Rare Sumatran Tigers Threatened By Palm Oil Plantations.

[NNadir]

In order to help places like Germany fuel their cars to meet their renewable energy portfolios there's been a big, big, big push for palm oil plantations in South Asia.

Because our cars are the most important things on earth - I mean, how else would we spend days and days driving around looking for "organically" locally produced foods - we have no fucking use for things like the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland, in South America or things like Sumatran tiger habitat.

The chronicle of car worship gets worse and worse and worse...

Endangered tigers found in Indonesian jungle allocated to agriculture
· Scientists hope evidence will save other areas
· Zoologists appeal for change in land-use policy

Alok Jha, science correspondent The Guardian Wednesday October 31 2007
Conservationists have found several species of endangered animals living in parts of the Indonesian jungle given over to timber and oil-palm plantations. They warn that the habitats for these rare animals could be destroyed by the plantations and have called on the authorities there to reconsider the way they allocate land for agricultural use.

A team of scientists, led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), found evidence of Sumatran tigers, families of elephants, sun bears, tapirs, golden cats and clouded leopards in so-called degraded land on Sumatra - areas that are not protected habitats and have been designated for agriculture. There is some 60m hectares of degraded land on the island...

...The London team studied a 2,000 sq km area of degraded land next to the Bukit Tiga Puluh national park in central Sumatra. Using camera traps, they took pictures of an entire family of Asian elephants, a species currently classified as endangered by the World Conservation Union's Red List - fewer than 50,000 of these animals are left in the wild and they are at risk from the illegal trade in ivory.

The team also found evidence of the Sumatran tiger, classified as critically endangered. The smallest of all tiger subspecies and found only in Sumatra, it is believed there are only 250 mature individuals left. It is threatened by habitat loss and poaching. Other rare species found in the survey area include the golden cat and the Malayan sun bear.

I wonder how "renewable" the tiger's genetic code is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/31/endangered

For Thanksgiving Dinner, I'll be driving 8,000 miles in my renewably powered Mercedes E320 palm oil powered diesel to feast on wind power threshed wheat bread baked in my renewable solar oven. (I'm driving to Belize to make sure I get plenty of sun for my renewable oven to operate.) The meal won't be vegetarian unfortunately, but we'll be feasting on organically grown Sumatran Tiger meat killed by totally natural organic flint spears fashioned from renewable flint flown in from Antarctica.

We'll be feasting on organically mango tarts, harvested from rototilled rain forest Mangos just before the rototilling of the forest, using renewably powered sustainable rototillers and our renewably powered wood-fired steam chainsaws. (Amory Lovins will be flown in to Sumatra from Snowmass, via Bentonville Arkansas, to certify that all of the trees for the wood fired chain saws would be renewable if there was any habitat left to grow them.)

We plan to feast on organically grown nuts from whatever the fuck kind of trees those were before we rototilled the forest to make our palm oil plantation to power our new organic Mercedes E320.

We also plan to fly in organically grown wild potatoes from Lima, Peru.

I'm not sure if we'll be able to get a roast California Condor though. The blind we had to shoot one using organically certified lead bullets caught fire last week and the Condors may have already been roasted.