plantations.

Two days ago Greenpeace released a detailed dossier of illegalities and rainforest destruction committed by Sinar Mas in West Kalimantan on Indonesia’s province on the island of Borneo. In the statement released by Unilever they referred to the impact of Greepeace’s investigations:

Here in the US Cargill is the largest importer of palm oil into the country, and is also the largest exporter of palm oil from Indonesia into the US. They trade palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia with at least 20 companies. Although they are a private company and do not release contract information, RAN has strong reason to believe Cargill is the largest US buyer of palm oil from Sinar Mas.

The case is clear. Sinar Mas uses corruption and political muscle to destroy rainforests, forest peoples, and the climate. Europe’s largest importer of palm oil finally showed some leadership and canceled their contract with this nasty corporation. Will Cargill?

RAN calls for Cargill to follow Unilever’s lead and publicly cancel their contract with Sinar Mas.  Cargill is not living up to their own commitments to sustainable palm oil and is a major player in one of the most environmentally destructive industries on earth. Local communities reject their palm oil plantations in Indonesian and Papua New Guinea, and Cargill recently refused to meet with impacted community members at this year’s RSPO. It is time for Cargill to take a step in the right direction. Cargill, are you ready? Or will you continue to force forest peoples to become de facto bonded laborers, clear forests, and violate RSPO criteria? The choice is your.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Supporting this belief, a new study by researchers at U of Illinois and U of Michigan has added to the growing body of evidence that indigenous peoples are better protectors of their forests than governments or industry. In a review of 80 forests in 10 tropical countries, the study showed that when indigenous and local communities own their forests, they effectively conserve their forest resources over the long term.

Reflecting the growing momentum behind viewing rainforests as carbon sinks that can either exacerbate or reduce climate change, the researchers measured the carbon emissions from forests under community and government control. The New Scientist recently ran an interview with the authors of this research, who said “our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities.” This is a bold assertion, but one that is supported by their research.

However, the idea that indigenous peoples are the best protectors of rainforests is considered controversial by some, who usually argue that forests should be protected by governments, following the National Parks model of conservation pioneered by the USA.

In this model, forests are enclosed in conservation areas and put off-limits, supposedly to be protected from loggers and commercial agribusiness by government agencies. This rational has been used to move control of forests away from indigenous peoples and into the hands of the government in many tropical nations. In an article cited by hundreds, researchers highlighted the  problems with this approach in Indonesian Borneo, where conservation areas lost over half of their forest cover in the period from 1985 to 2001.  These supposedly protected areas have become increasingly fragmented, degraded, and isolated, greatly decreasing ecosystem functions.

Another compelling piece of evidence supporting indigenous peoples’ ability to protect forests comes from Brazilian Amazonia. In a study published in Conservation Biology, researchers showed that many indigenous lands prevent deforestation completely even though there are high  rates of forest destruction directly outside their borders. In a compelling statement for the value of the protections indigenous peoples give to forests, the researchers claim that indigenous lands are the most important barrier to deforestation in the Amazon.

As usual, the research is racing to catch up with what indigenous peoples around the world have known for hundreds of years: indigenous people’s are the most effective protectors of tropical forests.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.

He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

So the meeting of conservation groups and palm oil companies this week in the Malaysian province of Sabah was not a surprise.  The oil palm industry is a giant in both Malaysia and Indonesia, and forest conservation groups believe they can make big gains in forest and wildlife protections if they convince the industry as a whole to adapt forest and forest people friendly policies.

After two days of meetings, conservation groups are touting a big gain in forest protection with the palm oil industry adopting a new policy to construct forest zones 100m from major rivers, and corridors to connect fragmented forests.

The WWF and the Nature Conservancy both proclaimed victory, and called for additional collaborations between conservation groups and the oil palm industry.

Surly, there are always positives to be gained when the representatives of two sides of an issues sit down at the table. But in this case, there are serious signs that WWF and the Nature Conservancy are being naïve in proclaiming progress.

