9 ms·

People don't cut the rainforest to produce palm oil. They cut it to make money and improve their livelihood in a political environment that places no value on r

by yholio 6y ago

People don't cut the rainforest to produce palm oil. They cut it to make money and improve their livelihood in a political environment that places no value on rainforest. If palm oil prices drop tomorrow to zero, those people will become even poorer, the value of the rainforest will remain zero, so they will cut it even further to plant the next best profitable cash crop not yet made obsolete by technology. This is a common pattern among green initiatives, trying to solve things by creating poverty and scarcity, expecting people far away to happily plow in manure so that they can buy a pair of jeans made from organic cotton at the latest pop-up fashion store. Survival is the most powerful force driving the human race forward. If you want to save the rain forest, there is a very simple trick to it: make sure the economy in the area is able to create 1000$/month environmentally sustainable jobs. At that labor price, survival farming and destroying the habitat does not pay, the palm oil farms will not find labor and will close down. Since in economic reality that's not at all a simple trick, we can suplement it with political measures, things that give value to the rainforest or strongly penalize its destruction: international agreements, subsidies and tariffs, sustainable tourism etc. But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.

mangecoeur 6y ago
This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild. I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    That would mean paying millions of "backwards" tribal communities millions and possibly billions of dollars which we can't afford (/s) - Governments everywhere Unfortunately, unless they're a voting group the government can maintain control over, nothing will be done. On the contrary, we have government ministers and bureaucrats around the world likely engaging and actively playing a role in the deforestation of rainforests.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
IronRanger 6y ago
The solution is even simpler than that: encourage poor people to have one or zero children. Cash handouts to encourage poor men to receive vasectomies for example.
- CommieDetector 6y ago
  Sperm granuloma A sperm granuloma is a lump of sperm that can cause small bumps or cysts that range from 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter in size. A person can experience multiple lesions. They don’t usually cause any symptoms. However, some men may have pain at the granuloma areas. Experts estimate 15 to 40 percent of men undergoing vasectomy experience a sperm granuloma. In some instances, a man may have to have the granuloma surgically removed.
- cies 6y ago
  > Cash handouts to encourage poor men to receive vasectomies for example. Yikes. There is a better alternative: it is very well known/studied that women that have a strong position and are educated have less children. One (poor; your words) man without a vasectomy can knock up many women. Hence I think it's better to focus on the women.
  - IronRanger 6y ago
    We can't wait decades for that process to play out. The environment doesn't have the time. Offer young poor men with one or zero children a vasectomy: and give them a bicycle, a shack with a light, a pressure cooker, a phone, a solar charger and battery. Total cost a few hundred dollars. This will shortcut what people ultimately materially want and would also fundamentally alleviate poverty.
    - cies 6y ago
      I totally cringe at your focus on poor/rich. Rich peeps are so much worse for the environment than the poor. Look at what an average Bangladeshi cranks out in CO2-equivalent, water use, landfill contribution and compare that to an average USer. Sure I get that having many children is a multiplier, but even if that average Bangladeshi couple has 4 they still dont contribute as much to environmental destruction as an average US couple without kids. My solution would be (as only picking on someone's solution is not nice in a discussion): only tax pollution, scarce resources and stuff that otherwise needs to be disincentivized. Only. So no tax on wholesome behavior like income from labor or housing. And yes: money is a scarce resource (tax the shit out of it over say 5 or 10MM USD). This will rearrange the economy to do good for us all + nature.
shmageggy 6y ago
Exactly. We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example. FTA: > "The real problem is cost, because natural palm oil is extremely cheap...” These kinds of statements are infuriating to me. It’s only cheap because we don’t pay for the negative externalities. If there were a monetary value associated with the forest, destroying it for a monocrop wouldn’t be so cheap. Markets are extremely useful things. We should use them.
- InfiniteRand 6y ago
  There are programs that approach deforestation from that perspective. The one that comes to my mind is REDD+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_deforestation_and_forest_degradation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_defore... These are not uncontroversial, but I think the idea makes sense.
- vram22 6y ago
  > We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example. From this HN thread of two months ago: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert usi... check out the influential book - The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates - that I mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550
nsoonhui 6y ago
That's one way to look at the problem ( we need to get people to stop destroying rainforest by giving them their livehood), another way is that once there is no value in destroying the rainforest, people will stop doing so. In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest. And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources. Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
- imtringued 6y ago
  The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.
- fy20 6y ago
  That's pretty much what has happened with the coal industry though. Coal is only used as a fuel because it is cheap, not because we need it [0]. And it's cheap because of goverment subsidies and political power, to continue providing coal miners in Wyoming earning $20/hour a job. [0] ...as a fuel. Yes there are other industrial uses of coal, but it is mostly used as a fuel.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Depends on the type of coal. I’m sure the coal we’re burning for heat isn’t the kind good for steelmaking which has a much higher value/ton.
- syshum 6y ago
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Isn’t loss of rainforest in Indonesia now due to large agrobusinesses cutting it down to build enormous plantations of palm oil trees? Deforestation in Madagascar is largely driven by dirt-poor subsistence farmers cutting down neighboring patches of rainforest in order to plant rice (and also Chinese firms logging precious woods for the furniture industry), but I thought Southeast Asia was a different case.
antman 6y ago
