There’s a village across the Sekonyer river, just outside the national park. People there used to be farmers, but there is a palm oil Plantation nearby and the fertilizer runoff and the extremely high water use for Palm oil production has poisoned their soil, so no more farming. When the villagers protested, the farm oil workers came and burned the national park ranger’s house to make clear that opposition to the palm oil industry is not welcome.
55% of Borneo’s rainforest is already lost to palm oil plantations, and also gold and coal mining. When you fly over Borneo, you see the large swaths of countryside with the regular grids of palm oil trees, where rain forests used to be.
So, next time you think about buying that highly processed palm oil product we call margarine (and my grandmother called war butter), protect the environment and get butter instead. 
