Sacrificed

Mix Fix

by Isciane Lallement

Avoid palm oil. That is what every responsible consumer has been trying to do for the last decade. We associate it with fires in the rainforest, sad animals’ faces, special mentions in advertisements. But palm oil is not the only one to blame: the mass production always has a cost. Coconut, olive, Emu oils… All of these are worshiped and used everywhere, sometimes sold as an ideal alternative to palm oil. They are in every cosmetic product, in our plates, in our hair, on our skin. The demand goes higher up each year, but we do not pay the price: others do. For now.

Our current society has the particularity to give everyone access to everything, daily. Even if people know that over-consumption is wrong, dangerous and hurtful, we just say we have no control over it, individually. Humankind has created and taken habits into comfort, and this luxury is all the last two generations ever knew. That is what makes it so hard to fight.

Oil is one concrete example. It has become a prime resource for centuries. We use it everywhere, everyday.

The demand for palm oil has increased from 2M tons for the year 1970 to 71M tons in 2018. In 2020, the rainforest was threatened by huge fires. It took weeks to end it. This was considered a catastrophe. What we consider less, is the massive deforestation provocated by the culture of palm trees. In 2009, over 270 000 hectares of Indonesian forests were cleared for the sake of palm oil. This was the highest number ever registered in this area. If it went down ever since, we still lose the equivalent of 300 soccer fields of rainforest each hour. Of course, this has a dramatic impact on countless levels, but the one we will focus on here is this one:

Animals.

They are part of this world just as much as we are, but still they are sacrificed. Not only animals, but also plants, insects, life in all its shapes is threatened by the culture of oils.

Each year, more than 2.6 millions of birds were vacuumed to death during olive harvest in Spain.

Coconut’s mass production requires the use of number of pesticides and chemical fertilizers that are responsible of soil’s weakening and different species’ threatening.

Among the species threatened by the mass culture of palm oil, the orangutan, the sumatran Elephant, tiger, Rhino, but also the pangolin and the hornbill. Some of them have reached a critical level of extinction threat and urgently need measures to be taken in their favor.

Vegetal Oil Production World

© ourworldindata.org

For taking part in that slaughter,

For contributing to those numbers,

For choosing to ignore so many things,

For feeling so bad, so helpless and so small,

Without ever changing anything.

For the species that have gone extinct,

With or without our help and for those who will, one day, follow

For walking on the same path I want so much to avoid,

For all the times where I gave in

And I will again

For hiding behind the fact that I am not the only one

For all of us

I am sorry.This has to change. I will. Will you?