Nestle Corporation Under Fire from Greenpeace
The world’s largest food company, Nestle, has been at the centre of some growing and very heated controversy over the past few weeks with environmental organisation Greenpeace sparking a crusade tying Nestle to the annihilation of rainforests in Indonesia through one of its palm oil suppliers.
The controversy is based on the fact that Nestle gets its palm oil from the Sinar Mas company in Indonesia who destroys the natural forests in order to have room to plant the tropical palm plant. Once Nestle was convinced that the activists at Greenpeace were correct in their allegations about the forest destruction, it has dropped their association with that company. The problem has not gone away for the big corporation however, as it still buys its palm oil from Cargill, which in turn, also gets its supply from Sinar Mas.
Nestle was successful in the removal of one of Greenpeace’s videos from the popular YouTube site relating to the issue, but the video spread over the Internet, while Facebook and Twitter were soon flooded with massive messages of protest. In the beginning, Nestle’s top personnel dismissed the activity which only made things worse, resulting in the Swiss food giant receiving nearly a quarter of a million emails regarding the issue.
Rainforest Destruction
As our fragile planet travels on through space we are beginning to understand that everything that is alive is in interconnected harmony, and that damage to one part of our biosphere, for example Rainforest destruction, can have damaging ripple effects in other parts of our fragile ecosystem, including further deforestation and global warming.
Accelerating deforestation is particularly alarming. This is because the destruction of the last few remaining great forests is the result of our own deliberate effort, as opposed to climate change or some other convenient alibi. Setting aside the more obvious consequences of ozone depletion and global warming, rainforest destruction is especially worrying because it irrevocably extinguishes unique sub-biospheres that are unlikely to be rebuilt within the time frame left, according to some more sober global warming predictions.
Every deliberate act of rainforest destruction is a bizarre rehearsal for the global warming that will follow if the custodians of the earth cannot mend their ways. Deforestation destroys not just a piece of forest canopy, but also a portion of our fragile world. This is because the smaller trees and plants that the canopy previously sheltered cannot survive the direct rays of the sun, and so wither and die. By an ironic quirk of nature, young forest giants, too, do not survive without the initial protection of that lesser canopy. As a result an entire ecosystem vanishes forever, as do the human families, the mammals, the birds and the insects that once lived in harmony within it, leaving our planet a shamefully poorer place.
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