Theoretically yes, most of the time has nothing to do with locals. Local reservations were kicked away after fighting with government forces and interests affiliated with the respective government. If they had to give a larger payoff to the government party to save their land they would need a bit more than 1k. Locals can simply not create an economy of scale to support sustainably and consistently the palm oil conglomerates, we are talking deforestation the size of countries.
satya71 6y ago
If it's individuals doing the cutting, this would be a correct diagnosis. My understanding is that it's rather large corporations in weak legal regimes that are the main driver of this. Incentives for them may be different.
Sodaware 6y ago
> But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival. A couple of years ago I attended a talk on lemur conservation, and this was one of the key points they brought up. Habitat loss from slash-and-burn agriculture is a huge problem for lemur populations, but from a conservation point it's not effective to visit Madagascar and tell people not to do it. To the Malagasy you're just a rich tourist telling them off for living without offering any help. So instead they focus on education. Two of the initiatives they mentioned were teaching people more effective methods of cultivating food (such as setting up fisheries), and providing them with plans for more efficient wood-burning stoves.
- nwah1 6y ago
  Good idea in general, but the details matter. Teaching people how to make efficient wood burning stoves could fall prey to the Jevons Paradox. Ideally you would enable some other type of stove. They may lack the infrastructure for natural gas or propane, of course. But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    Rocket stoves can use pretty much any dry woody detritus, though not whole logs. They aren't useful for baking, but much nicer for boiling and pan frying.
  - Sodaware 6y ago
    > But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance. In a perfect world, yes. But this is the problem with conservation work in poor countries. 1.7% of US energy generation comes from solar [1], so going to Madagascar and saying "hey, you should be using solar instead of chopping down trees" rings a little hollow. [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
da39a3ee 6y ago
If palm oil farming becomes less profitable, then local people will transition, and some of them will transition to ecotourism or other forms of economic activity that are less damaging. I'm not sure that you need to sound so negative about developing artificial palm oil.
pcrh 6y ago
The massive palm oil plantations of Malaysia and Borneo are not being planted by poor locals, but by wealthy landowners.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  But the point is, poor locals are productively employed earning more than they would doing something else. (additionally, small farmers make up 40% of Indonesia's palm oil production) https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm-sustainably-external-support-necessary https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...
buzzy_hacker 6y ago
Just wanted to plug https://www.coolearth.org/ https://www.coolearth.org/, which takes this approach
- will_walker 6y ago
  I've been donating to this organization for several years. For the amount of money they raise, they seem different from other conservation-focused charities in working with people on the ground to find means of income that drive conservation economically. It's a thoughtful model that isn't just helicoptering money in (like direct giving), but actually getting involved with communities and raising their standard of living.
pge 6y ago
I agree with your comment, and it highlights for me a challenge I have seen in cleantech VC. For VCs coming from tech, there is often an implicit assumption that new product innovation is the solution. When dealing with climate change, however, new product innovation is often secondary to policy solutions.
snarf21 6y ago
I agree with you. We must focus on the underlying problems. I still think this helps underline our biggest problem. Our planet just can't support this many humans. We are selfish destructive creatures and demand will only go down with less of us. It is true with pollution, our oceans, our air, etc.
- kiliantics 6y ago
  This is just not true. The massive demand is artificially produced because of the logic of our economy. People don't need a whole new wardrobe and new smartphone each year but there are few long-lasting options on the market. People shouldn't have to own two cars per household so everyone can get to school and work on time but cities are designed to encourage the sale of cars. This is the underlying problem. We could make the world a lot less wasteful and easily support all the human life in a sustainable way. It just requires a drastic political and cultural shift. But we are told that humans in their nature are going to be this way -- even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary -- so that you never demand that things change. So please stop reinforcing this idea.
- ta2987 6y ago
  Ok, you go first.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kiba 6y ago
An ecologist Willie Smit and his foundation worked on something called the village hub, which is very cool! It started with harvesting juice from sugar palm trees and then goes through a whole plethora process that makes use of it in wide varieties of ways. [1] 1. https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18 https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18 Judging from comments from the rest of the thread, it looked like big palm oil plantation owners are doing this, not small time locals.
- vram22 6y ago
  E. F. Schumacher's work and writings such as his highly influential book, Small is Beautiful, about Appropriate Technology, are relevant here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful Mentions of him on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=e.%20f.%20schumacher&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... One by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882 He was influenced by Gandhi, among other people. Gandhi had done a lot of work on appropriate technology, like on charkhas (hand-operated spinning wheels), khadi (indigenous handloom cotton fabrics), in India, with a view to self-sufficiency of the people, apart from (but also related to) his more well known work on the non-violent feeedom movement which resulted in India's independence from Britain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi Such work started decades ago. If people research what has been done in their fields in the past, they can sometimes avoid rediscovering or reinventing a lot of wheels.
ooboe 6y ago
Jane Goodall has made the provision of supports and options for local people one of the core parts of her conservation efforts for chimpanzees and other wildlife.
sharaticku 6y ago
Unfortunately, the situation for many people living "there" (in Malaysia and Indonesia, primarily) is that their land is taken from them by palm oil conglomerates, and then they are forced into low-wage labor on the plantations. They went from self-sufficent to conditions that look like forced labor. The AP presented extensive reporting on this 3 months ago: https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-only-on-ap-f258329cd8ec06fb9b296ef7ee6f6e42 https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-o...

