The short cartoon, a mere 90 seconds long, features a mischievous orangutan baby frolicking in a girl’s bedroom while British actress Emma Thomson, acting as the narrator, recites a nursery rhyme. “There’s an orangutan in my bedroom and I don’t know what to do,” the girl explains via Thompson. “She throws away all my chocolate and she howls at my shampoo.”
Thirty seconds in, it becomes clear why the cheeky little orangutan is acting up. “There’s a human in my forest, and I don’t know what to do,” the baby ape tells the peeved little girl as a beast-like bulldozer appears felling trees in a flashback. “He destroyed all our trees for your food and shampoo,” the orangutan adds. “There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do. They are burning it for palm oil and so I thought I’d stay with you.”
Thus educated, the little girl pledges to help her newfound friend save her forest, which is presumably in either Sumatra or Borneo, where palm oil cultivation has wreaked ecological havoc over past decades.
The advert by Iceland Foods called “Rang-tan,” which was made by Greenpeace for the Christmas holidays this year, gets the message across wonderfully: the forest homes of critically endangered orangutans continue to be destroyed just so we can continue to have gazillion liters of palm oil, a versatile edible substance used in a myriad for consumer products from chocolate to shampoo.
Once our love of palm oil stops, so will the destruction of Borneo’s and Sumatra’s forests. Yet despite its positive message, the poignant advertisement, which has gone viral on social media, has not been allowed by the broadcasting regulator Clearcast to be shown on British television. The reason: Greenpeace, its maker, is classified as a political organization and political advertising is not allowed on British television.
The decision has not gone down well with British viewers, 700,000 of whom have already signed an online petition to allow the ad to appear on television screens across the nation. “This commercial was banned from TV for being too political,” TV presenter James Corden wrote on Twitter. “I think everyone should see it.”
Agreed. Everyone should also start doing something about palm oil, whose cultivation in Malaysia and Indonesia has been a massive environmental disaster, leading to the loss of vast tracks of virgin forests. A good way to start is to stop buying products with palm oil content or at least products whose palm oil content has not been certified as sustainably obtained.
