Visit the source of this article to see photos and learn more: Telegraph.co.uk

Millionaires are purchasing entire ecosystems around the world and turning them into conservation areas. Their goal? To stop environmental catastrophe.

By Jonathan Franklin r

Sebastián Piñera, one of the richest men in Chile, has a CV that includes introducing credit cards to his country and many large-scale property developments. Now he has added what every chic millionaire needs - his own private ecosystem.

Brazil can preserve Amazon rainforest without outside help, says president Johan Eliasch, Gordon Brown consultant, fined for illegal Amazon logging Parque Tantauco, which Piñera created in 2005, is on one of South America’s largest islands, Chiloé, off the coast of Patagonia.

Piñera bought the land and immediately set about protecting the offshore habitat of blue whales and the inland virgin forests.

Pulling out a map of the park, Piñera explains his plan, tracing his finger over a trekking route that will be connected by rustic cabins.

‘We have been buying all the land around us. We started with 110,000 acres and now we have 150,000,’ he says. ‘I want my children and grandchildren to remember me for making one more million? No! So I now have many projects like this.’

While yachts and jets marked the status of last century’s super rich, today the stylish accessory for millionaires is their very own ecosystem.

From Patagonia to Montana, hundreds of thousands of acres are being bought by wealthy businessmen and placed in private charities, conservation trusts or handed over to governments as a gift.

Johan Eliasch, chairman of Head, the ski and sporting goods manufacturer, and the grandson of a Swedish property developer, has taken his business skills and invested them in a new industry - Amazon Forest conservation.

Eliasch, who has a personal fortune estimated at £360m, has bought 400,000 acres in the Brazilian Amazon, near the river town of Manicore.

Deforestation, argues Eliasch, causes more carbon emissions annually than transportation, yet is often overlooked.

In his parcel of land, Eliasch estimates that some 80m tons of carbon are trapped in the forest - about the same amount the entire Swedish population will produce over the next 15 years at current rates (53m tons per year).

‘The key to saving the Amazon and the rest of the world’s great rainforests is actually very simple: just put a fair price on the role they play in providing a quarter of the world’s oxygen, a fifth of fresh water and 60 per cent of its species,’ declares Eliasch.

‘I truly believe that with their values as a carbon store at last being recognised, we will see mass deforestation halted in five years.’

Eliasch’s interest in the Amazon came about from a concern that one of the effects of global warming was its destruction of the European ski season due to the lack of a critical component - snow.

‘The Swedish winters and summers hold the most enduring memories for me. Now when I am back in Stockholm in November, it is difficult to imagine being able to ski to school. I think that is a tragedy,’ he remarked.

The efforts by Eliasch to protect the rainforest have hit a nerve among some people in Brazil who are suspicious of foreigners coming in with plans to invest in the Amazon.

Eliasch, who admits that shutting down sawmills and putting hundreds of workers out of a job is controversial, insists that hacking down the rainforest is a wildly inefficient use of natural resources.

‘Once timber is cut, there is little that can be done with the land that is is sustainable,’ argues Eliasch. ‘Timber extraction provides big profits at the expense of local communities.’

‘Providing communities with unfettered access to harvest a forest that is protected in perpetuity provides better and more reliable incomes.’

Still, some people remain unconvinced, and it might be years before Eliasch is able to fully utilise his business acumen within the complex world of conservation.

‘There are pitfalls everywhere,’ says Evan Bowen-Jones of the conservation body Fauna & Flora International. ‘In some countries it is possible to buy large chunks of lands and preserve it, and in other areas it is impossible.’

Bowen-Jones cautions that entering the world of large-scale conservation requires patience, and he strongly suggests consulting experienced individuals who have already been through the process.

Working with local groups or, better yet, being invited by local environmental groups is another key to success, he says.

‘With the current pace of biodiversity loss posed by climate change, we are going to have to stretch the methods available to us and that is going to bring in the wealthy individuals,’ says Bowen-Jones.

‘If they [wealthy donors] bring the right attitude to the table, then there is a good chance for success.’

‘It is pretty hard for a country to turn down a gift of 300,000 hectares [740,000 acres],’ says Douglas Tompkins, 65, the American-born founder of Esprit and The North Face.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Tompkins amassed a multi-million dollar fortune. He lived in a huge estate in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighbourhood and had a world-renowned art collection.

Then he read a book on deep ecology, the philosophy pioneered by Norwegian Arne Naess, who calls for a radical re-evaluation of man’s relationship with the planet.

Tompkins was an instant convert. He sold his estate, the art and everything else, then moved to the remote wilds of Patagonia.

Since 1992, Tompkins has spent nearly £110m buying or organising the purchase of around 25 properties covering 2.2m acres in Chile and Argentina.

Once purchased, the land is placed under strict environmental protection by its new owner. Tompkins has even coined a phrase for this movement - wildlands philanthropy.

When Tompkins met someone with the same philosophy and her own pile of money - Kristi McDivitt, the former CEO of the Patagonia Clothing company - they began to focus their business acumen on building coalitions of funders, environmentalists and governments to create national parks.

‘Spend your money on land conservation,’ says McDivitt. ‘To restore a creek is patriotic in my mind. Restoring the land in any form is a patriotic act.’

This eco-power couple have now created two national parks - Parque Nacional Corcovado in Chile and Parque Nacional Monte León in Argentina.

Another two are being finalised, with a total area of close to two million acres. At the centre of Tompkins’ conservation efforts is Chile’s Parque Pumalin, a pristine wooded ecosystem that includes volcanoes, old growth forests and hidden hot springs. The park’s 740,000 acres are off limits to all development except small-scale enterprises.