Comments from oil palm representatives at the meeting in Sabah continued the industry’s dogged refusal to acknowledge the serious impacts of their oil palm operations; Malaysia’s Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities claimed that oil palm does not cause deforestation, destroy biodiversity, or displace orangutans.  And the meeting was organized by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, who’s CEO still maintains that oil palm plantations are good for orangutans and their ‘shiny coats’. But all scientists who study orangutans have testified to their negative impacts on orangutan populations.

Looking at the bigger picture, Indonesia’s efforts to expand to 10 million hectares of oil palm makes David Dellatore’s NGO’s efforts to convince two oil palm companies to pay for the reforestation of 150 hectares of Gunung Leuser National Park look questionable.

And when you consider that laws already exist to protect all forest within 50 meters of rivers on oil palm plantations, the new oil palm industry policy to protect an additional 50 meters of forest along rivers does not seem to be much of a compromise. And those forest corridors? Forest corridors are indeed important to conserve the ecological function of Indonesia’s tropical forests, but what good will forest corridors be if there is no forest left?

I wonder if these tiny advances, claimed to be victories in the protection of forests by major conservation groups, only serve to distract from the fact that the oil palm industry is destroying hundreds of thousands of hectares of primary tropical forest each year, and hundreds of thousands of hectares more of ecologically and economically important agro-forests, orchards, and small-scale farms are flattened.

The oil palm industry must be held to a non-negotiable and surprisingly simple commitment: no more oil palm plantation expansion in tropical forests.  Rather than spend our time developing complex conservation plans and negotiating over tiny policy changes with oil palm plantations, lets support local people’s ability to refuse oil palm plantations on their lands, and act as watchdogs over the oil palm industry to ensure they do not flatten any more tropical forests.

But I’d like to use this year’s World Rainforest Week to talk about a little-known threat that tar sands development poses to temperate (i.e. cold, not hot & sweaty) rainforests in British Columbia.

The areas marked in green are existing mature rainforest; the areas marked in red have been deforested.

“Rainforests – in British Columbia??” you might say. (Well, actually, if you’re savvy enough to be reading this blog, then you may well know that rainforests don’t just exist in the tropics.) That’s right: BC is home to the Great Bear Rainforest, an area of spectacular natural beauty and biodiversity, home to many species – like the “spirit” bear – that exist nowhere else in the world.

But this spectacular rainforest is facing an urgent threat: the proposed construction of an oil pipeline that would run from the tar sands of Alberta to Kitimat, a town at the end of a long, narrow sea inlet that passes through some of the most spectacular parts of the Great Bear Rainforest.

This pipeline, the Northern Gateway, is proposed by Enbridge – the same company that is building the Alberta Clipper pipeline from the tar sands to the Midwest that was recently approved by the U.S. State Department (and opposed by a coalition of environmentalists and First Nations communities). Apparently, the Alberta Clipper – with its capacity of 800,000 barrels per day – won’t be big enough to pump out all the oil from rapidly-expanding tar sands strip mining in Alberta. So, Enbridge is proposing to build this new 720-mile pipeline, which would carry 525,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day to the sleepy little town of Kitimat, nestled at the end of an inlet that is surrounded by beautiful mountains and pristine temperate rainforests.

Spills along the pipeline route are certainly a concern: the pipeline will run across several fault lines, and Enbridge hardly has a great safety record – its existing pipelines had 65 “reportable spills” of a total of 13,777 barrels in 2007 alone. But the really scary threat to BC’s rainforests is the shipping route that will carry tar sands oil by tanker, through 70 miles of narrow inlets, on its way to ports on the U.S. West Coast and in East Asia.

In March 2006, the Queen of the North ferry ran aground and sank, killing two people, along the shipping route that these oil tankers would be taking (see the green arrow on the map below; Kitimat is in the upper right corner). In fact, just over a week ago, on Sept. 25, a pulp freighter ran aground near Kitimat and needed to be towed to Vancouver for repairs. And under Enbridge’s Northern Gateway proposal, 225 oil tankers would need to make the trip through these challenging channels to Kitimat and back each year. Four or five of these ships each month would be supertankers – which are over 1,000 feet long and carry 2 million barrels of oil, eight times the amount spilled by Exxon Valdez.

