The road to Bali
As good as it gets
I think I finally understand the complex issue of how the Rainforest Alliance is trying to certify palm oil plantations for being environmentally responsible.
I spent two days here in Bali with the German-born forest expert Peter Sprang, who lives in Bali with his Jakarta-born wife Hally in a terrific open-air home next to a noisy welding shop on the flight path of airplanes brimming with tourists. Well, you can't have everything in paradise, although this is close to it.
The serious issue for anyone concerned about the looming extinction of orangutans is what to do about the consumer products we buy that have contents in them like paper pulp or palm oil that may or may not come from plantations that are devastating the forests in Borneo and Sumatra that orangutans need to survive.The palm oil is used in standard products like chocolate and cosmetics.
Peter explained to me that the Rainforest Alliance's green frog certification label comes from an attempt to balance high standards with what can be reached in practice.
To get the certification, a palm oil company has to stop converting forests to palms, pay at least minimum wage to workers, and not hunt orangutans.
I know little about this directly and so I have to rely on the credibility of someone like Peter, who has an affection for trees.Peter also has a bit of the natural wanderlust combined with a desire to help others, after doing volunteer reforestation work when he was twenty-two in Bangladesh. He couldn't have been nicer to me, a stranger from Canada who arrived on his doorstep looking for a quick introduction to deep rainforest issues, although he did want to take me to a "monkey forest" in the mountains where the monkeys want to steal my watch. Maybe you don't need a watch in Bali.
Peter is optimistic about the chances for survival of orangutans and their forests. He believes that the destruction of forests in Borneo and Sumatra is slowing down because the remaining forests are in remote swampy or mountain areas where the cost of logging makes it uneconomical.
I'm less optimistic,although it's hard to feel that way in Bali, which is even better than I thought it would be from my memories of the old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby film The Road to Bali. That film tells you nothing about the wintry Australian breezes south of the equator in July that blew Peter and me off the beach last night into the shelter of a restaurant that thinks that Bob Marley is some kind of Hindu god.
As for the Rainforest Alliance certification of palm oil companies -- nobody qualifies yet. But people like Peter are optimistic. In paradise, one can only hope.