‘I fundamentally believe in national parks,’ Tompkins said. ‘I don’t believe in private parks. I believe that nations do best and have done best when they really value their parklands and areas that are off limits to development.’

Hansjörg Wyss, one of Europe’s richest men, agrees. After amassing a fortune estimated at £4,200m from his position of CEO of Synthes - a company that produces artificial spinal discs and nails for repairing broken bones - Wyss has tackled a far larger reconstruction project: the wild areas of the American West.

Through The Wyss Foundation, he has donated millions of dollars to preserve wild lands in Utah and Montana.

As chairman of the board at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a grassroots conservation group in the American southwest, Wyss has instituted a corporate structure that includes a £3.5m cash surplus, investments in stocks and mutual funds and an £800,000 office building in Salt Lake City.

In order to save thousands of acres in the Rocky Mountains of Montana from development, Wyss bankrolled a simple solution; he offered to buy up the mineral rights from the mining companies.

Thanks to Wyss’s understanding of corporate America, the Foundation had discovered a strategy for effectively paying the oil and gas companies to leave the area.

In that Montana battle, The Wyss Foundation was an early funder and longtime proponent of the ‘buy ‘em out’ strategy.

Even investment bankers Goldman Sachs have caught the bug. In 2003, Goldman Sachs received 670,000 acres of forests in southern Chile and Argentina as the result of a bankruptcy settlement.

‘It was part of a large package of distressed debt. We started asking, what do we do with a million acres of forest at the end of the earth? We had to get out an atlas,’ laughs Lawrence Linden, an advisory director to Goldman Sachs.

He continues: ‘As an investment bank, we know what to do with shopping malls and apartment complexes. But an ecosystem in Tierra del Fuego? So we called in The Nature Conservancy to study the land and they came back with the conclusion that it was actually a very valuable piece of land from an environmental point of view.’

Today the Goldman Sachs land is a vast tract of wilderness and is home to the guanaco, a llama-like animal that roams the forests. It also has an endowment of around £9m.

“We didn’t want to be a burden for taxpayers. This is not just a question of preserving a pristine wilderness,’ says Pete Rose, a Goldman Sachs spokesman. ‘This is about using 21st-century science to preserve a pristine wilderness.’

Across Europe, eco-barons have also invested heavily in land conservation.

Dutch businessman Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, who died in 2006, was a leading figure in the movement. From his 82,000-acre estate in Scotland - which he proudly advertised as public lands - van Vlissingen managed supermarket chains, energy companies and investment trusts. His passion was Africa’s beleaguered national parks.

In barely two years, Vlissingen poured millions of dollars into the then incomplete Marakele National Park in South Africa, a job that would have taken at least 10 years without his funding. Today Marakele is part of a far bigger park system and is a healthy home to African wildlife, including elephant, white and black rhinoceros, buffalo, hyena, cheetah, wild dog, giraffe and eland.

To consolidate his philosophy, Vlissingen helped create the African Parks Foundation, an NGO that continues to reinforce the infrastructure and funding for national parks in Africa.

Before his death, van Vlissingen was widely considered the richest man in Scotland, and with tens of thousands of acres, the country’s biggest landowner.

But van Vlissingen refused that title, ‘You can’t own a place like this. It belongs to the planet,’ he once said. ‘I’m only the guardian.’

The full version of this article appears in the latest issue of First Life the British Airways magazine from Cedar Communications.

Look deep into her eyes … Is she sad or do we just think so? Many scientists now believe that animals feel emotions too.

Gorilla mother Gana carries her dead baby at the zoo in Muenster, western Germany

By John-Paul Flintoff

Source: Times Online

A three-month-old baby died in its mother’s arms earlier this month. For hours the mother, Gana, gently shook and stroked her son Claudio, apparently trying to restore movement to his lolling head and limp arms. People who watched were moved to tears — unfazed by the fact that Gana and Claudio were “only” gorillas in Münster zoo, northern Germany.

It wasn’t just witnesses who were moved. A British woman who read about Gana’s loss online posted this comment: “From one bereaved mother to another — Gana, you are in my thoughts. My baby boy died last June and you wouldn’t wish it on any form of life.”

Some, to be fair, reacted differently. One newspaper writer asked bluntly whether we are “ too quick to project human feelings onto animals”. However, Dr Bill Sellers, a primatologist at Manchester University, believes gorillas experience pain and loss in a similar way to humans, “but of course it’s extremely difficult to prove scientifically”.

As Einstein said: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.” Only a few years ago doctors did not give anaesthetics to tiny babies, believing they did not feel pain. By focusing narrowly on specifics — in this case, the emotional capacity of animals — scientists may fail to take account of what seems obvious and meaningful to the rest of us. The scientific experience of the world must seem a bit like watching a football match at night, with a single spotlight instead of floodlights.

Many of those who commented on Gana’s story online took a robustly anti-science line, asking angrily how “experts” could be so idiotic. “Have they not heard a cow calling for days when her calves are removed?” asked one. Others described how dogs and cats had become “depressed” by the death of their own kind — and indeed by the loss of human companions. These people would turn the sceptics’ question on its head: “Haven’t we been rather slow to recognise that animals have emotions?”

The question goes to the heart of our way of life. If animals have feelings, it is much harder to justify experimenting on them in laboratories, ogling them in zoos and farming them intensively — or, indeed, at all. The academics attempting to resolve this fall into two camps. Behaviourists accept only the results of tests, rejecting any unproven suggestion that animals think or feel or are even capable of emotion. Ethologists, on the other hand, are prepared to draw conclusions from studies and observation, anecdote and personal observation.

Ethologists, these days, are in the ascendant. One of the best known is Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado and co-founder with the primatologist Jane Goodall of the group Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Sceptical behaviourists often ask him, “How do you know dogs and elephants feel joy or jealousy or embarrassment?”

Bekoff replies: “One retort is to say: how do you know they don’t? Darwin said there was continuity in evolution, so the differences between species are differences in degree rather than differences in kind. They’re shades of grey.

“If we feel jealousy, then dogs and wolves and elephants and chimpanzees feel jealousy. Animal emotions are not necessarily identical to ours but there’s no reason to think they should be. Their hearts and stomachs and brains also differ from ours, but this doesn’t stop us from saying they have hearts, stomachs and brains. There’s dog joy and chimpanzee joy and pig joy, and dog grief, chimpanzee grief and pig grief.”

Although many people would feel comfortable associating emotions with large, charismatic mammals, hard evidence increasingly suggests that other animals are similarly capable. The neurobiologist Erich Jarvis of Duke University, North Carolina, argues that evolution has created more than one way to generate complex behaviour; and that they are comparable.

Some birds have evolved cognitive abilities far more complex than those of many mammals. Dr Nathan Emery, a neuropsychologist at Cambridge University’s department of zoology, suggests that in their cognitive ability, corvids — the bird family that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and magpies — rival the great apes and might well be considered “feathered apes”.

Esther Woolfson, author of a new book, Corvus: A Life with Birds, has lived for years with a variety of these feathered apes. Woolfson doesn’t believe that her birds understand every word she says — the claim beloved of pet owners everywhere — but she does believe they have emotions. “I have seen — or believe that I have seen — in birds, impatience, frustration, anxiety in the urge to impart news, affection, fear, amusement (the last being a difficult one, I admit, to prove, merely on the basis of watching the look on a magpie’s face as its booby-trap was successful) and, particularly, joy.”

One bird, Spike, would balance an object — a pamphlet, a rubber glove, a matchbox — on top of a half-open cupboard door, then wait until it fell onto the head of the next person to open the cupboard.

Her birds also seemed to empathise: “To have a magpie, on seeing me weep, hover on top of the fridge, wings outstretched, tremble for a few moments then fly down to my knee to crouch, squeaking quietly, edging ever nearer until his body was close against mine, seemed to me at the time, (as it does now) an act of an unexpected tenderness that I can interpret only as empathy. There may be other explanations of their behaviour, but I can’t think what they might be.”

Bekoff agrees that we can no longer associate emotion only with the charismatic mammals: “The fact is that fish show fear. Rodents can empathise. This is hard science. With birds and mammals there is no doubt that they have a very rich ensemble of emotions.”

Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine, was for several years a Jain monk. The Jain respect for life is extreme: Kumar didn’t wash his hair for years in case there were fleas in it. He gave up being a monk eventually, for other reasons, but still believes that all living beings should be respected.

“We are animals. And we have a kind of empathy with the animal kingdom. They’re our kin. There is a slight difference between a cat and a dog and a chimp and a female human and a male one and a black human and a white one. These differences are very small: 98% of our DNA is the same as in other animals such as primates,” Kumar says.

“There used to be a time when people thought that animals had no soul, just as they thought that slaves or Africans or women had no soul. We realised a long time ago, as Jains, that animals have souls.

They do feel pain and joy. Mostly they feel what we feel. Animals have empathy and intelligence. We have to be humble and accept that we are only one kind of animal and these are others.”

Jains divide the living world into several categories. “Living things like trees and vegetation have only one sense — touch. Then you have two senses, touch and taste, the animals that eat. Then there are animals with a third sense, smell. Fourth are the ones that have sight, too. And then hearing. Intelligence is limited in these cases because they get their information through fewer senses than us,” says Kumar. “But look at people who are not literate. Literacy is a relatively new thing. Before that we had only an oral culture. That does not mean that people lacked intelligence; just techniques.

“So even mosquitos have something. Even viruses and fungi have intelligence. Nature is full of intelligence. That intelligence manifests in different ways. A tree knows how to bear fruit.”

Many people will reject this as sentimental nonsense, but scientific evidence is increasingly providing support for such ideas. Dodder, the parasitic plant, appears to “choose” which host plants to parasitise on the basis of an initial evaluation of a potential host’s nutritional status. Transplanted shoots are more likely to coil on (“accept”) host plants of high nutritional status and grow away from (“reject”) hosts of poor quality. Crucially, this acceptance or rejection occurs before any food has been taken from the host. We do not yet understand how the parasite evaluates the host’s food value.

However, intelligence is not the same as emotion. Studies of intelligence and ability have been around for ever — a new one last week showed that elephants can do maths.

Evidence of emotional capacity, conceivably older in evolutionary terms than intelligence, has the greater potential to change the way we treat animals. You might put an animal into a circus if it did tricks, but if you knew that this upset the animal you would take it out again. (Unless you were a psychopath, many of whom have been shown to be cruel to animals as well as humans.)

To Bekoff, the great distinction between living beings is whether they have eyes: “The eyes tell it all.

If we can stand it, we should look into the fear-filled eyes of animals who suffer at our hands, in horrible conditions of captivity, in slaughterhouses and research labs, fur farms, zoos, rodeos and circuses. Dare to look into the sunken eyes of animals who are afraid or feeling all sorts of pain and then try to deny to yourself and to others that these individuals are feeling anything. I bet you can’t.”

Bekoff abandoned a promising career at medical school for this reason. “A very intelligent cat looked at me and asked, ‘Why me?’ I couldn’t find the words to tell him why or how badly I felt for torturing and killing him.”

Strict behaviourists might laugh at this, saying the animal’s expression was merely a physical response to particular stimuli. But if they are consistent they must say the same about human emotions, too.