Enbridge reassures us that “all vessels using the Kitimat terminal will be required to be double-hulled.” But a section of the Exxon Valdez that ran aground was double-hulled – and that didn’t prevent hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from spilling. In fact, a detailed 2006 study by an industry expert at tanker construction argued that double hulls do almost nothing to prevent major oil spills – due to the fact that any grounding or impact large enough to cause a major spill is easily large enough to rip through two hulls.

And as the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the 2002 Prestige spill in Spain have shown, all it takes is one screw-up to cause unimaginable damage to a coastal ecosystem. After Exxon Valdez spilled 265,000 barrels of oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska, 1,200 miles of coastline were polluted; within days of the spill, 250,000 seabirds, 1.9 million salmon, and 2,000 otters died. A 2003 study found that sequestered oil was still causing animal deaths, and that some shoreline habitats would likely not recover fully until after 2030.

And one of the things that is so amazing about the Great Bear Rainforest also makes it incredibly susceptible to oil spills: the forest and marine ecosystems are incredibly interdependent. Bears live off of the salmon and other fish runs; rainforest wolves, which swim from island to island, eat fish and barnacles; and animals carry salmon carcasses into the forest, where they provide vital nutrients to plants. If the marine ecosystem was devastated by a massive oil spill, the entire ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest would be tremendously affected.

And these salmon of BC aren’t just vital to the ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest – they’re also vital to the local economy.

The people of British Columbia – among the most progressive in Canada – recognize the dangers posed by the Kitimat pipeline: a July 2008 poll found that 72% of BC residents favored banning oil tanker traffic in BC’s Inside Passage, while only 19% supported allowing it. Furthermore, 77% agreed that the communities most affected by a potential oil spill should have first say in whether tankers should be allowed on BC’s North Coast.

And those First Nations communities that would be most affected by such a spill have made it very clear where they stand. In Dec. 2008, the Haida Nation stated that they “will certainly not accept tanker traffic where we would run the burden of risk an oil spills in our waters.” In March 2009, the Gitga’at First Nation stated that “there is nothing but risk in this whole process for the Gitga’at people.” And at a First Nations energy summit in June, the Chief of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation said bluntly of the pipeline: “We don’t want it.”

So why is this dangerous idea being pursued? Well, any RAN supporter could probably tell you the answer: because Big Oil supports it.

Freaked out by the potential for tar-sands-oil-killing climate legislation in the U.S., the tar sands industry is hedging their bets by planning the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would allow them to export oil to East Asia – especially to China, which has recently taken a much stronger interest in the tar sands. While the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (which would limit the use of tar sands oil in California) was being considered in March 2009, the head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers stated that “the only realistic… alternative to the U.S. in the near term would be exports off the West Coast to the Far East.”

And to make it clear that it isn’t just Enbridge that stands to benefit from the Northern Gateway pipeline, Enbridge announced in July that outside oil companies (they wouldn’t say which) are contributing $100 million to the effort to win regulatory approval for the pipeline. (This could be part of the reason why Enbridge’s CEO, when asked about how he’s going to deal with environmentalists’ concerns about the potential damage to the Great Bear Rainforest, simply said, “I think those can be addressed.”) And then there’s also the huge question of the (as yet unclear) involvement of Chinese oil companies in funding and promoting the pipeline.

Plus, the government of Alberta – the Saudi Arabia of Canada – is taking the cue from their oil industry buddies, and throwing down for Northern Gateway. In May 2008, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach stated that “we will not only depend on the American market, we will expand markets. And if that means building a pipeline to the coast and selling oil to another country, we will.” (Note the use of the word “we” when describing the actions of oil companies – that says a lot.)

And, to top it all off: what bank do you think loaned Enbridge $1.1 billion in 2008 (and thus presumably stands to gain from the pipeline’s success)? None other than the biggest corporation in the country, Royal Bank of Canada.

