Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe. [View all]

[Cattledog]

The exception to the devastation of South Kalimantan is supposed to be the national parks. But the parks are not safe, either. As our boat cruised out the mouth of the Kumai River, a teacup skipping over the white caps into the open sea, our guide, Fajar Dewanto, warned us that a large part of the park was threatened by palm development. Dewanto works for Orangutan Foundation International, a group that has resettled many of the more than 5,000 orangutans here in the park. But because it’s the widespread conversion of the land to monoculture plantations that threatens the orangutan habitat, Dewanto has also become a de facto park ranger, policing the forest where officials don’t have enough staff, or willingness, to do it themselves.

A week before our arrival, Dewanto’s team found the rigid body of an orangutan, half buried under a fallen log next to a scar of freshly cut forest in a peat bog being razed for a new palm plantation. They turned the orangutan over. It was riddled with bullet holes to the chest, arm and thigh. As more than a dozen police officers and wildlife experts established a crime scene, an excavator continued ripping down trees on the peat bog behind them, unwilling to lose even a day of progress.

Dewanto couldn’t get the scene out of his head. As our boat rounded a small point of mangroves toward a little-visited swatch of parkland, he wasn’t sure what he would find. Our captain slowed the motor and turned into a small tributary crowded with nipa, a stalky canelike plant that is a food staple for native people here, and from there we navigated into a recently dredged canal no wider than 10 feet. Dewanto had been here one month earlier and seen forest. Now the forest was gone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage