Showing posts with label forest destruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forest destruction. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Open Letter to Dove

Dear friends,

Your campaign to save Indonesia's rainforests, the climate and the orang-utans that live there, starts here. Watch video below.

The palm oil industry is the problem.

We've made maps, videos and reports to identify the emergency facing the forests. Now we're turning to the company who needs to help stop the destruction: Unilever, the huge multinational corporation behind Dove soap and other household brands containing palm oil.

Unilever buys its palm oil from suppliers who destroy Indonesia's rainforests for their palm plantations, leading to further climate change and killing orang-utans and other endangered species in the process. By their own admission, Unilever is the biggest single user of palm oil in the world, which is why they can't wash their hands now of this problem. We mustn't let them.
A truly responsible company would not buy from suppliers who trash forests. But Unilever needs to be moved into action, which is what the international Dove campaign is about.

To sign the open letter to Dove link here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/forests/asia-pacific/dove-palmoil-action

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

There Is No Border

From LI Yifang Forest campaigner Greenpeace China:

I started to write my blog on a major Chinese website since my arrival at the Forest Defenders Camp. Now it has already got 260,000 hits. A guy left a message like this, “Indonesia people used to treat our people badly. Why we help them to save their forest? ”

I consider this as a common query in Chinese people’s mind. All I want to answer is, “We are not just helping them; we are helping ourselves.” Even something unhappy happened in the past between us, we won’t be better off if the whole Indonesia becomes a desert. Deforestation makes Indonesia the third largest GHG emitter in the world. And the climate change impacts are not restricted in some certain countries. If we keep doing what we are doing now, 80% of Himalaya’s glacier will be melted; there will be more floods, more tsunamis, and more droughts. And no one is gonna escape from that.

Surely, we used to think in the logic of “my back yard”, “my community”, and “my country”…I am no exception. When I was in the Europe, western people criticized about China being the largest emitter of GHG, I replied as “then what did your country do in the past century?” But when talking about the solution of the world’s environmental crisis, there is no national border any more. We have to consider the planet as a whole.

Taking the forest destruction in Indonesia as an example:
Timber is certainly harvested in Indonesia, but then export to China. After that EU and the US import plywood and wood floor from China. So who should we blame in this chain, source of the timber, producers, dealer, retailers or the end consumer?
So let’s face it. We have no other choice but work together. Stop sitting there and blaming each other, we don’t have time for this. Take some real action now! At the end of the day, it is our common future; it is we sharing responsibility.