Is Indonesia's fire crisis connected to the palm oil in our snack food? | Lindsey Allen

The widespread burning of tropical rainforests and peatlands to develop palm oil plantations is one of the largest sources of carbon pollution today

Traveling from California to Indonesia's Sumatra island recently was a startling journey between two lands engulfed in flames. Although a world away from each other, these two historic fire events are connected through the cause and effect of climate change and a broken system of international commodity production that will take all of us at both ends of the supply chain to fix. This will necessitate holding Western companies accountable for the consequences of their global operations.

The conflagrations raging out of control across Sumatra and Borneo are a global scale environmental and human rights emergency, but the players involved, from the Indonesian government, commodity producers and traders, to Western snack food companies, have so far largely failed to connect the dots to strike at the core of the problem.