BORNEO — The Price of Palm Oil

I traveled to Borneo intentionally during the height of the 2015 fire season, which lasted over two-months between September and November to document what was being ignored by the international media. Millions of hectares were going up in flames. Afire releasing a toxic plumes of smoke into the global atmosphere that has been called the greatest human-cause environmental disaster. That noxious air pollution, euphemistically called “haze”, contained a witch’s brew of poisons, including arsenic, ozone, formaldehyde CO2, and others. Eventually it equaled the 24-hour carbon output of the United States. The 2015 fires added to an ongoing environmental disaster: decades of existing deforestation by corporate palm oil, timber and other agribusiness operators, further imperilling critically endangered species like the orang-utan.