by yholio 6y ago

mangecoeur 6y ago

This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.

worldsayshi 6y ago
The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild. I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.
- fakedang 6y ago
  That would mean paying millions of "backwards" tribal communities millions and possibly billions of dollars which we can't afford (/s) - Governments everywhere Unfortunately, unless they're a voting group the government can maintain control over, nothing will be done. On the contrary, we have government ministers and bureaucrats around the world likely engaging and actively playing a role in the deforestation of rainforests.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

IronRanger 6y ago

The solution is even simpler than that: encourage poor people to have one or zero children. Cash handouts to encourage poor men to receive vasectomies for example.

CommieDetector 6y ago
Sperm granuloma A sperm granuloma is a lump of sperm that can cause small bumps or cysts that range from 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter in size. A person can experience multiple lesions. They don’t usually cause any symptoms. However, some men may have pain at the granuloma areas. Experts estimate 15 to 40 percent of men undergoing vasectomy experience a sperm granuloma. In some instances, a man may have to have the granuloma surgically removed.
cies 6y ago
> Cash handouts to encourage poor men to receive vasectomies for example. Yikes. There is a better alternative: it is very well known/studied that women that have a strong position and are educated have less children. One (poor; your words) man without a vasectomy can knock up many women. Hence I think it's better to focus on the women.
- IronRanger 6y ago
  We can't wait decades for that process to play out. The environment doesn't have the time. Offer young poor men with one or zero children a vasectomy: and give them a bicycle, a shack with a light, a pressure cooker, a phone, a solar charger and battery. Total cost a few hundred dollars. This will shortcut what people ultimately materially want and would also fundamentally alleviate poverty.
  - cies 6y ago
    I totally cringe at your focus on poor/rich. Rich peeps are so much worse for the environment than the poor. Look at what an average Bangladeshi cranks out in CO2-equivalent, water use, landfill contribution and compare that to an average USer. Sure I get that having many children is a multiplier, but even if that average Bangladeshi couple has 4 they still dont contribute as much to environmental destruction as an average US couple without kids. My solution would be (as only picking on someone's solution is not nice in a discussion): only tax pollution, scarce resources and stuff that otherwise needs to be disincentivized. Only. So no tax on wholesome behavior like income from labor or housing. And yes: money is a scarce resource (tax the shit out of it over say 5 or 10MM USD). This will rearrange the economy to do good for us all + nature.