So who’s going to win? Big Oil, or the Great Bear Rainforest? An alliance of the Alberta government, RBC, and the biggest oil companies in the world – or an alliance of environmentalists and First Nations, backed by the public opinion of the people of BC?

You can help the fight against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline by signing this petition by the Dogwood Initiative, by sending a letter to Prime Minister Harper, or by joining the Dogwood Facebook group. (Or, if you’d like to do something a bit more interesting, click here for the office numbers and email addresses of top Enbridge executives.)

Sumatra is ground zero for the oil palm and pulp-and-paper industries, and, like many tropical habitats, suffers from a severe lack of forest cover and deforestation data to inform natural resource use discourse.

The REDD project in Aceh, named ‘Reducing Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in the Ulu Masen Ecosystem’, is to be implemented by Flora and Fauna International, and Merrill Lynch signed on to fund the carbon project back in 2007.

Over the past two years, this project has been mired in political and practical considerations including uncertainty over the involvement of the Indonesian Government in a private and voluntary carbon project, as well as the status of project funding during Merrill Lynch’s financial implosion.

But many observers in Aceh and in the environmental community consider it a shining example of the positives REDD can potentially deliver to the protection of forests, local communities, and the world’s climate; California, along with two other US states, has committed to purchasing carbon offsets generated by the project.

With their paper, Gaveau et al. have produced the region’s first reliable deforestation maps, a critical tool for forest management and policy groups. These maps depict historical deforestation rates in Aceh and also serve as a model for future deforestation scenarios. This research is on the forefront of landscape ecology by not simply generating a ‘one-rate-fits-all’ model for deforestation in Aceh, but rather it evaluates the importance of factors such as road expansion and forest type – parameters that significantly impact the chance that any given block of forest is deforested.

REDD and deforestation scenarios in Aceh through 2030

The researchers used their new forest deforestation maps to examine the potential for Ulu Masen’s REDD project to effectively conserve Aceh’s forests. Using some basic assumptions of potential REDD scenarios, Gaveau et al conclude that the Ulu Masen project will only protect a small percentage of Aceh’s forest, and very little of Aceh’s highly threatened lowland forests.

The researchers are correct to point out that limiting REDD efforts to large protected areas of forest will not give any protection to many fragments of primary forest immediately threatened by oil palm concessions or other agribusiness throughout Aceh, and to focus on the giant role road expansion plays in deforestation.

The paper proposes an alternate REDD model, where these endangered forest fragments are protected with REDD-based revenues, which are paid directly to land owners to compensate for potential revenues earned through the conversion of forest to oil palm or other agriculture. This would be in place of Ulu Masen’s focus on funding law enforcement to protect the Ulu Masen Ecosystem Protected Area.

Road construction and deforestation risk

I commend Gaveau et al. for thinking big and working out the details of how to maximize forest conservation in Aceh with REDD revenues.  They realistically point out that the current price of carbon offsets will have trouble competing with oil palm development, and, in my opinion, this might indeed be a fatal flaw in the potential implementation of their ‘maximum forest protection’ model in Aceh.

Their work makes clear that the Ulu Masen REDD project is not sufficient to protect all of Aceh’s forests, which is a valid contention. But in my view, the Ulu Masen project is promising not because it attempts to conserve all of Aceh’s forests, but rather because it attempts to establish a novel pathway to securing long term funding for the protection of a single block of Aceh’s forest.

In fact, as deforestation rates recover to pre-tsunami and pre-conflict levels in the province, any measure that secures the protection of Aceh’s forests from oil palm and illegal loggers deserves support.

After a year and a half of taking a close look at the social and economic dynamics of illegal logging and oil palm expansion in Aceh, I have serious concerns if Gaveau et al’s maximum forest protection REDD scenario could ever be implemented in Aceh. While working with the Leuser International Foundation, I became acutely aware of the giant political and community support road building projects, in particular. Even with the implementation of a comprehensive REDD-based forest protection project in Aceh, efforts by Acehnese politicians and industry to expand Aceh’s limited road network will remain.

