After a lunch discussion, I decided to research the comment that a bull shark attack had once occurred in Lake Michigan. It appeared to be such an impossible thought that we all scoffed at the idea of sharks infesting a freshwater lake so far inland.

I found an online site that claimed that a bull shark attack did occur in Lake Michigan in 1955, but it was never verified.  A shark attack in Lake Michigan? There's speculation that it's all a practical joke. Even if the story was true, it would have been such a rare occurrence as to be statistically insignificant.

The above illustrates the propensity of green groups like the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and even zoos like the Melbourne Zoo to scrape the bottom of the barrel in coming up with their lie-a-minute diatribes against palm oil.

Just why palm oil should attract so much vitriol from such seemingly diverse organizations is certainly baffling, when we consider the fact that palm oil is probably the most inherently sustainable of all edible oilseed crops. Planted on only 0.23% of the world’s agricultural land and yet palm oil accounts for an amazing 30% of the global edible oil output!

Therein is the crux for the baffling anti-palm oil stance adopted by these anti-palm oil rabble rousers. It is the incredible hyper yields of palm oil which has catapulted palm oil from third world commodity to market leading global edible oil export that has attracted the vitriol. Its competitors can hardly hope to compete with palm oil on the open market for such hyper yields also means that palm oil prices would be lower than its competitors.

Throw in the innately heart friendly profile of palm oil and any competitor would be worried.  Perhaps those two facts and those facts alone would clue in any objective observer that something doesn’t jive with all the anti-palm oil hype that regularly sprouts from the pages of the international media who, it appears just regurgitates the press releases of these “diverse organizations” without doing the customary due diligence and investigation that such media appear to reserve only for third world dictators considered unfriendly or hostile to western interests such as Ghadafi and Sadam Hussein.

Perhaps, the powers-that-be who are funding these “diverse organizations” have carefully planned and selected a procession of “diverse organizations” to carry the anti-palm oil torch to mask their real intentions and to give the impression that opposition to palm oil is wide ranging and widespread! Clever if that is the case but that would also mean that the international media are naïve and have been led on a long, winding and tortuous ride by the anti-palm oil pied piper and financier of the cleverly woven web of anti-palm oil campaigns.

However, if there really is a web of lies and deceit centrally planned by the evil empire, it is in the selection of the “diverse organizations” and the execution of the plans is found wanting. If the intention was to give the impression that these diverse organizations are working independently, they could have recruited more credible and articulate mouthpieces. As things stand, these mouthpieces betray such a deficit in intellect that they lay grand scheme of the evil empire bare and transparent.   

Take RAN. Writing in RAN’s blog, The Understory, Hillary Lehr quotes a Jakarta Post report that 4 orangutan skulls have been discovered in a palm oil plantation in Central Kalimantan (Borneo) together with the buried remains of an orangutan in another plantation in East Kalimantan.

Displaying a twisted leap of logic that would have done most imbeciles proud, Ms Lehr tries to equate the discovery of 5 orangutan remains due to poaching as proof of the "role of palm oil plantations in the illegal souvenir trade of the skulls of endangered orangutans."  That's analogical to labeling the entire New York City as a city of murderers just because 5 bodies are discovered in NYC!

Poaching is despicable and poachers should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

However, it is intemperate for Ms Lehr or RAN to use emotive language such as "bloodied palm oil" to pressure Cargill on their palm oil import trade.

It should be observed that RAN is the same organization who had to sheepishly remove from their website their scurrilous allegation that the orangutan would be extinct by 2011. Of course, they had to remove that wild allegation as the year 2011 is upon us and the orangutan population in the wild has grown rather than go extinct as they'd predicted, when new tribes of more than 2000 wild apes were found in the East Kalimantan province of Indonesia, as reported by National Geographic. With roughly 50,000 orangutans thought to remain in the wild, the new find could add 5 percent to the world’s known orangutan numbers, said Erik Meijaard, senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia.

They remain true to form and Ms Hillary Lehr's article is just more gobbledegook and par for the course.

Further, surely Ms Lehr has more authoritative sources to quote from rather than Sean Whyte of Nature Alert, whose propensity for exaggeration and hyperbole has earned him the unenviable reputation and epithet of "Crowned prince of Hyperbole"; see: http://deforestationwatch.org/index.php/Key-Papers/-Palm-Oil-and-the-Crowned-Prince-of-Hyperbole.html?show=1&start=8

Ms Rachel Lowry,  Conservation Director of the Melbourne Zoo is no better. Attempting to justify the display of the zoo’s orangutans which is a tropical animal, in the biting cold Australian winter, Ms Lowry argues that the zoo has simulated natural environments of the species?

Let us quote the Ms Lowry: "They also have access to beds that are heated. They're like bedrooms really...."

Beds? Bedrooms? That's the natural environment for orangutans? If Ms Lowry really believes that, we have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell her!
In any event, Deforestation Watch aka Melbourne Zoo Watch takes the view that if Melbourne Zoo really cares about wildlife, they should not just preach but act immediately to release all the wildlife held in captivity in its zoo back into the wild.
 
The zoo's "Don't Palm Us Off" campaign is nothing but a cynical campaign design to induce donations from corporate donors as well as the well meaning but gullible public to throw money into their bank accounts.

How cruel of Melbourne Zoo to ignore the plight of smallholders who, contrary to public opinion, cultivates more than 40% of the world's supply of palm oil. THE END