Marian Stamp Dawkins, professor of animal behaviour at Oxford University, points out that even in humans it is difficult to measure emotion: “There are three ways: we can listen to what people say they feel; measure body temperature and heart rate and hormonal levels; and observe behaviour. Unfortunately, the three emotional systems do not necessarily correlate with each other. Sometimes, for example, strong subjective emotions occur with no obvious autonomic changes — as when someone experiences a rapid switch from excitement to fear on a roller coaster.”

Ultimately, the minds and feelings of individuals other than ourselves are private. “Access is limited because we can’t really get into the head or heart of another being — and that includes other people,” says Bekoff.

“I often imagine a dinner table conversation between a scientist and his or her child concerning research in which the nature of mother–infant bonds is studied by taking the infant away from their mother.

“Child: ‘What did you do today?’

“Parent: ‘Oh, I removed two baby chimpanzees from their mother to see how they reacted to this treatment.’

“Child: ‘Do you think the baby minded being taken from her mother?’

“Parent: ‘Well, I’m not sure — that’s why I did it.’

“Child: ‘But what do you think the baby’s fighting to get back to her mother and her writhing and screaming meant?’

“Parent: ‘It’s getting late, isn’t it time for bed?’ ”

Taib implicated in Indonesian timber scam

By Tony Thien

Indonesian logs are being illegally imported into Sarawak and re-exported as local timber to other countries, including China, Taiwan and Japan, according to an Indonesian newspaper report.

In the Aug 14 edition of the Tribun Pontianak, the Pontianak-based Indonesian language daily also implicated chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud and Hardwood Sdn Bhd, a wholly-owned unit of state agency Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation (STIDC).

“The good name of the chief minister and that of the government-owned company have been marred by the report,” Ng Kim Ho, PKR Sarawak state chief told Malaysiakini.

Ng said PKR will lodge a report with the Anti Corruption Agency on the matter. According to him, the Tribun Pontianak report was serious enough to warrant immediate investigation by the authorities here, especially since Indonesia and Malaysia have an existing agreement prohibiting the illegal export of logs.

“Let the relevant authorities carry out an immediate and thorough investigation,” said Ng, who is also assemblyperson for Padungan.

The front-page news report was accompanied by a chart detailing how logs were being transported illegally from the forests in Ketapang and how they were being shipped out of West Kalimantan to two places. The names of some middlemen purportedly involved in the scam were also mentioned.

According to the report, several individuals were charged in an Indonesian court for complicity in illegal timber trade, including the forest controller for the area, a M Darwis. The report said Darwis admitted to receiving bribe money from the individuals in exchange for allowing the logs to be iilegally taken out of Ketapang.

The forest controller told the court the bribe money amounted to between Rp 10 million and Rp 40 million for each shipment of between 800 and 1,000 cubic metres of timber.

About 30 shipments of illegal logs worth some Rp2.16 trillion (about RM750,000) were being taken out either by land or sea across to the East Malaysian state every month.
NGOs go undercover

An Indonesian-based NGO together with a UK-based NGO investigating the illegal timber trade in Indonesia had gone undercover to Sarawak, where they traced the eventual destination of the logs.

The name of Hardwood Sdn Bhd was implicated, although Tribun Pontianak erroneously reported the firm was owned by �the governor of Sarawak’ Abdul Taib Mahmud.

The news report also highlighted a dialogue the European Commission had in Kuching with various stake-holders and NGOs on issues of the legality of the timber being exported to Europe.

The legality issue is tied to, among other things, the sources of the timber and respect for the rights of indigenuous groups living on the land from which the timber is extracted.

Malaysiakini understands some of the logs end up being processed by local industries, which would otherwise face a shortage because of an increase in manufacturing activities and also because Sarawak still allowed the export of timber. Up to 40 percent of the total annual production of round logs is exportable.

Timber is one of Sarawak’s main earners accounting for several billions of ringgits in export revenue each year.

Source: http://www.rengah.c2o.org/news/article.php?identifer=de0626t

The Central Florida Zoo & Botanical Gardens in Sanford is gearing up for an $11 million Sumatran Swamp Forest project, featuring two new exhibits that will open during the next two years.

Zoo CEO Joe Montisano wants to break ground on a $3.2 million Sumatran tiger exhibit by the end of this year, with work taking about eight months to complete.

Plans call for getting a pair of tigers from another U.S. zoo or facility, breeding them and eventually having four. “It’s entirely feasible to have the tigers on the property by 2009,” Montisano said.

The zoo also will start building an orangutan exhibit next year and open it in 2010 with six individuals.

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2008/08/25/story5.html

Orangutans beware. These guys are gunning for you…. Take cover! ~ Rich

Faces of Death: Puru Kumaran (left) and Velayuthan Tan at the briefing.

Subang Jaya: IJM Plantations Bhd plans to invest RM600mil in capital expenditure to expand its Indonesian operations.

Chief executive officer and managing director Velayuthan Tan said the investment would be staggered over six to seven years.

“So far, we have spent RM50mil, mainly for land acquisition. We have signed three agreements with Indonesian parties to cultivate oil palm at three locations in East Kalimantan totalling about 33,000ha,” he said after the company AGM and EGM yesterday.

IJM Plantations, one of the latest Malaysian companies to venture into Indonesia, established nurseries there in March while field planting is targeted to start early next year.

With its latest acquisition, the plantation company has a total landbank of about 62,000ha.

IJM Plantations owns about 30,000ha in Sabah, which is mostly used up. According to its 2008 annual report, 62% are prime trees, 28% young trees and the balance immature oil palm.

