What's common to shampoo and ice cream?

 No, this is not that kind of a take on shampoo.

What is an ingredient that is likely to be found in shampoo and ice cream?  "You may not see it but you are eating it and washing your hair with it."

Name that ingredient.

It is palm oil.

You’d have to look far and wide to find a major company that doesn’t have palm oil on its hands. They include Walmart, Colgate-Palmolive, Kellogg’s, Nestle, McDonalds, Ikea, Target, and Whole Foods. Palm oil is mixed into animal feed and biofuels.

This ingredient "is a Shiva of the modern consumer economy, a great creator and a great destroyer. A startling amount of human happiness and wellbeing depends on our relationship with this one plant."

I love that phrasing--"a Shiva of the modern consumer economy, a great creator and a great destroyer."

Why this dual nature?

Palm oil production is phenomenally important to local peoples and international economies. But it is also tremendously destructive to natural ecosystems and to the global climate.

So ... can this Shiva be morphed into more of a creator and less of a destroyer?

Genetics might be a way out:

What’s most needed is way to reboot our relationship with the oil palm—to find a way to produce more oil on less land. Here is where plant scientists must step in. And they have. They have crafted a novel genetic technique to induce each palm oil tree to produce more fruit, containing more of the precious oil. It’s a way to keep the ice-cream makers happy while saving the rainforest, and it can be scaled up now.

Can't we reduce the consumption first?  Do we really need all that shampoo, and eat that much ice cream?

Consumption is practically what the modern economy is all about, once we got beyond basic survival.  Oddly enough, even those concerned and worried about the natural environment--including me--love to get salary increases so that we can consume more, even when we know fully well that additional consumption will have negative implications for the natural environment.  How twisted are we!

It is a strange world in which we live.  Ask yourself what exactly are we working for, and what exactly is it that we want to get out of the incomes that we earn?  Go ahead.  Do that first and then resume reading this post. 

Yep, we earn in order to consume.  

Our highly productive lives--as in economic productivity--are not about working fewer hours and creating leisure time that we can enjoy, but are about consumption. 

It is almost as if we set aside the golden years for leisure.  When we can no longer do anything "productive."  What a wasteful approach to life!

This consumption lifestyle made possible by, among other things, palm oil.

The orangutans weep!