So Greenpeace are campaigning to protect these important habitats for the orangutans as well as the indigenous people who live there too. They've produced a video and a picture book for children and adults to share to explain in lovely rhyming text from the viewpoint of the baby orangutan, Rang-tan, how his home is being burnt down and his mother taken away to make palm oil for our food and shampoo. "There's a Rang-tan in my bedroom" is a beautifully illustrated book, with an introduction by Dame Emma Thompson. And there's a wonderful animated video of the story too.
Did you know there's palm oil in the spread we put on our bread, lipstick, pizza dough, instant noodles, shampoo, ice cream, detergents, chocolate, cookies and biscuits, soap and bread and that's just for starters (from worldwildlife.org).
And it comes from the palm oil trees that are being planted in great rows in great plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia (85% of the world's palm oil produced and exported from here) as well as parts of Africa, Asia and South America.
The above pictures are all detail of the illustrations in the book, I think highlighting them like this is a powerful way of getting the message out there..
A long, long time ago, I went on a big trip to Indonesia and Malaysia and I visited the jungle rain forest where the orangutans live. This was 1993, and we drove on a bus past huge palm oil plantations in Malaysia even then. And now, more and more tracts of orangutan home are being destroyed to plant palm oil trees. In Sumatra we visited the orangutan sanctuary where they were rehabilitating rescued orangutans for reintroduction into the wild. But now there's less and less wild for them to go. Here are some of my pics from 1993...
We can all help to save the orangutan. We can look at what we are buying and check if there is palm oil in it. We can try to replace products with those with no palm oil. This is hard, but we must try. We can support the Greenpeace campaign by signing their petition. We can check out the supermarket Iceland who have promised to remove palm oil from all own brand foods by the end of 2018 - ambitious but what an example to set to the other retailers. We can share this post. We can check out the Rang-tan book and video - links below) and explain to the children why this is so important. We can get ourselves informed (it's not that hard nowadays being online). And for a really powerful documentary that partly covers why this is so important, check out Chris Packham's journey to Sumatra (link below).
Please help to...
And will you promise to do this...
Brilliant Links
Greenpeace campaign here where you can sign the petition and watch the Rang-tan film.
Iceland campaign here
World wildlife fund info on palm oil here
Chris Packham's In search of the lost girl here
Check out and share #SaveRangtan #StopDirtyPalmOil on social media
To order the book, email Greenpeace here - Supporter.uk@
Share the link to Rang-tan's story on your social media - https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/page/s/rang-tan-video
Greenpeace’s main objective is to share the story far and wide - the more people we can get talking about deforestation, palm oil and orangutans, the more chance we have of stopping rainforest destruction for good.
Facebook | www.facebook.com/itsallaboutstories/
Pinterest | uk.pinterest.com/allaboutstories/
No comments:
Post a Comment