On its earlier plan to launch a 30,000-tonne biodiesel module this year, Tan said the project had been deferred.

“We are very cautious about this venture. We want to wait for the right price and moment to embark on biodiesel,” he said.

“I wish I had a crystal ball,” Tan quipped when asked on the price trend of crude palm oil (CPO).

He said during the peak season in October and November when supply was high, CPO prices would typically be low while during the monsoon, prices would be high.

Although that had been the trend in past years, many industry players and analysts had been proven wrong when CPO prices rallied over the past few months.

Meanwhile, Tan was upbeat on the company’s prospects for the current financial year ending March 31, 2009 due to high CPO prices.

General manager (corporate affairs and finance) Puru Kumaran said IJM Plantations had had a good financial year ended March 31, 2008 when CPO prices averaged about RM2,000 per tonne.

Source: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/8/22/business/1861417&sec=business

He expects the company to continue doing well as CPO prices were still higher than 12 months ago.

By Michael Brune
Please visit the source: The Huffington Post

In the end, climate change made us quit.

On most days, we’re like any other card-carrying, food-conscious environmentalists. My wife and I shop at our local natural grocery store, dutifully selecting locally grown, organic produce. We planted fruit trees a few years ago, our summer vegetable garden is thriving, and we generally do what we can to make Michael Pollan proud.

But every now and then, late at night, we get a little wild. Often to the accompaniment of John Stewart, we’ll pull the blinds down, tip-toe past our sleeping daughter, reach into the darkest recesses of our cabinets, and pull out something sinful. My personal weakness is for cookies and chocolates. My wife is more the pretzels and chips type.

That was before we learned that palm oil - a common ingredient in many of our favorite munchies, not to mention soaps, cosmetics and biofuel - is one of the biggest causes of rainforest destruction and a prime accelerator of climate change.

Throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and now South America as well, millions of acres of tropical rainforests are slashed and burned every year to make way for massive palm oil plantations. Gone are some of the most biologically diverse, carbon-absorbing ecosystems on the planet, which are home to orangutans, tigers, Sumatran rhinos and other endangered species - all replaced by endless rows of palm trees. The draining of peatlands and rampant deforestation has catapulted Indonesia to its status as the world’s third-highest greenhouse gas emitter, trailing only China and the United States. It’s a humanitarian nightmare as well: more than five million indigenous people in Indonesia alone are expected to be evicted from their lands by 2010 to make way for palm plantations.

Much of this palm oil makes its way to the United States, where the palm oil trade is driven by the “ABC’s of rainforest destruction,” giant agribusiness companies Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill.

Through late spring and early summer, my organization, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), mobilized hundreds of volunteers to research where palm oil could be found on the shelves of American grocery stores. The news was mixed.

The bad news is that palm oil is nearly everywhere. Palm is used to produce everything from Cheez-Its, Oreos and Mrs. Fields cookies to Pop Tarts, Cool Whip and Ivory Soap. We found palm oil in surprising places, such as Whole Foods-branded products and Newman’s O’s. It’s in Twinkies, Twizzlers, Milky Way bars, even Girl Scout cookies.

The good news is that there are alternatives. As Glenn Hurowitz opined in the Los Angeles Times:

The great tragedy of all this palm oil use (about 30 million tons globally every year) is that it’s so easily replaced by healthier vegetable oils, like canola, that come from significantly less ecologically sensitive areas. Indeed, every single product I examined had either a variant or a competitor that didn’t contain palm oil — with no discernible effect on price or quality. Sitting next to those Whole Foods-brand water crackers were Haute Cuisine water crackers made with canola oil. Down the aisle from palm oil-laden Ivory soap was palm-oil-free Lever 2000.

Can we have our cake and our forests too? One step to take is to simply not buy from the companies that came up on RAN’s research list. That’s a decent start, but if consumers act collectively, we can challenge some of America’s most well-known food companies to make much deeper change.

Last week, RAN issued letters to more than 300 different companies, asking them to join us to protect rainforests and fight climate change by finding sustainable alternatives to the palm oil in their products. At the same time, more than 2,000 citizens across the country went to their local grocery stores to plaster stickers reading “Warning: Product May Contain Rainforest Destruction” on any products that contained palm oil. Online, we generated more than 1.3 million emails to those same companies, sent by people who, like many of us, probably enjoy the occasional late night snack, but aren’t wild about the accompanying rainforest destruction. Here’s what Fortune magazine had to say about it.

In 2008, we shouldn’t have to explain to Cargill, Keebler, or any other company that it’s not right to displace indigenous communities and chop down rainforests, but we must. To understand the pervasiveness of this problem, and to educate and pressure the companies that are putting palm oil on our shelves, stop by TheProblemWithPalmOil.org, take action, and let us know what you think.

Kraft Foods, Kellogg’s and other U.S. food producers come under attack as demand for vegetable oil made from palm trees soars.

By Marc Gunther, senior writer
Please visit the source of this article: Fortune

(Fortune) — What do Oreo cookies made by Nabisco (KFT, Fortune 500), Cheez-It crackers from Kellogg’s (K, Fortune 500) or General Mills’ (GIS, Fortune 500) Fiber One Chewy Bars have to do with global warming and the destruction of tropical rainforests? A lot, say environmental activists.

The link between the supermarket shelf, climate change and shrinking rainforests is palm oil, a controversial ingredient that may now be the most widely-traded vegetable oil in the world.

Here’s the problem: Demand for palm oil, which is found in soaps and cosmetics as well as food, has more than doubled in the last decade as worldwide food consumption has soared. Farmers, in turn, are expanding their plantations, burning forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, where nearly all of the palm oil imported to the United States originates. Deforestation is the primary reason that Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions are the third-highest in the world.

The Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are all campaigning against palm oil. (You can find their arguments here and here and here and here.) Last week, RAN asked about 2,000 volunteers to sneak into food stores across the United States and attach stickers to products made with palm oil.

“Warning!,” the stickers said. “May Contain Rainforest Destruction.”

The targets of the RAN campaign are three global agricultural firms that grow or import palm oil: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500), Cargill and Bunge (BG). The goal of last week’s stunt was to get the attention of consumer-goods companies, who are being asked to look into their sourcing of palm oil.

“We’re working our way down the food chain,” explained Mike Brune, the executive director of RAN. “Most customers won’t want rainforest destruction and climate change in every mouthful of cookies or crackers, so our plan is to start with the most prominent brands. Once we get some of the top brands on our side, we’ll use the power of the pocketbook to convince the ‘A,B,C’s’ (ADM, Bunge and Cargill) that destroying rainforests and increasing climate change isn’t smart - for business or the planet.”

The agribusiness companies say they are doing their best to buy palm oil that is produced with minimal harm to the environment. All are participants in a partnership, formed by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever (UN), called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, or RSPO, which is setting standards for palm-oil cultivation.

Said Mark Klein, a Cargill spokesman, by e-mail: “We are currently working towards having all of our company-owned plantations officially RSPO-certified as quickly as possible in 2008.” You can read more about Cargill’s position here.

The trouble is, critics say, the RSPO principles as they are now written are vague, don’t prevent the destruction of rainforests, and are not well-enforced. What’s more, only a handful of palm plantations have been certified to date by RSPO.

“There’s currently no palm oil in the world that can be proven to be sustainable,” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, who leads RAN’s agribusiness campaign. The growing use of palm oil in biofuels has made the problem even more urgent.

Caught in the middle of the controversy are the consumer brands. A handful of companies have already made efforts to buy palm oil that is responsibly grown. The Body Shop says that it gets its palm oil from an organic producer in Columbia. Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a small firm that makes organic soaps, says that it sources all of its palm oil from small growers in Ghana.

There’s precedent for bigger brands to push their suppliers to do better. Several years ago, after Greenpeace attacked McDonald’s (MCD, Fortune 500) for buying soy from the Amazon and contributing to deforestation, the fast-food giant persuaded Cargill and Bunge to stop buying soy from newly-cleared areas while the parties come up with a longer-term conservation plan, which is still in the works.

John Buchanan of Conservation International, which works with Bunge and Cargill, says those companies are trying to improve their practices. “I see them as part of the solution,” he said. But he agrees with the Rainforest Action Network that buyers of palm oil need to more actively seek out responsible sources. “It’s really important for the market to step up and create demand.”

The World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay, author of the an authoritative book called World Agriculture and the Environment, says that, instead of cutting and burning forests to make way for palm plantations, farmers should be encouraged to grow the crop on already cleared land.

“Global production could be doubled by planting palm trees on degraded areas of Borneo,” Clay said. “The advantage is that not a tree would have to be cut.”

Louis Prima is for many people the man most associated with orangutans– but they may not even know it! Anyone who’s ever seen Walt Disney’s “Jungle Book” knows Prima’s voice– even if they don’t know Prima by name.

Ollie Johnston, the Disney animator who brought King Louie to life, recently died at 95. ~ Rich

Here’s the clip:

He put the world on to swing: Trumpeter who blazed through New Orleans, Hollywood, Vegas unhonored

By Jerry Fink

It’s time to give Louis Prima his due.

Actor Bruce Dern has a Las Vegas street named for him, for Pete’s sake. So does Ben Johnson. Neither had his name on Vegas marquees or set the neon nights ablaze with music.

But no street honors Prima, who created the classic songs “Sing, Sing, Sing” and “Just a Gigolo.”

No star on the Las Vegas Walk of Fame recognizes the trumpeter who pumped life into the Vegas lounges during the ’50s with his boisterous showmanship. There’s no star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame despite his film and radio successes, nor does he have a spot in the rock, blues or jazz halls of fame despite his crossover music appeal.

One of the world’s great entertainers, who’s synonymous with Las Vegas, has no statues here or anywhere else. No plaques. No postage stamps.

Years ago he was inducted into Steve Cutler’s Casino Hall of Fame Museum at the Tropicana, but the museum has closed.

It’s time to crank up the righteous indignation.

It’s been 50 years since Prima and Keely Smith won a Grammy for “That Old Black Magic” — in the first year of the awards ceremony. It’s been 30 years since Prima died in his hometown of New Orleans; he succumbed Aug. 24, 1978, after being in a coma for three years. He was born Dec. 10, 1910, so there’s still time to name a street after him or put a star on a sidewalk somewhere by the time the centennial of his birth rolls around.

“The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival will honor Louis on his 100th birthday,” his widow, Gia, says from her home in Toms River, N.J. “They will make a commemorative poster.”

That hardly seems enough for the man whose entertainment career spanned six decades from Dixieland through big bands, lounges and jump blues.

The giant mural at the Louis Armstrong International Airport honors 50 New Orleans legends — but not Prima. “There’s a jazz park on Bourbon Street and they have statues of Al Hirt, Pete Fountain and Louis Armstrong. I would like to see them get a statue of Louis in there,” says the former Gia Maione, who was Prima’s fifth and final wife. After Smith and Prima divorced, she also became Louis’ co-star onstage. “I’ve been trying to get some recognition in Las Vegas for Louis, but so far nothing, not even a park named after him, even though he helped make it the entertainment capital of the world in 1956. It amazes me.”

