Related Posts
Ecocide: Indonesia’s palm oil industry
The coal and palm oil industries have been getting away with ecocide in the forests of Indonesia, threatening...
Palm oil = bogus ‘biodiesel’ – Indonesia now world’s 3rd highest emitter of greenhouse gasses
Is palm oil ‘biofuel’ a complete waste and are big oil companies just incapable of getting it right?...
Orangutans use mime to communicate with humans and each other
Studies analyzing some 20 years of footage taken of Orangutans in the jungles of Borneo are giving scientists...
Where to see wild orangutans in Malaysia Wild mother and baby orangutans. Pic: karma-police (Flickr CC).
Malaysia, along with Indonesia, is the only place in...
Australia and Indonesia Announce Plans to Save Sumatra’s ForestsSumatra: A large, Indonesian island that is home to over 200 mammal and nearly 600 bird species, including...
Tip of the Day
Go grocery shopping locally to help reduce your carbon footprint
Indonesia: Palm oil firms trapping and killing orangutans
photo by Rainforest Action Network (Flickr CC)
In Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) orangutans are being hunted and driven into possible extinction.
Indonesia, which is home to 90% of the world’s orangutan population, is also home to rampant unregulated and illegal palm plantations, deforestation and logging. Loss of habitat has pitted villagers against the orangutans, who may venture into gardens for food. Locals are known to kill great apes for food and out of fear.
But the real culprits are the industries who see orangutan conservation as a threat to their business. These firms are not only destroying the orangutans’ habitat, but have allegedly paid villagers to hunt and kill orangutans.
From the Guardian:
Erik Meijaard, who led a team carrying out the first attempt to assess the scale of the problem in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, said the results showed that between 750 and 1,800 orangutans were killed as a result of hunting and deforestation in the 12 months to April 2008.
Indonesia is the largest producer of palm oil, with some 75% of the current organgutan population living trapped on palm plantations.
For more on this story see the following Al Jazeera English report.
Tags: borneo, Indonesia, Kalimantan, kill, orangutan, palm oil
2 Comments
You can also log in to post a comment.
Other Greenfudge.org posts
China: Siberian tigers vs. humanity
The world’s wild tiger population is in serious risk of vanishing completely. Since the early 20th century tigers have lost 93% of their habitat, a trend that has only accelerated in recent years. It seems that each bit of progress in tiger conservation is met with increased challenges. For example: the recent spot of good news that China’s endangered Amur tigers (better known as the Siberian tiger) are experiencing a growth in population is tempered by the fact that the people...
From Greece to a recession near you: What to do in a crisis?
If you’ve been following the global economic crisis and particularly the Greek crisis, you may be wondering just what the hell the Troika (IMF, EMU, European Central Bank) are playing at. The neo-liberal, anti-democratic, anti sovereignty, German-led bailout (loaded with economic and societal killing measures) doesn’t make sense to economists, political analysts or anyone except those who stand to make money from it. As the Independent reports, suicide rates have jumped 40% due to the crisis and salaries are being slashed...
Scientists Depart from New Zealand on Six-Week Whale Research Expedition
Last week it was reported that a group of researchers intended to investigate the Japanese whaling in the Antarctic seas. In particular, they wanted to see if the whales could be studied without killing them; which could be viewed as a challenge to Japan, since they claim they have to hunt and kill hundreds of whales per year, all for the sake of “scientific research”. The researchers deployed from Wellington, New Zealand on Tuesday. Nearly 20 scientists from Australia, France and...
Tropical storms hit both Asia and US
Tropical storms are battering two parts of the world at present: the east coast of the United States and parts of East Asia. Hurricane Irene raged up from the Bahamas through North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and into New York, where it was downgraded to a tropical storm yesterday. According to the Associated Press Irene has claimed at least 21 lives in 8 US states. Two nuclear power plants in the US were shut down due to the hurricane, one in New Jersey (purely...
The promise of bike sharing to Reduce Emissions
Bike sharing sure has come a long way since the failed Yellow Bike Project of 1994 in Portland, Oregon. With the launchof New York City’s first system next spring coinciding with similar plans in other cities, it appears that bikes and bike stations may become as widespread and popular as they are in Canada and throughout Europe. The concept of designating a certain number of bikes for unrestricted use has many economical and environmental advantages. It should come as no surprise...
Weird Science News: An unlikely saboteur
A time traveling bird who drops baguette bombs. Sounds pretty preposterous, doesn't it? But it's part of a theory that two physicists are proposing in order to explain the latest in a series of stumbling blocks that have thwarted the efforts of the CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research since 1964. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto propose – in several published papers,...
Study: Methane is Rapidly Leaking Through Holes in Arctic Permafrost
For the longest time, CO2 was considered the main culprit in global warming. Many would pin climate change issues on this particular greenhouse gas. However, it seems another such gas intends to make its presence feared all the same: Methane. This greenhouse gas has been sneaking its way into the atmosphere more rapidly than scientists previously thought; especially in areas of the Arctic Ocean where there is unstable permafrost. An international research team conducted a survey of the East Siberian Arctic...
Food crisis: When starvation equals profit
If there ever was an argument against the unregulated free market, it's that it can kill people. Of course, it can also feed people. But, surely even the most hard-hearted capitalists must agree that there is a figurative line in the sand when it comes to profiting from starvation. You'd think so anyway. But it happens. Take the situation in Niger, where the current food crisis is being caused by severe drought and poor harvests, but fiddling with market forces may...
Since Russia is on fire and losing crops, they could probably use a seed bank
Record summer temperatures and drought have caused around 800 wildfires, which in turn covered Moscow in a cloud of poisonous smoke. Now some 28 fires have reached parts of the Bryansk region of Russia, which is located near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine – site of the worst nuclear accident in history in 1986. This is raising concerns that the fires could release radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl disaster, which heavily contaminated parts of Bryansk. From a Spiegel...
Should Portugal’s energy policy inspire the UK?
Back in August I wrote about ‘Portugal’s green energy revolution’ as detailed by a New York Times article on the sunny, windy and relatively unspoiled coastal European nation. Portugal’s evolving energy policies continue to garner international attention from investors, industry, politicians and the media. Industrial market research firm SBI Energy has much to say about Portugal’s ‘sweeping clean energy initiatives’, including this: The country is quickly emerging as a “green” trendsetter due to its determination to reduce its dependence on imported fossil...
View all articles
Greed and no rule of law. The Indonesian government has barely done a thing to stop these practices.
grrrrrrrrrrrrr…there are certain issues that after reading you’ll get an instant head ache and this is one of those…perhaps because, we know that the solution to the problem is a non- brainer but what makes it impossible to be solved is nothing but all GREED.