Stop Burning Rain Forests for Palm Oil
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What's Next?A way that we can find a way to stop the burning of these trees is to set up regulations that can prevent the destruction. As stated within the article, "The most promising plan to stop it comes courtesy of the United Nation's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program, which would get developed countries to pay developing countries to not cut down trees". Another solution to this would be to find alternatives to palm oil. In my experiences, I have been always using canola oil or olive oil to cook and i know for a fact that these oils are also used in cosmetics. I am not aware of how these oils are manufactured but considering that there are not any articles explaining how, I am assuming that it is a safer alternative to palm oil.
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SummaryIn the Tripa forest in Indonesia's Aceh province, the trees have recently been going up in flames. A result of these fires is that the Sumatran orangutans are starting to die off. These fires however, were not accidental, they were intentional. This is because people needed to clear the land for planting oil palms, a tree whose fruit yields palm oil, and used in biofuels, cosmetics and food. Because of its low price and long shelf life, people have chosen palm oil as the cooking oil in most of the world. Even though palm oil brings in a very good amount of profit, it comes at a terrible environmental price. Burning down these forests destroy the habitats of many animals including Sumatran Orangutans, Sumatran tigers, as well as the Sumatran rhino. Another consequence of burning down these trees is that it releases a large amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These forests also sit in peatland and the draining and burning also release more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
ReflectionThis article was very interesting to me and relates to a lot the lessons we are learning in our class lately. It was very interesting to read about the different forests that can also contribute to the carbon dioxide emissions. Even though that is not the main point of the article, it caught my attention considering that we have been studying this. The burning of the forest just to be able to produce oil is very unreasonable. I believe that humans should just have a less greedy mindset and start thinking about the different animals that burning these forest down affect. However, even though I am against the burning down of these habitats, I am able to see the other side of the coin and look at this from the humans perspective. We do have many needs that we need to satisfy however I do think that we are intelligent enough to find alternatives to destroying our environment.
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