As Gaveau et al. point out, current carbon offset prices would have trouble competing with potential profits from oil palm and illegal logging revenues. An additional barrier would be the enormous technical challenge of monitoring a large patchwork of forest fragments for changes in carbon stocks over time. And the absolutely essential outreach needed to gain local communities support in any REDD project would become a logistical nightmare for even the largest and most capable of implementing partners, not to mention the financial distribution and reporting requirements of an REDD project spread through out rugged and isolated Aceh.

While many REDD mechanisms deserve attention for their potential to fund forest conservation, they must be viewed not as stand alone mechanisms, but as tools to influence the natural resource use debate currently raging in Aceh.  Intrinsic to this approach, REDD project design must be based in the social, economic, and political realities on the ground faced by forest management groups operating in Aceh, not just the carbon quantities or even blocks of forest potentially conserved.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights

Too many forest fires to even participate in climate talks? It is not looking promising for those in Bangkok that want to use the current momentum behind climate negotiations to curtail deforestation and deforestation’s associated carbon emmissions.

The dreaded climate fluxuation El Nino has officially descended upon Indonesia this year. Memories of the 1997 El Nino fire season remain fresh in Indonesian’s minds as a disaster for their forests, the global climate, and Indonesia’s national pride.

Some see this year’s already horrible fires in South Sumatra as a sign of climate change itself.  Widely cited projections for Indonesia done by the WWF show that Sumatra will have much more intense dry seasons under future climate scenarios, leading to greater intensity and  extent of forest fires. South Sumatra, ground zero for Indonesia’s pulp-and-paper and timber operations, run by industry giants Sinar Mas and Raja Garuda Mas (now officially pontificated as ‘Royal Golden Eagle’), has been struggling with widespread fires the past few months.

Many experts point to changes in land use – associated with the logging and palm oil industries – that increase forest landscapes propensity to burn as a key factor in these fires. In the Sumatran province of Riau alone, 1.6 million hectares of peat and forests are expected to burn this year. These kinds of massive fires are what place Indonesia as the world’s third largest contributor to climate change. Peat lands are the world’s most carbon rich organic material,  when they burn the climate suffers.

Conservationists on the ground say that many of the 2,500 fires spotted this year by NASA have been set illegally by oil palm and pulp and paper companies. This is deforestation in its most damaging form, bad for ecosystems, forest peoples, and the climate. The smoke is so thick, and visibility so curtailed, that the Jambi and Riau airports have been repeatedly shut down this year.

South Sumatra Forest Fires in 2009

RAN’s own Margaret Swink is at the Bangkok meetings, and artfully shows just how high the stakes are for Sumatra’s forests leading up to a post-Kyoto climate treaty in 2012. As climate change makes South Sumatra region even drier during the dry season, and multinational industrial agribusiness makes forests more likely to burn, the negotiators at Bangkok can not even come up with an acceptable definition of ‘forest’.  Yikes.

David Gilbert is a RAN research fellow. He has lived and worked in the rainforests of the Amazon and Indonesia. David has a special interest in how conservation and indigenous right activities can be mutually reinforcing.

The story takes an interesting angle, completely ignoring the massive scale of legal oil palm development in Aceh and focusing in on illegal planting by small farmers or tiny companies.

With oil palm threatening to overwhelm Aceh’s Leuser Ecosystem, NGOs and certain sections of the Acehenese government are doing their best to slow the onslaught, and their efforts to team up with Acehenes police to cut down illegal palm is interesting, but it is not the most important story there for either forests or forest peoples.

Aceh, one of Indonesia’s least developed and isolated provinces, is facing one of the fastest expansions of oil palm in the world; Aceh is just a hundred miles from Malaysia, the world’s most technically advanced nation when it comes to destroying biodiverse rainforests to plant oil palm,  and it is just emerging from a 30 year civil war that kept the province off limits to previous oil palm development.

