0.8
January 15, 2014

4 Headlines we should give a Care About.

1. Palm Oil Company Fined for Burning Only Place on Earth Where Tigers, Elephants, Rhinos, & Orangutans Live Together in the Wild – Indonesian court finds ‘PT Kallista Alam’ firm guilty of illegally burning large swathes of Sumatran Forest. (ens-newswire.com) PS: The company didn’t even show up at court.

You can learn more about it here http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/palm-oil.php

For bodycare, Lush doesn’t use Palm Oil. For food, a list of products that do not use palm oil can be found here.

“Deforestation for the purpose of making palm oil is one of the insidious effects of good-intentioned movements such as anti-trans fats (and thus partially hydrogenated oils) and veganism–palm oil’s desirable quality is that it stays solid at room temperature, as partially hydrogenated oils do, and as butter does, so now we have products like oreos and earth balance (every vegan’s favorite butter-alternative) containing palm oil, and consumers buying these products are indirectly supporting deforestation like this.

The ultimate takeaway is that our eating habits here have wide-ranging effects the world over. The best thing to do is to eat as local as possible, and to buy as few products with over, say, 4 ingredients as possible.”

2. A Doctor Has Spent Decades Dressing Up Like A Homeless Man. The Reason Is Fantastic:

 

3. Overfishing doesn’t just shrink fish populations—they often don’t recover afterwards (qz.com)

So… what eats jellyfish? Sea turtles, apparently. And sea turtles have been dying because they eat plastic bags that they think are jellyfish. Well, f*ck…

Sea turtles also have problems with fishing nets. While there are such things as turtle excluder devices that allow them to escape a net, they’re not mandatory in many places, and bigger sea turtles (like loggerheads and leatherbacks) are often too big to get through the “escape hatch” (though it’s getting better).

But before turtle excluder devices, it was shrimp trawling that was killing sea turtles – far more so than plastic bags. And it’s still around 150,000 sea turtles a year caught in nets. (Source)

If you absolutely have to buy fish, then make sure to look for this marking:

http://i.imgur.com/0KK3C5T.png

More information:

http://www.msc.org/

Also please check out WWF’s consumer guide for your nation:

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/conservation/marine/sustainable_fishing/sustainable_seafood/seafood_guides/

Thank you!

 

4. Using real corks (not the plastic kind) helps protect endangered species.

Leave a Thoughtful Comment
X

Read 0 comments and reply

Top Contributors Latest

Elephant Journal  |  Contribution: 1,510,385