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Tuesday, December 25, 2018

DNA Tests Make Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land

Important, critical read pertaining to DNA testing which has become so popular today with 23andMe and ancestry.com.  Key quote:

At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are—something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.

As Aviva Chomsky maintains, by reviving "long-held ideas about purity and authenticity," these tests are the modern "race science" of today that has the impact of reinscribing constructions of race, as well as erasing our history with respect to "conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world."  Read on.

-Angela Valenzuela

DNA Tests Make Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land

Reviving race science plays into centuries of oppression.


Amid the barrage of racistanti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped US-Native American relations has no relevance to today’s realities.
Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to “prove” her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.
The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it’s true that the it’s-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects 19th-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a 21st-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.
Today’s policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair “privileges” offered to a racially defined group and so “discrimination” against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the ICWA (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.
PROFITING BY RECREATING RACE
Let’s start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and profits from, a 21st-century reformulation of race. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations. “Who do you think you are?” asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer, the company promises, lies in your genes.
Such businesses eschew the actual term “race” in their literature. They claim instead that DNA reveals “ancestry composition” and “ethnicity.” In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the “ethnicities” they identify bear an eerie resemblance to the “races” identified by European scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce scientific-looking “reports” that contain purportedly exact percentages linking consumers to places as specific as “Sardinia” or as broad as “East Asia.”
At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make upthe vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are—something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.
IS THERE ANY SCIENCE BEHIND IT?
Although all humans share 99.9 percent of our DNA, there are some markers that exhibit variations. It’s these markers that the testers study, relying on the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it, “No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9 percent alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1 percent of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race.”
Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental—and racialized—misunderstanding of how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains discrete and measurable percentages of the “blood” and DNA of our two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can’t. As science journalist Carl Zimmer explains, “DNA is not a liquid that can be broken down into microscopic drops.… We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each grandparent—but only on average.… If you pick one of your ancestors from 10 generations back, the odds are around 50 percent that you carry any DNA from him or her. The odds get even worse beyond that.”
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world—and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them.
So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic material for the good of “science.” In fact, when it comes to one DNA testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the geographical origins of those who have contributed to its “Native American” database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. “In North America,” the company blandly explains, “Native American ancestry tends to be five or more generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains.” In other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map altogether.
THE ANCESTRY INDUSTRY AND THE DISAPPEARING INDIAN
The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity. For much of US history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would “vanish,” at least in part through biological dilution. New England’s native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and tribal status in the 19th century on the grounds that they were too racially mixed to be “authentic” Indians.
As historian Jean O’Brien has explained, “Insistence on ‘blood purity’ as a central criterion of ‘authentic’ Indianness reflected the scientific racism that prevailed in the 19th century. New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds.” The supposed “disappearance” of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.
However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O’Brien points out, “complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession that English colonists accomplished.… Even as Indians continued to reckon membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship, New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying Indian persistence.”
Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific category allowed whites to deny Indian existence—and now allow them to make biological claims about “Indian” identity. Until recently, such claims, as in Senator Warren’s case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today, the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic “proof” of such a background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or protection of Indian rights.
The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an individual’s ancestors. It’s an idea that plays directly into the hands of right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call “identity politics”—and the notion that “minorities” are becoming unduly privileged.
Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of Donald Trump’s mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and discrimination—not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.
REVIVING RACE TO UNDERMINE NATIVE RIGHTS
Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and identity are, in fact, the products of history. “Native Americans” came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people’s assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry’s claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Let’s look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the courts, and North Dakota’s Republican-dominated state legislature. But all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European colonists arrived in “the New World” into “Native Americans,” and imply that Native American historical rights are meaningless.
The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they “had existed as a distinct community since the 1620s.” In other words, federal recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe’s drive to build a casino on its newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality: that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions that the Indians of Massachusetts were not “real” or “authentic” because of centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state’s 19th-century legislature prefigured just such a 21st-century backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such “distinctions of race and caste.”
In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first Native American to hold that position, “paved the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era,” a 20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government attempted to “terminate” Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to “assimilate” them. The new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the Trump years, the decision portends “a new termination era,” or even a possible “extermination era,” for the country’s Native Americans.
Meanwhile, on October 4th, a US District Court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while promoting “assimilation.” Indian child removal continued into the late 20th century through a federally sponsored “Indian Adoption Project,” as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the foster care system.
According to the ICWA, “An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions.” States, it added, “have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families.” The Act gave tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents, kin, or at least within the tribe.
The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized “Indian” as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign collective rights. It was based on the Constitution’s implicit acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court’s ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale, like the rationale behind the Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.
Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is this: Thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state’s reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names, their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately homeless.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens—the right to vote—whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a convenient denial by those Republicans that the country’s history had, in fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North Dakota’s Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm election.)
These three political developments downplay Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that history created today’s realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests to claim “Native American” genes or blood trivializes this same history.
The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should, however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.
Aviva ChomskyAviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Beacon Press, 2014).

