Freelancewritingtips.com: Can you help tell the story of saving the orangutans?

ASPIRING writer and wildlife campaigner Lin Treadgold is on a mission to publicise the plight of Borneo's orangutans.

Please do get in touch if you would like to know more. Do you have any contacts who could help Lin with her efforts to raise the profile of this work and warn against the perils of buying palm oil?

Lin writes: "On a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur, I looked down from the aeroplane to discover that the landscape beneath me, that I had visited over 30 years ago, had transformed beyond recognition. The changes were so dramatic, it was sickening."

"My heart sank as I realised that the recent e-mail messages I had received from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation had been true.

"Nothing was recognisable, just row upon row of palm trees and there, in the distance, were the Petrona Towers in the centre of Kuala Lumpur city. As a conservationist, I felt a huge disappointment. I was now seeing the destruction of the rainforest for myself.

"Although I am a volunteer bird researcher on a nature reserve near my home in Holland, I felt that my global awareness amounted to nothing but a passive TV conservationist. I could have been out there doing more, instead of procrastinating about saving the world.

"I couldn’t save the world personally, but I could act to change the way I was living my life. I could make a difference and it felt the right thing to do."

Lone Droscher Nielsen

Things moved on and in June 2007, Lin was invited to get more involved and began to seek to raise awareness:

"Local families take the young orangutans in as pets and keep them in appalling conditions. They tie them by their wrists and the animal often loses a limb due to ignorance and cruelty. Female orangutans only give birth every six to eight years and the mothers are killed or sold for around $100.

"As the forest is cut down, more orangutans move into farmlands in search of food and are then either shot or captured."

But Lin says there is an equally pressing problem - one we can all help lessen:

She explains: "It is becoming increasingly difficult to find rainforest to rehabilitate each one of the orangutans to safe release sites.

"It isn’t the orangutans that are the problem it is the people who are buying the products from the supermarkets and now just about everything you buy seems to contain palm oil.

"The UK is one of the biggest importers of this product and the consumer doesn’t realise that for every week of food shopping, ten orangutans die in the wild.

"Nick Knowles informed me that it only costs 90p per day to feed an orangutan and at present, there is no immediate solution to the problem. In order to save the species we have to help them to survive, we are losing 5000 orangutans per year in the wild. All this, because palm oil is included in most of the products we purchase on a daily basis.

"The consumer is certainly not entirely to blame. The problem is that most of us really don’t know which products contain palm oil. We go shopping and don’t realise what we are buying in the bottles or bars of chocolate.

"We can help by asking the shop manager if this particular product is orangutan friendly. If anything, it will get them thinking about it even if they don’t quite understand what you are talking about. You then have the chance to explain."

"So, what is your palm oil footprint?" asks Lin.

She says we should:

* Look in your food cupboard and check those labels.
* If you see the words, “palm oil or “vegetable oil” resist buying those products again.
* Find an alternative.
* Buy fresh foods.
* Tell your supermarket manager there are too many products containing palm oil in the shop and you won’t be buying them, tell him you want to see more orangutan friendly products on the shelves.
* Look out for soap, shampoos and shower gels, chocolate, toothpaste, biscuits, cosmetics - mostly moisturisers and lipsticks, muesli and potato crisps.
* If in doubt, don't buy it