May I Have a Chimpanzee Finger, Please?

Nestlé is a company that has a very high reputation in almost every country where its products are sold. At least that was what I used to think until we saw in our French class a video that showed what Nestlé did with the Indonesian forests. In order to produce Kit Kat chocolates, Nestlé needs palm oil. They need to plant multiple acres of these palms to have enough oil to make those Kit Kats. What Nestlé did, was deforesting the woods from Indonesia where chimpanzees live and plat their millions of palms.

As expected, Greenpeace reacted in a defensive manner. They created a video clip that was a plagiarism of the Kit Kat commercial in which they highlighted what Nestlé was doing. The video consist of a guy opening a Kit Kat wrapper and taking out a piece of chocolate that was actually the finger of a chimpanzee. When the guy eats it, blood starts to come out of the finger and then, it is all over the place. Disgusting, I know. Even though the video was a little shocking, it was truthful.

The reaction of Nestlé was as expected; they didn’t like it at all. Their image of a social compromised company was damaged. After all the trouble they were put into, they decided to start using a substitute of the palm oil for an artificial one.

Does the end justify the means? In this case, it’s clearly that satisfying our whishes (eating chocolate) does not worth to kill the environment of a very important being for the world, such as the chimpanzee. It is really hard for me to understand how big companies like Nestlé don’t measure the consequences of their actions, and they just act selfishly.


Francis Bacon, an English philosopher of the Renaissance, once said: “Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed”. I should think more often about it…

Nature vs. Human

Why most of the people are going green lately? Isn't too late to start taking action or are we on the right path? I think that global warming involves society, politics, economics, and even more. The human species is playing a game against nature, and we can already deduce who is going to win. Yes, we had made a progress in technology and now being "conscious" of our actions, but we can't control nature's fury can we? An example that comes to my mind with this question is Hurricane Katrina, which with on southern Florida on 2005, that leave destructions everywhere and the costs of them were high up in the sky. My point here is that we can't avoid a natural disaster to happen, just predict it and run away from danger like scared deer.We would have to abandon everything and start a new life elsewhere, which is not an easy thing. Nature provide us all what we need to survive, but we are so selfish that we always want to do it our way. Burning fossil fuels to create plastics, electricity, etc. We have some solutions to get clean energy, recycle plastic bottles, but the action is missing. Apply what is said is the hardes thing. Not only humans will suffer the consequences of the climate change, but also the beings that share this world with us. These beings include animals and plants aswell. Sadly, they will be carried away with our bad actions. The number of individuals of a species is reducing in great number, especially in the North Pole. The melting ice takes away the home for Polar Bears. It's not fair, not at all.

On the political side, this has also become a hot topic. In the recent world meeting "Copenhagen 2009", politics and activists from the main countries were supposed to get on an agreement to reduce their Co2 emissions so that the world temperature doesn't increase more than 2 °C. However, Greenpeace said that the "treaty" made was a weak poltical statement, because the agreement made weren't enough to reduce the emissions, and that the world temperture will increase at lest 3 °C. Climate change in inevitable. Some politics don't take this issues seriously. Time will make them understand, but we will all be affected. The more we help in little details, like recycling, the bigger the difference is. Hopefully, later in the future everyone include "ecology" in their daily actions.