Prima’s children do their best to keep their father’s music alive. Lena Prima performs a tribute show, and Louis Prima Jr. sometimes gets a gig at an Italian festival or other event, such as a recent show that drew 1,400 fans at the Hilton. But even those gigs are getting tougher to come by. Prima Jr. would like to establish a Louis Prima lounge in one of the Strip resorts to honor his father and the other acts that created the Las Vegas lounge scene.

“The fans know and love my father and his music. It’s the venues,” says Prima Jr., who lives in Las Vegas. “They’ve forgotten him.”

The older generation that knew Prima’s music and saw him perform is dying, says Ron Cannatella, official archivist for Prima Music LLC in New Orleans. But the younger generation knows his music rerun-style through movies and TV.

“Louis’ music is still a vital part of mainstream pop culture,” he says. “They may not know Louis Prima but when you put his music into a contemporary context, people remember.”

Remember the orangutan singing “I Wanna Be Like You” in Disney’s “The Jungle Book”? King Louie was Prima.

All those khaki-clad “Swingers” and “Swing Kids” in the movies and Gap ads? Dancing to Prima. David Lee Roth hamming it up on “Just a Gigolo”? Channeling Prima. Musicians such as Brian Setzer, Los Lobos, Phish, Smashmouth and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy keep Prima’s music alive.

Just consider Prima’s classic composition “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

The stretched out version by Benny Goodman and a big band that included Harry James and Gene Krupa defines swing music. It’s shown up in movies from “After the Thin Man” to “Leatherheads,” in Broadway shows such as “Dancin’ ” and “Swing!” and on TV shows including “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos” and a long-running Russian serial.

“It was a landmark composition,” Cannatella says. “Louis should receive a posthumous lifetime achievement Grammy or even an Academy Award.

“He’s like a brand name, musically. He would take anything, whether his own composition or a standard, and once Louis Prima got hold of it and put it in his own style it was unmistakable. He is still unique and recognizable today.”

Source: Las Vegas Sun

Visit the official Louis Prima website

Please visit the source: Discover Magazine

By Thomas Kostigen

A few test projects show that landowners protect forest when it’s valuable to them.

Far from the last knock of civilization in the Borneo jungle, I trudge along the Malaysian border with Indonesia. Here, together with two Iban tribesmen and a guide—all of us caked in mud and sweat—I come to a place where the familiar clamor of birds, monkeys, and bugs is being drowned out by the sound of a chain saw. We enter a clearing in which a teenager is hacking a felled tree, sawing it into pieces. Nearby, a backhoe levels a huge swath of land. Soon palms will be planted here, I’m told, and when harvested their oil will be sold on the world market. What I’ve come upon is just one scene in the massive global picture of deforestation. There are thousands and thousands of small operators hacking away at forests to profit from their bounty.

Deforestation is occurring at a rapid pace as the demand for housing and goods increases with world population growth, which is expected to climb 50 percent between 1999 and 2040, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, as appetites for food and biofuels—made with palm, corn, and other plants—rise, more land is needed to accommodate agriculture. About 32 million acres of forest are destroyed per year. That’s equivalent to about 50 football fields a minute. And the rate is expected to increase as demand grows.

Without forests, the world as we know it would cease to exist. Climate change has added new impetus to forest conservation efforts as we increasingly appreciate how efficiently forests sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. In fact, deforestation is calculated to be the second-biggest man-made contributor to global carbon emissions after the burning of fossil fuels for energy use, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. This is because when forests are cleared, the carbon stored inside the trees is released, either immediately or over time; in addition, what had been a natural resource for capturing carbon—the trees themselves—disappears. Moreover, many people clear land by fire, which releases still more noxious gases. But there is an innovative and growing worldwide movement to get people to stop chopping down trees. The answer: Simply pay them not to do it.

Governments can try to conserve with stricter policies, activists can petition developers and farmers, and benefactors can buy land out of the goodness of their hearts (much like the investment firm Goldman Sachs, which recently purchased some 700,000 acres in Patagonia for conservation purposes). But to really put a dent in deforestation, people must have an incentive not to partake in it. (For-profit businesses such as large timber operators already have profit incentives.)

“Forests are like giant utilities providing ecosystem services to the world that we all benefit from but we don’t pay for.” That’s the way the U.K.-based nonprofit Global Canopy Programme puts it.

Global Canopy advocates a “cap and trade” program that hinges on ecosystem valuation. Simply put, a forest’s importance to the ecosystem would be valued in the form of credits. These credits could then be traded on markets. Forest owners would be given credits for the amount of carbon that they sequester, and those credits could be sold to those who are producing carbon in excess of a specified cap. The economic pressure of having to buy credits could effectively mitigate that “footprint” we hear so much about and arguably balance things out.

The United Nations has initiated a similar offset program called REDD (which stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). REDD will work in one of two ways: either with forest owners’ earning credits that they can sell, as with Global Canopy, or by developed countries’ contributing to a fund that would in turn pay developing countries to keep their forests intact. The fund would act as a de facto arbiter of the developed world’s carbon emissions, allowing offending countries to offset their pollution through such payments.

The idea was introduced for inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol but was eliminated from the final provisions because of political concerns. Brazil, for example, formally opposed it, saying that accepting funds from industrial nations to reduce deforestation could limit the country’s future development options. Its sovereignty would be jeopardized, the argument went, because it would be controlled by the prices set by large carbon emitters—such as the United States, China, and the United Kingdom—who might contribute to the fund, in effect paying Brazil not to develop its forests.

If every hectare of preserved forest saves 200 tons of carbon and each ton of carbon is worth $10, then Indonesia could gain around $2 billion each year.