Trump tweets: I'm all alone (poor me)







An aloneness of one's own making.  



Sad.





-Angela

Monday, December 24, 2018

INDONESIA’S RAINFORESTS MAY SEEM VERY FAR AWAY FROM THE U.S., yet their destruction is affecting the whole world

Friends, 

This holiday season, let's keep Indonesia in mind.  These people on the coastline, many of them holiday tourists, we caught off guard by Saturday's tsunami that you can read about here.

While learning about the tsunami, I came across this report on Indonesia and other efforts by the Sierra Club.  A lot to ponder in light of the perspective on just important and valuable Indonesia is to the planet as expressed below.

Happy to share several links to organizations that are helping out the victims.  

Consider making a donation, as well, to the Sierra Club—or any environmental organization of your preference.  We must think in a planetary way if we are to survive as a human species.  

-Angela Valenzuela

 INDONESIA’S RAINFORESTS MAY SEEM VERY FAR AWAY FROM THE U.S., yet their destruction is affecting the whole world. They are the third largest rainforest region on Earth; vital in regulating the climate and critical to our future in a dangerously warming world.
What happens to forests happens to all of us, and Greenpeace is bringing all of our best strategies, strengths, and skills to the fight to stop Indonesia’s rainforests from being further destroyed by the expanding palm oil industry. Over the last few months we have brought high, global visibility to the issue—with the release of reports on Greenpeace’s in-depth investigations and exposés, the use of creative communication to inspire people to take action, and the deployment of the full power of our movement to effect change.
As we defend forests overseas to fight global warming, we are striving for climate leadership here at home. While the Trump Administration and its regressive policies require our most determined resistance, Greenpeace is simultaneously pushing for real climate leadership in California to create the progress we need to address global warming.
Greenpeace pulled out all the stops in the run up to Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit, using creative direct action and grassroots organizing tactics to demand that before he leaves office, he acts as the climate leader that California, the country, and the world urgently need. We’ll continue to call for him to stop new permits for oil and gas extraction, phase out fossil fuels and related infrastructure, and move the state towards a fair and just 100% renewable energy economy to model climate action not only in California, but for other states and countries as well.
Your support is what makes it possible for Greenpeace to go the distance in every fight we take on. Whether it’s saving rainforests and critically endangered animals, protecting vulnerable marine ecosystems, taking on the world’s biggest corporations, or any other issue affecting our earth, you are the reason Greenpeace can be a powerful force for a better future for people and the planet.
For a green and peaceful future,
Signature of Annie Leonard, Executive Director
Annie Leonard, Executive Director
Greenpeace USA

OUR MISSION

Greenpeace, Inc. is the leading independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful direct action and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future. Please visit greenpeace.org to learn more about Greenpeace, Inc., and greenpeacefund.org to learn more about Greenpeace Fund, Inc.
This update is intended to provide a comprehensive summary of all Greenpeace campaign activities. Please note that all donations to Greenpeace Fund, Inc. were solely used in connection with 501(c)(3) permissible activities. ISSN: 8899- 0190. Unless otherwise noted, all contents are © Greenpeace, Inc.
© Greenpeace / Geoff Reid

