More Palm Oil hypocrisy

Look at this jungle.

Look at those vines, the way they twine around the trees, swaIIowing everything.

Nature's cruel, Staros.

Lieutenant colonel Tall in The Thin Red Line

A millennium ago North Western Europe was covered in forest. The ancestors of modern environmentalists cleared those forests and replaced them with pastures to graze sheep and cattle. and as a result Western Europe became wealthy.

A result of wealth is that when it is no longer necessary to hard scrabble in the dirt just to survive societies can support artists, scientists and thinkers. So the societies of Western Europe prospered and grew wealthier.

And as life became more secure they also became more humane along the way - because they could afford to be.

Look at this story the SST this morning: Rainforest dies for your cattle feed, NZ farmers warned and its companion piece: Our destructive ways. It seems clear cut -no? We should not be buying Palm oil or its derivative products!

Wrong!

You see the people who are creating and working in Palm Oil Plantations do not have the benefit of having a 1000 years of wealth behind them. Their societies cannot afford education, health care and all the other things we take for granted. To get them they have to build wealth with the resources they have.

And palm oil is a boon to them. Its an opportunity to move beyond hard scrabble survival, to enjoy a higher quality of life and build a better future for their children.

The only reason pampered, over privileged western environmentalists can even think about whining about clearing rain forest is that their ancestors did exactly the same thing 1000 years ago in Europe and they are the beneficiaries of that.

The biggest irony of all is now the West is wealthy the forests Europe and North America are recovering, they are recovering because those societies can afford that luxury along with the luxury of supporting newspaper reporters and eviromentalist agitators.