Save the rainforest: Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: The death of Indonesia's rainforests

The world’s greatest environmental crime in history is currently taking place. A great part of the earth is on fire and the rainforests in Indonesia are being deliberately burned to the ground to clear the forest for palm oil plantations. The world and the media have decided to turn a blind eye to a crime that will have consequences for the whole world.

The Sumatran/Borneo rainforests are some of the most diverse and ecologically important ecosystems on earth, home to many critically endangered species such as the orangutan, the Asian elephant, the sun bear, Sumatran tiger, clouded leopard and the Sumatran rhino (which now number at less than 100). George Monboit states that the fires are destroying "treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains which have been levelled by ISIS". The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 70 per cent of the anti-cancer plants identified so far are rainforest plants. A new drug development possibly for treating HIV, is Calanolida A, which is derived from a tree discovered on Borneo. It was only discovered in 1991. According to the United Nations, 25% of Western Medicine comes from rainforest ingredients, yet scientists have tested less than 1% of tropical plants. The rainforests in Borneo/Sumatra are potentially our largest and most powerful chemical laboratories, if we destroy them it won’t be like mothballing a factory, we simply will not be able to able to open them again. The irreversibility of the destruction of the Indonesian rainforests is a catastrophic loss to medical science.

(By 2022, Indonesia will lose 98% of all of its rainforest)

The orangutan, a fellow ape which we share 98% of our DNA with, is also under a real threat of extinction. It is thought up to a third of the world’s last remaining endangered orangutans have been wiped out by the fires in the last few weeks. Before the fires there were only 6,000 orangutans left in the wild in Sumatra, thousands are now estimated to have perished and burned alive in the fires. It could already be too late for the orangutan.

It is not only the environment that has been affected by the fires, humans are suffering greatly too. The smog from the fires has engulfed the whole country and as a result 500,000 people have developed respiratory problems, 100's of people have died and over 75 million people (including millions of children) are breathing in toxic fumes. Schools have been closed, flights cancelled and a state of emergency called. In Palangkaraya, where the air standard pollution index has reached 1900 (anything over 300 is considered hazardous), scientists have recorded dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, cyanide, ammonia, and formaldehyde in the air. The head of the BBC Indonesia, Bec Henschke, in October described the fires as a "apocalyptic hellish scene" and "even in the hotel which was air conditioned" she would wake up in the night "having to breathe from oxygen in a can". She notes that "the scale of the environmental devastation is just unbelievable. I don't think I've ever felt so depressed about the world and I've covered lots of sad things".

Why is this happening?

Indonesia's forests have been overly exploited over the last decade because of the huge demand in palm oil. The forests are burned to the ground because it is 75% cheaper to clear the rainforest that way than any other method. Palm oil is a vegetable oil which is found in one in ten of our supermarket products, from crisps to shampoo to chocolate. 50 million tons of palm oil is produced annually, supplying over 30% of the world’s vegetable oil production. According to Greenpeace, major corporations such as Dove, KFC and Pepsi are among the worst offenders in destroying virgin rainforest for palm oil. The WWF estimate that an area the size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. New photos released today by Greenpeace show that palm oil workers in Borneo are already planting burnt peatlands with palm oil seeds.

The fires in Indonesia highlight a planet which is in real danger. Since 1970 the earth has lost 52% of all of its wildlife, according to the United Nations three quarters of all fish stocks are now over- depleted or exploited and we could see fishless oceans by 2042. The WWF's Living Planet Report has noted that "people are now using about 25% more natural resources than the planet can replace." If everyone in the developed world lived like people in the UK, three planets would be needed to support the earth. Our resource use has simply outstripped what the earth had replenished.

(this baby elephant would not leave her mother's side for over five hours after she was poached)

More than 100 world leaders will be meeting at the United Nations Climate Change conference in December to try and reach a ground-breaking deal on the climate. It is desperately needed as Dr Canadell from the Global Carbon Project, has noted that the daily emissions from the "Indonesian fires had been equal to the daily emissions of the US, accelerating humanity's progress along the upward line of global emissions by about one to two years". What has happened in Indonesia should never be allowed to happen again, and provided we act now the IPCC has suggested that there is still time to limit climate change.

To see the destruction of the earth in such a callous and destructive manner is heart breaking. If the human species is to rise to the full height that is demanded by its dignity and its intelligence then we must act to save the planet now. It is clear that once we have destroyed this planet we do not simply get another one.

Mahatma Ghandi once quoted "the earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed". Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last wild animal killed, the last fish taken from the ocean, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, will man realise that you cannot eat money. Simply man has the power to turn the earth back into the earth again and the future survival of the planet now rests with us.