Notes From An Indonesian Activist Who Occupied Wilmar's Palm Oil Refinery

By Waya Maweru
As part of our recent global campaign push to protect rainforests, our colleagues in Indonesia staged a superb direct action at Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil traders’ oil refinery in Bitung, North Sulawesi. On September 25th, thirty brave activists scaled 20 meter high containers to deliver a message to the industry, to stop destroying rainforests for palm oil. We are honored to introduce you to Waya, one of our amazing activists. She wrote this piece the morning of the action.
I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS A KID, Papa always took me back to his hometown to see Oma, my grandmother, every Christmas. The town Papa is from is called Manado, in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, and it’s so beautiful. Like Bali, where I study now, but less well-known.
Once, Papa invited us to travel far out of the city to Lembeh Island, famous for its underwater riches. When we were on the island we could enjoy the view of the city of Bitung in the distance, with a beautiful view of Mount Klabat on the other side.
This memory from my childhood makes my heart wince, knowing that Bitung has since become a home for forest destruction.
When I also consider that makers of everyday products like Ritz, Colgate, and Dove are contributing to the loss of the home of the Cenderawasih bird in Papua, the cute Orangutan in Kalimantan, and the Sumatran Tiger, which is getting closer to extinction, I feel even worse.
I was enjoying the sunset on Kuta Beach, Bali, thinking this over when I realized I can’t keep quiet. I want to act. I want to do something about it, to stand up to these brands and tell them to immediately #DropDirtyPalmOil.
Today, my breathing is unsteady and my palms are sweating. When the rubber boat slides from Lembeh island, my body will move from where I keep the good memories. I’ll see Bitung in the distance, with its tanks of dirty palm oil. I’ll shout, “this is not the scene I want!”
I want to see the beautiful rainforest. I want to see the wildlife of Indonesia’s pride move swiftly and dance freely in our forests. I want my life to be clean from dirty palm oil. I want dirty producers to change straight away, and no longer trash our forests.
I am Waya Maweru. I am an Indonesian woman of Manado blood. With full awareness, I will stand to fight for the future of Indonesia’s forests.
And today, standing at the doors of the world’s dirtiest palm oil giant—me and other Greenpeace activist friends from various parts of the world—are asking makers of products like Ritz, Colgate, and Dove to #DropDirtyPlamOil, drop Wilmar.
Shortly after this action, Sulawesi felt the horrible impact of an earthquake and Tsunami. We hold the people of Indonesia in our hearts and send our sincere condolences to the victims of Donggala and Palu, Central Sulawesi.
Take action for the forests by adding your name to our petition at greenpeace.org/usa/dirtypalmoil
 
Waya Maweru
Student, Barista, and Greenpeace Indonesia activist
© Nugroho Adi Putera / Greenpeace
Globe Image

Capturing Hearts and Calling 

Millions to Action

By Diana Ruiz
As a way to raise awareness of the plight of orangutans in Indonesia
 and the links to deforestation, we introduced the world to an 
adorable little character named Rang-tan. In a 90-second 
film we tell the story about a little girl and her orangutan friend
 forced from her forest home. Within just two weeks, Rang-tan 
had already been viewed more than 2.5 million times, capturing 
the hearts of many.
Rang-tan shows the direct link between palm oil destruction in 
the forests of Indonesia and our shopping carts. Indonesian 
rainforests are destroyed to grow row upon row of dirty palm oil 
\found in everyday products that we all use. Palm oil is a key 
ingredient in snack foods, cosmetics, and cleaning products—
this vegetable oil is in over half the products sold in supermarkets, 
meaning it’s in pretty much everything we use daily.

HOLDING CORPORATIONS ACCOUNTABLE

Greenpeace is campaigning for big companies to take responsibility 
and make sure that the palm oil used in their products isn’t made at
 the greatest cost of our forests.
Global consumer companies have made multiple promises, pledges,
 and commitments to cut their ties with companies that are 
destroying rainforests. The corporate executives of leading 
consumer brands like Unilever, Mondelez, and Nestlé committed to 
protect forests and address climate change. They pledged to clean 
up their palm oil supply chains (including soya, beef, pulp & paper, 
and timber) by 2020. Meaning that they would not buy palm oil from 
companies that are destroying forests. Yet despite these promises, 
palm oil continues to be one of the leading drivers of deforestation.
The time is now for companies to fix the problem they created before it’s too late. We are less than 450 days from 2020 and deforestation shows no sign of slowing down.
While company sustainability guidelines now include “no 
deforestation, no peat, no exploitation” (NDPE) policies on paper, 
they lack tangible enforcement on the ground. Rainforest destruction for 
palm oil is a disaster for wildlife, people, and our climate. These 
precious forests are essential to our survival.

WHAT DO WE LOSE IF BUSINESS AS USUAL CONTINUES?

Indonesia’s rainforests are rapidly disappearing. It’s gotten so bad 
that, between 2012 and 2015 roughly one soccer field of forests was lost every 25 seconds.
The rapid rate of deforestation has greatly impacted the wildlife 
found in these richly diverse forests. All three types of orangutans, 
the Bornean, Sumatran, and recently discovered Tapanuli species 
qualify as critically endangered.
These forests are also crucial to restoring our climate. Land use 
change from tropical deforestation accounts for 12% of global 
carbon emissions. While forests represent huge carbon sinks for 
our global climate, recent studies have shown that deforestation 
rates of tropical forests are now emitting more carbon then they 
absorb.
So, for the love of forests and orangutans, join us to put pressure 
on these big companies to create the sea change needed to reform
the industry.
 
In an explosive investigative report, Final Countdown, Greenpeace reveals that some of the world’s best-known brands are still doing business with palm oil suppliers linked to rainforest destruction and human rights abuses. The report documents extensive deforestation and human rights abuses by 25 of the worst palm oil producer groups that are supplying palm oil traders and consumer companies.
To learn more and watch the Rang-tan film, visit greenpeace.org/usa/rangtan
 
Diana Ruiz
Greenpeace USA Palm Oil Campaigner