An Acehnese Palm Plantation – Photo by author

Now, Aceh is faced with a flood of land speculators, signing deals with currupt low level politicians for access to land that has been designated as off limits to oil palm development. As the Reuters story quotes:

The Acehnese Ministry of Agriculture has called for more than a million hectares of oil palm expansion in the province. To give you an idea of the scale of that potential expansion, the Leuser Ecosystem of Aceh is one of the world’s largest remaining intact tropical forests at 2.5 million hectares.

The article seems content to focus on the estimated 40,000 hectares of illegal palm in Aceh, which is a shame considering the massive scale of oil palm development around the province.

But at least the story does end with an acknowledgment of the basic problem with oil palm in Aceh:

A simple statement from an Acehnese forest conservationist that sums it all up.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

The article includes a comment from Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s single largest rainforest destroyer, reiterating Sinar Mas’ sole talking point:

Gandhi Sulistyanto, Sinar Mas’s managing director, also points to the huge economic benefits his business brings Indonesia, directly and indirectly supporting millions of people and producing more than one-tenth of Indonesia’s exports…

Sinar Mas desperately wants us to believe that conserving the environment is bad for development and by extension people. But there is a large and growing body of evidence that demonstrates  keeping forests standing generates more benefits for the economy than clear cutting.

A study by a group of economists published in Ecological Economics took a detailed look at this question, using the Leuser Ecosystem, arguably Indonesia’s single largest contiguous tropical forest, as a study site.

The Leuser Ecosystem - Photo by David Gilbert

The researchers developed three model outcomes for the Leuser Ecosystem in 2030: ‘Conservation’, ‘Deforestation’, and ‘Selective Use’.  They then assigned monetary values to all the ecological services the Leuser Ecosystem provides to the 4 million people who live in or around it.

What they found is that under the ‘Deforestation’ scenario, where Leuser was logged legally and illegally at a rapid rate, the accumulated Total Economic Value of the scenario was USD 7 billion. But under the ‘Conservation’ scenario, at 2030, the Total Economic Value of Leuser was USD 9.5 billion.  And this number does not account for possible future revenues derived from the carbon content stored in the trees that are left standing if the Leuser Ecosystem is left standing.

Granted, this is just one study focusing on one tropical forest in Indonesia. But the important nuance that is never acknowledged by Sinar Mas or others in the forest destruction business is that forests have real, concrete, and even measurable economic value when they are left standing.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.

He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing.

The basic question before us, “how bad does it have to be before we pull out?” ought to excite a passionate and principled debate, but we’ve traveled so far from environmentalist fundamentals that we can manage only flaccid, enervating exchanges. As our major organizations ready themselves to swallow nuclear power in a Boxer-engineered Senate compromise, the few points of eco-logic in this drab, grey landscape are lit by leaders and organizations mostly outside mainstream environmentalism. MoveOn.org campaigns against gutting the Clean Air Act, Green Party leaders and community health advocates offer an articulate challenge to Waxman-Markey, and the wave of support building behind 350.org puts organizations in my home state, like the Mass Council of Churches and Sustainable Business Network, far out in advance of mainline green groups. Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace are the only nationally known environmental organizations honest enough to acknowledge that the king has no clothes.

It seemed clear from the get-go that U.S. environmentalists would eventually find ourselves in such a jam, where the imperatives of pragmatic politics and seductions of techno-solutions would warp our better judgement, unless we stuck to a very clear interpretation of the precautionary principle. Bill McKibben recently remarked that, having already lost the arctic, we’re past the point of precaution; it’s now a stark matter of survival. True enough, but the core logic of the precautionary approach is valid and stands in counterpoint to our present pathway – a fundamental cognitive clash between scientific realism and political pragmatism.

There is no simple answer, but the Faustian Senate bargain before us is so antithetical to environmentalist principles that it ought to cause even the most hardened Hill advocate to pause. In such quiet, personal moments of uncertainty, I suggest it is worthwhile to consider what those trained in the Nader/PIRG tradition call the “problem/solution statement.” The point of the exercise is to maintain an absolute standard of reference for the immensity of the challenge before us and scale of the solution it demands.

