Indonesian Forest Protections Under Attack

I wish I didn’t have to write this blog post on Earth Day. The rainforest where I saw my first wild orangutan is under threat. I can’t believe it! There are many reasons to protect the Leuser Protected Ecosystem, a forest area on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Thousands of Indigenous people rely on the [...]

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Cargill Dead Set On Plantation Expansion; Orphaned Orangutan Calls on CEO Gregory Page in Wayzata, MN.

Meet Uttuh. She’s an orphaned Sumatran Orangutan who lost her forest home when it was destroyed for palm oil. Today she reached out to Cargill CEO Gregory Page at his headquarters in Wayzata, Minnesota for help. She’s got nowhere to go and hardly a limb to stand on. Uttuh’s treetop protest is just the latest [...]

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The Last Stand of the Sumatran Orangutan

This is the first blog post I’ve written for RAN. I’m the new senior agribusiness campaigner and I was hired because RAN believes that it is more urgent than ever that we take our palm oil work to the next level. I’m writing this post to lay out the next phase of our campaign to [...]

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What Does the 2012 Farm Bill Have to Do with Palm Oil?

As our allies at the Environmental Working Group reminded us this week, the Farm Bill is the single most important piece of legislation that determines what type of food appears on your plate every day, how farmers will be paid government subsidies and what type of environmental protections will preserve the land and topsoil for [...]

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The Future Of Endangered Orangutans Is In Your Hands

There has been an overwhelming amount of attention paid recently to the plight of Indonesia’s most iconic species due to habitat loss. Last month the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated the status of Sumatran elephants to critically endangered on its Red List of Threatened Species, a category which Sumatran orangutans and rhinoceros’ [...]

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What is Sustainable Palm Oil? Part Three

This is the third and final installment in a series of posts that endeavors to answer a simple question: What is sustainable palm oil? The answer, of course, is anything but simple. The first blog post in this series explored the weaknesses of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the dominant certification standard for [...]

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