shmageggy 6y ago

Exactly. We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example. FTA: > "The real problem is cost, because natural palm oil is extremely cheap...” These kinds of statements are infuriating to me. It’s only cheap because we don’t pay for the negative externalities. If there were a monetary value associated with the forest, destroying it for a monocrop wouldn’t be so cheap. Markets are extremely useful things. We should use them.

InfiniteRand 6y ago
There are programs that approach deforestation from that perspective. The one that comes to my mind is REDD+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_deforestation_and_forest_degradation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_defore... These are not uncontroversial, but I think the idea makes sense.
vram22 6y ago
> We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example. From this HN thread of two months ago: Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert usi... check out the influential book - The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates - that I mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550

nsoonhui 6y ago

That's one way to look at the problem ( we need to get people to stop destroying rainforest by giving them their livehood), another way is that once there is no value in destroying the rainforest, people will stop doing so. In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest. And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources. Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

imtringued 6y ago
The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.
fy20 6y ago
That's pretty much what has happened with the coal industry though. Coal is only used as a fuel because it is cheap, not because we need it [0]. And it's cheap because of goverment subsidies and political power, to continue providing coal miners in Wyoming earning $20/hour a job. [0] ...as a fuel. Yes there are other industrial uses of coal, but it is mostly used as a fuel.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Depends on the type of coal. I’m sure the coal we’re burning for heat isn’t the kind good for steelmaking which has a much higher value/ton.
syshum 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Isn’t loss of rainforest in Indonesia now due to large agrobusinesses cutting it down to build enormous plantations of palm oil trees? Deforestation in Madagascar is largely driven by dirt-poor subsistence farmers cutting down neighboring patches of rainforest in order to plant rice (and also Chinese firms logging precious woods for the furniture industry), but I thought Southeast Asia was a different case.

antman 6y ago

Theoretically yes, most of the time has nothing to do with locals. Local reservations were kicked away after fighting with government forces and interests affiliated with the respective government. If they had to give a larger payoff to the government party to save their land they would need a bit more than 1k. Locals can simply not create an economy of scale to support sustainably and consistently the palm oil conglomerates, we are talking deforestation the size of countries.

satya71 6y ago

If it's individuals doing the cutting, this would be a correct diagnosis. My understanding is that it's rather large corporations in weak legal regimes that are the main driver of this. Incentives for them may be different.

Sodaware 6y ago

> But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival. A couple of years ago I attended a talk on lemur conservation, and this was one of the key points they brought up. Habitat loss from slash-and-burn agriculture is a huge problem for lemur populations, but from a conservation point it's not effective to visit Madagascar and tell people not to do it. To the Malagasy you're just a rich tourist telling them off for living without offering any help. So instead they focus on education. Two of the initiatives they mentioned were teaching people more effective methods of cultivating food (such as setting up fisheries), and providing them with plans for more efficient wood-burning stoves.