Problem Statement. Differences in opinion on the bright line for averting cataclysm (1.5º vs. 2.0ºC limit on temperature increase and 275 vs. 300-350 ppm cap on carbon concentrations) are relatively small in light of overall trends, and our institutional support for the nominal CASE 450 ppm target is a concession we would not make left to our own devices.

The conceptual divergence in taking the next step from temperature/carbon concentration, however, is significant. Our entire enterprise is based on a single metric—emissions. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are absolutely correct in identifying the pollution prevention mindset as a roadblock to understanding the problem. If we conceive climate in terms of smokestacks and tailpipes, we are dealing with the last step in a long series of choices and the solutions we contemplate are thereby cramped. It is seldom acknowledged that fossil fuel interests also promote the pollution prevention paradigm as a fall-back to denial (with the apogee in our simpatico thinking reached when environmentalists agreed to measure oil companies by their success in cutting plant emissions, while ignoring their main business). Relative investment in fossil fuels vs. renewables, as Ted and Michael suggest, is a better method of understanding the problem because it takes in the long lead time in capital investment (and, in their view, pits a positive green future head-to-head against a dirty, inefficient and regressive society of the past).

The better measure, I think, was conceived by Greenpeace International climate campaign Bill Hare and presented in his brilliant, prescient 1989 paper, The Carbon Logic.  Hare, who remains an adviser to Greenpeace, and co-author Malte Meinshausen, both researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published an updated analysis of the Carbon Logic in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature, Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C, which concludes that “less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C).”

An upcoming post will present a solution statement commensurate with this definition of the problem, but that analysis is not necessary to conclude that Waxman-Markey, with its explicit promotion of fossil fuels, stands in flat contradiction to the imperative before us, which is to halt exploration for new fossil fuel deposits and cap extractions at 1/4 of known reserves. If environmentalists do not acknowledge this reality, we are doing nothing but dreaming up imaginary ladders.

When my colleague Bria and I sent out action alerts to the Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign’s grassroots activists a few weeks ago, asking them to participate in our Halloween Stickering Week of Action, we had no idea that almost 1,000 people – in 43 states and 5 Canadian provinces – would sign up! We had ordered 20,000 stickers, reading “Warning: May Contain Rainforest Destruction.” Those quickly ran out, and we had to rush-order another 10,000.

Between October 27 and 31, these 1,000 rainforest defenders went to their local supermarkets, and stickered palm oil-containing Halloween candy made by Hershey and Nestle. These two massive corporations buy their palm oil from ADM, Bunge, and Cargill – three of the world’s most notorious rainforest-destroyers – and they’ve spent the last several months doing everything they can to avoid signing our pledge to commit to helping us end the massive destruction of rainforests for palm oil production.

ADM, Bunge, and Cargill are expanding palm oil plantations into tropical rainforests on a massive scale – threatening thousands of species, displacing Indigenous communities, and accelerating climate change. Right now, Indonesia produces more greenhouse gases than any other country in the world except the U.S. and China – and the vast majority of those greenhouse gases come from burning rainforests. And if the palm oil industry gets its way, things are only going to get worse: the Indonesian palm oil industry plans to expand its plantations by over 40,000 square miles by 2020 – an amount of rainforest the size of Kentucky.

It’s so incredibly inspiring to see that so many people across the country care enough about the destructiveness of palm oil that they’re willing to take time out of their lives, and join RAN’s Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign in taking action to help stop the spread of ADM, Bunge, and Cargill’s destructive palm oil production. Their actions send a clear message to palm oil-using corporations like Nestle and Hershey: we demand more responsibility from our corporations, and we’re going to hold them accountable for the destruction caused by the palm oil that they’re putting into our food.

This reportback comes from Colby, who stickered at grocery stores in Encinitas, CA:

It was super fun! This time we went to Target. A few people showed interest. I was talking to them and telling them about Palm Oil. I gave them literature and they walked out palm oil-free. 

RAN’s power comes from our grassroots – and, by that measure, it seems like we’re doing pretty good.

Thanks so much to everyone who participated! Y’all rock.