Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Although we live in an integrated world, as the disruption to the global oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz show, we don’t seem to realise that when we buy food, cosmetics, cleaning products and pet food that we are almost certainly contributing to the demise of the ecological sustainability of the biosphere. What this means is that we are in a direct, measurable and tangible way undermining our children’s and grandchildren’s future.

No doubt some readers will feel affronted by this deduction, thinking ‘I would do absolutely anything for my family and those I care about’. Would you, however, forego buying products with palm oil in them? If you want to be thought of as a good ancestor who lived in compliance with the regenerative capacities of nonhuman nature then your response would be affirmative.

What would not using products with palm oil entail? As 72% of the global food market relies on palm oil it would mean not eating most types of biscuit, cake, crisps, breakfast cereals, breads, spreads and ice cream. If you already abstain from eating these on taste or health grounds would you forego using most brands of tooth paste, soap, shampoo, facial cream, lipstick as well as many cleaning products? In the case of the latter 18% of cosmetics and cleaning products use palm oil. If you drive a petrol or diesel vehicle will you cease to drive it on learning that legislation requires that petrol and diesel is composed of 10% biofuels and that 10% to 15% of this comes from palm oil?

As our dependency on palm oil shows fossil fuels are not the only commodity that enmeshes us in the web of the global economy and thus widespread ecological destruction and structural injustices.

Palm oil originated in the rainforests of the Guinea coast in West Africa and has been used for millennium by local communities for cooking, healing and rituals. It was also traded as traces of it have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back 5,000 years. It was not, however, until the nineteenth century that European colonialists in Africa realised its versatile properties and transplanted it to Indonesia and Malaysia where it is widely grown today.

Although palm oil is beginning to make its ecologically disruptive presence felt in tropical Africa, central and south America, it is Indonesia and Malaysia account for the vast majority of the palm oil used around the world. Malaysia supplies 25% of the market while Indonesia 60%.

There is nothing ecologically wrong with palm oil per se. (Biologically it is not classified as a tree.) The problem is they are planted in vast regimented formations on land that has been cleared of bio-rich forests either by bulldozing them down or turning them into ash by setting them alight. The loss of these forests is immeasurable as it results in the extinction of flora including some not known to science but familiar to the Indigenous communities who use them in an ecologically sustainable way.

In Indonesia palm oil plantations have led to the catastrophic demise of the Sumatra tiger, forest elephant, forest rhino and the three species of orangutan. It has led to soil erosion and water contamination through the indiscriminate use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Indigenous people in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua have been particularly affected losing much of the forest that sustained them physically, psychologically and culturally.

Losing a culturally significant site is important as verified by the August 2017 and November 2024 protests in the Sandy Row area of Belfast over the dismantling of the Boyne Bridge as part of the construction of Grand Central Station. Between 2006 and 2008 there were sustained local and international protests against the building of the M3 motorway through the culturally important landscape in the vicinity of the Hill of Tara, County Meath.

To grasp the importance sites of cultural significance are to our sense of identity imagine how you would you feel if a company acquired an iconic site such as Devenish Island in County Fermanagh and without prior and informed consent levelled what is left of the monastic buildings and planted row upon row of gooseberry bushes. Likewise, how would you feel if a graveyard where your loved ones are buried was acquired by a company who bulldozed away the graves in order to use the land to grow a commercial crop.

This is what has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia since the nineteenth century and as Muhamad Isnur informs us in The Jakarta Post, 12 May 2026, it is happening on a large scale today in Papua, one of the 17,024 islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Here Indigenous communities are losing their land to corporations with the active support of the government and military.

Although Indonesia and Malaysia are a long way from Ireland if we use palm oil we are complicit in the suffering caused to the people and nonhuman life forms in both countries even if we are unaware of the devastation caused by the palm oil plantations. Like it or not we are entangled in the web of international commerce simply by spending money.

Is there a way out of the conundrum of enjoying the comforts, conveniences and opportunities offered by modernity which inescapably entails us violating our values and principles? This is something we all need to ask ourselves whilst examining plausible resolutions.

First though we need to see what is wrong with how we live as we won’t attempt to fix what we don’t know is broken. To do this we need to breach the membrane of our enculturalisation and have an idea of what we are looking for in the foliage of the taken for granted.

Education in the sense of training our minds to see the consequences of our behaviour on the disempowered as well as the capacity of nonhuman life forms to live according to their endowments is critical. As all things are connected when we harm others we harm ourselves.

– – – – – –