Since Kyoto, however, Brazil and other countries with large forest reserves, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, are warming to the idea of REDD. “Rather than seeing it as inhibiting their economic development, they are seeing the potential for big credits in their forests,” says William Laurance, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He tells me that REDD would bring much bigger resources to the table than have ever been contemplated in global conservation, and that is opening the eyes of government ministers who had previously opposed such ideas. “What have been efforts valued in the millions, [REDD] would bring into the billions,” he says.

REDD would pay market prices for carbon storage. At the current market value for carbon, a hectare of rain forest, if left intact, could be worth anywhere from $400 to $8,000 or more. Since we are talking about millions of hectares of conservation, the sum adds up to quite a lot for the developing world. Laurance explains: “Suppose, for example, that the baseline deforestation rate for Indonesia is 2 million hectares per year, and the government manages to reduce this to 1 million hectares per year. If one assumes that every hectare of preserved forest saves 200 tons of carbon emissions and that each ton of carbon is worth $10 on the international market, then Indonesia could gain around $2 billion each year.”

Moreover, leases are now being contemplated so landowners retain land titles and receive “rent” payments (rather than selling their land to the fund). Not a bad way for a poor farmer to profit from his land.

REDD so far has commitments of hundreds of millions of dollars from a dozen developed countries. Not a large amount, to be sure, but a beginning. The program is scheduled to be formally voted on for all-nation adoption at next year’s U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Then the hope is that the billions will pour in.

REDD isn’t the only game in town. Many forest conservationists believe it will take a combination of efforts to save the world’s trees and, along with them, all the carbon they store.

Mark Plotkin, who heads the Amazon Conservation Team, says he is skeptical of progress being made on the national and international policy levels. “It needs to be addressed by grassroots efforts as well,” he says, explaining that by the time policy trickles down to the people to whom it applies, “it may be too late.” In addition, Plotkin believes that resources should be put toward creating attention and awareness and toward policies that make sense and are applicable to indigenous people.

When you see the squalor in which they live—under a mere tarp covering a small raised platform—and you hear that they receive less than one dollar per felled tree, you really have to think there must be a way to preserve the forests and at the same time aid the people who live off them. Indeed, as the sun begins to set and I turn away from the teenage loggers to begin my long hike out of the Borneo jungle and away from their desperate conditions, I realize this is not an option for them. But another type of dollar incentive might just give them a different way out.

REDD is one way to do it and may hopefully spark more widespread attention, laws, and policies that will further promulgate forest conservation. It gives credit where credit is due and pays out the ultimate dividend to us all: the air we breathe.

A desperate struggle for survival is raging deep in the heart of Borneo’s forests. Illegal logging is rapidly destroying the Bornean orangutans’ last stronghold in the wild — leaving hundreds of orangutan babies orphaned and homeless. Their future seems bleak but a ground-breaking project provides real hope for ensuring the survival of the species. Meet the 35 classmates of Forest School 103 at the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. These precocious red-haired “children of the forest” will get the opportunity, through this innovative project led by Lone Droscher-Nielsen and her team, to live wild on a protected island. Orangutan Island is the foundation for the largest primate rescue project in the world. Go with them on their journey to adulthood as they struggle to form their own society and learn how to live free on Orangutan Island.

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Email us for details

5th grader Maya Lynch is a proud adoptive parent of Lomon.

She loves orangutans so much that she recently did a school report on them.

Maya had to give a presentation in front of her whole class, and during the report, she says, “At least 3 of my 10 classmates cried when I told them about Lomon’s and Kesi’s past.”

Maya was born in Brooklyn in 1996 and moved to San Francisco the next year.

She is the proud caretaker of two lovely cats, Patsy and Winston, as well as Lucy the Maltese.

Her love and understanding for all animals led her to the Orangutan Island TV show and the Orangutan Outreach sponsorship program.

By the way, Maya got an A!

Check out the report.

By Glen Hurowitz
Source: Grist

I just started as Greenpeace’s media director, in part because I wanted to help Greenpeace save the world’s rainforests, a topic I’ve written a lot about at Grist and elsewhere. Within a week of starting the job, I knew I’d made a good decision when I got this news release from our Southeast Asian office:

This is very good news for the orangutans, rhinos, and elephants being killed off by Indonesia’s aggressive expansion of palm oil — and excellent news for the climate too: Burning all that rainforest for palm oil makes Indonesia the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, right behind the United States and China and right ahead of fellow forest destroyer Brazil.

The victory comes after months of effort by Greenpeace in Riau (see a video of Greenpeace’s Forest Defenders Camp in Riau here) to expose the hugely disproportionate damage palm oil does to the planet. Alone, it accounts for around 8 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

But don’t start buying Entenmann’s products, Twix, Oreos, Kit Kats, Body Shop soap, Burt’s Bee’s products, Kashi breakfast bars, or any of the other cookies, crackers, soaps, shampoos, and cosmetics that contain palm oil just yet. Food and ag giants like Cargill, ADM, and Bunge are still slipping this fattening orangutan killer into our Trader Joe’s Chocolate Truffles and Whole Foods’ water crackers, and the Indonesian central government is still allowing this land grab to go ahead unabated. Until deforestation for palm oil is stopped and already deforested areas restored, we need a complete ban on palm oil and rapid replacement with less ecologically damaging (and equally affordable) edible oils like canola.

We also need a long-term solution that will permanently change the financial calculus that allows palm oil, soy, and cattle ranching to take precedence over the far more valuable services forests provide such as carbon storage, clean air, and water, and shelter for indigenous people and wildlife. We can do that by giving financial credit for protecting forests under both domestic and international climate regimes. And we can finally put the deforestation era behind us once and for all.