http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/03/where-the-earth-s-forests-are-deadly-silent
Borneo is ground zero for the destruction of the earth’s rain forest in order to fuel the West’s palm-oil dependence—a place where birds no longer sing and orangutans are left homeless.
Fifteen hundred square miles of some of the oldest and most species-rich and spectacular rain forest on Earth had been totally eradicated to make room for one profitable line after another of Elaeis guineensis— oil-palm trees, with big clusters of oil-rich nuts—flickering past. Dr. Galdikas has hundreds of orangutans in her care center outside the town of Pangkalanbun, confiscated from loggers and pet owners, but there is almost no forest left in central Kalimantan, the southern, Indonesian two-thirds of Borneo, where she can release them. In the late eighties the deforestation rate in Borneo was the most dramatic on Earth, and it’s still happening. Rain forests one hundred and thirty million years old in places, with insects, plants, and other species that haven’t even been identified, are going up in smoke. The Wildlife Conservation Society is calling it the greatest destruction of biodiversity on the planet. And almost nobody in the West knows or cares, even though we are all implicated as consumers of hundreds of modern products that contain palm oil. I knew I had to come back and write about this.
(long article - worth your time reading)