nwah1 6y ago
Good idea in general, but the details matter. Teaching people how to make efficient wood burning stoves could fall prey to the Jevons Paradox. Ideally you would enable some other type of stove. They may lack the infrastructure for natural gas or propane, of course. But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  Rocket stoves can use pretty much any dry woody detritus, though not whole logs. They aren't useful for baking, but much nicer for boiling and pan frying.
- Sodaware 6y ago
  > But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance. In a perfect world, yes. But this is the problem with conservation work in poor countries. 1.7% of US energy generation comes from solar [1], so going to Madagascar and saying "hey, you should be using solar instead of chopping down trees" rings a little hollow. [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
  - Scoundreller 6y ago

da39a3ee 6y ago

If palm oil farming becomes less profitable, then local people will transition, and some of them will transition to ecotourism or other forms of economic activity that are less damaging. I'm not sure that you need to sound so negative about developing artificial palm oil.

pcrh 6y ago

The massive palm oil plantations of Malaysia and Borneo are not being planted by poor locals, but by wealthy landowners.

missedthecue 6y ago
But the point is, poor locals are productively employed earning more than they would doing something else. (additionally, small farmers make up 40% of Indonesia's palm oil production) https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm-sustainably-external-support-necessary https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...

buzzy_hacker 6y ago

Just wanted to plug https://www.coolearth.org/ https://www.coolearth.org/, which takes this approach

will_walker 6y ago
I've been donating to this organization for several years. For the amount of money they raise, they seem different from other conservation-focused charities in working with people on the ground to find means of income that drive conservation economically. It's a thoughtful model that isn't just helicoptering money in (like direct giving), but actually getting involved with communities and raising their standard of living.

pge 6y ago

I agree with your comment, and it highlights for me a challenge I have seen in cleantech VC. For VCs coming from tech, there is often an implicit assumption that new product innovation is the solution. When dealing with climate change, however, new product innovation is often secondary to policy solutions.

snarf21 6y ago

I agree with you. We must focus on the underlying problems. I still think this helps underline our biggest problem. Our planet just can't support this many humans. We are selfish destructive creatures and demand will only go down with less of us. It is true with pollution, our oceans, our air, etc.

kiliantics 6y ago
This is just not true. The massive demand is artificially produced because of the logic of our economy. People don't need a whole new wardrobe and new smartphone each year but there are few long-lasting options on the market. People shouldn't have to own two cars per household so everyone can get to school and work on time but cities are designed to encourage the sale of cars. This is the underlying problem. We could make the world a lot less wasteful and easily support all the human life in a sustainable way. It just requires a drastic political and cultural shift. But we are told that humans in their nature are going to be this way -- even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary -- so that you never demand that things change. So please stop reinforcing this idea.
ta2987 6y ago
Ok, you go first.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kiba 6y ago

An ecologist Willie Smit and his foundation worked on something called the village hub, which is very cool! It started with harvesting juice from sugar palm trees and then goes through a whole plethora process that makes use of it in wide varieties of ways. [1] 1. https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18 https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18 Judging from comments from the rest of the thread, it looked like big palm oil plantation owners are doing this, not small time locals.

vram22 6y ago
E. F. Schumacher's work and writings such as his highly influential book, Small is Beautiful, about Appropriate Technology, are relevant here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful Mentions of him on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=e.%20f.%20schumacher&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... One by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882 He was influenced by Gandhi, among other people. Gandhi had done a lot of work on appropriate technology, like on charkhas (hand-operated spinning wheels), khadi (indigenous handloom cotton fabrics), in India, with a view to self-sufficiency of the people, apart from (but also related to) his more well known work on the non-violent feeedom movement which resulted in India's independence from Britain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi Such work started decades ago. If people research what has been done in their fields in the past, they can sometimes avoid rediscovering or reinventing a lot of wheels.

ooboe 6y ago

Jane Goodall has made the provision of supports and options for local people one of the core parts of her conservation efforts for chimpanzees and other wildlife.

sharaticku 6y ago

Unfortunately, the situation for many people living "there" (in Malaysia and Indonesia, primarily) is that their land is taken from them by palm oil conglomerates, and then they are forced into low-wage labor on the plantations. They went from self-sufficent to conditions that look like forced labor. The AP presented extensive reporting on this 3 months ago: https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-only-on-ap-f258329cd8ec06fb9b296ef7ee6f6e42 https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-o...