Palm Oil's Relationship with our Environment
The controversial topic of the day: How bad is palm oil for the environment? While I came into writing this article with an answer already in mind, I learned that the answer is actually a lot more complicated than I initially presumed. Here's the bad: Palm oil contributes to the largely-known deforestation issue , releasing copious amounts of carbon into our atmosphere as the trees are cut down, inadvertently speeding up our climate change timeline. Palm oil correlates directly with the decrease in the orangutan population, a drop from 315,000 in 1990 to fewer than 50,000 in the wild today (not to mention the many other species threatened by the deforestation of their homes). Palm oil is associated with illegal land theft , displacing many communities in the process. So why is anyone even farming for palm oil, and getting away with it? Yes, money has a lot to do with it, but there are some unexpected upsides to its production. For one, its yields are heavy – very hea