In a just world, major news outlets would devote coverage to the plight of animals and the environment proportional to the violence being perpetrated against both.

This is, obviously, not such a world. But we caught a glimpse in April of what such a world might look like when the New York Times devoted prestigious print real estate (Section A!) to a long piece on the plight of Indonesia’s endangered orangutans.

The situation portrayed in the piece is a bleak one.

We read of a massive blaze that occurred last fall that “destroyed more than 10,000 square miles of forests, blanketing large parts of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze for weeks.” We also learn that such blazes are intentional annual burnings, conducted to clear land, often for palm oil plantations. Indeed, “Indonesia has approved palm oil concessions on nearly 15 million acres of peatlands over the last decade.”

The NYTimes story is framed with a moving account of Katty, a 9 month old orangutan — and “docile, orange-haired preschooler” as the Times article describes her — “whose family is believed to have been killed by the huge fires last fall.” Katty was found, we learn, “in a charred forest by villagers in Central Kalimantan last October.”

The impact of such burnings is by no means limited to orangutans. The blazes, the NYTimes reports, “sickened hundreds of thousands of people… caused $16 billion in economic losses,” and dealt a huge blow against global efforts to combat climate change  as “burning peat emits high levels of carbon dioxide.”

But, the impact on orangutans is especially dire due to their endangered status.

There are some, albeit tenuous, glimmers of hope in this story.

For starters, Katty’s story is brighter than most. “She now lives with 20 other infants in an old, one-story wooden house that was converted into an orangutan nursery, where they sleep side-by-side in colored plastic laundry baskets stuffed with leaves. They will spend the next seven or more years learning from their human minders how to climb trees, make a nest of leaves, spot edible forest fruits and avoid snakes and other predators, before being released back into the wild as young adults.”

In addition, the government in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is finally beginning to acknowledge the immensity of the crisis it is facing. Though only a start, it is significant that it has “recently banned the draining and clearing of all peatland for agricultural use, and ordered provincial governments to adopt better fire suppression methods.”

Lastly, there is now a cornucopia of dairy-free and palm oil free products that span the entire range of culinary foods and cooking materials that we can buy, so we don’t need to play an unwilling role in this devastating catastrophe. Miyoko, to name but one option, sells a delicious European style cultured vegan “butter” that is made without palm oil. Check it out here.

Still, these are but the faintest glimmers of hope. The larger story here — of the immense violence humans perpetrate daily against the non-human life of this earth — as elsewhere, is overwhelmingly tragic.

To change our current trajectory towards catastrophe, at few things must happen. For starters, news outlets must commit to devoting coverage to the plight of animals and the environment proportional to the violence being perpetrated against both, while informing people how they can take responsibility through either their purchasing power, or voting power, or other methods.

Secondly, we, humanity, must think hard about our place in the global ecosystem that supports us, and about the catastrophic violence and damage that human overpopulation is inflicting upon the planet – threatening the survival of countless species, and indeed ourselves –and on the sublimity, dignity, and inherent worthiness of the other species of this world.

Lastly, we must then decide, collectively, of our own volition, and without coercion,to stabilize and slowly reduce the human population to a sustainable number, and to change the way we live and consume. The only sustainable future is an ethical future, free of products based on animal slaughter, slavery or labor, and free likewise of any other industrial process that devastates non-human species or the ecosystems upon which we all depend.

To paraphrase the popular science communicator Neil Degrasse Tyson: as goes the fate of Indonesia’s orangutans and the other species with whom we share this planet, so goes the fate of all humanity.

Read more here.