Abstract
Among UK-based orangutan conservation supporters, palm oil consumption boycotts are widespread, due to the ecological impacts of oil palm cultivation on orangutan habitat. Yet these boycotts are largely at odds with the stances of orangutan charities. Drawing on interviews with orangutan supporters, this article explores why some Global North consumers are so consumed by palm oil. Palm oil is viewed by orangutan supporters as insidious, invasive and cheap, and forces a bodily complicity with orangutan suffering. It is mobilized as a metonym for human greed and capitalist destruction. This metonymic relationship mirrors broader Anthropocentric framings of human-nature relations, which emphasize humanity as a universal actor. Yet the practices of 'species guilt' associated with these framings largely mitigate against a decolonizing model of conservation, as they have the potential to deny agency to workers and villagers enmeshed within the oil palm economy. Despite these unpromising circumstances, this article explores the unintended value of palm oil boycotts in terms of agency and ecological consciousness and addresses the potential to align such boycotts with a decolonial analysis, through centering the human dimensions of orangutan conservation.
Highlights
The poor things have got nowhere else to go
Palm oil: bodily complicity and metonymic power. Given this discrepancy between the anti-palm oil enthusiasm expressed by so many orangutan supporters on the one hand and the delicate and pragmatic everyday relations between orangutan charities and palm oil corporations on the other, what is it that makes palm oil so distinctly antagonizing for British consumers compared with other ecologically destructive products? To answer this, I begin by examining my interviewees' engagements with palm oil, recognizing the power and agency palm oil seems to wield through manifesting in apparently innocuous items, and forcing a bodily connection with orangutan suffering
As Chao (2018a, p. 632) notes, this vegetable fat is "almost oversaturated with meanings that relate to its destructive effects." I contend that palm oil becomes a metonym for orangutan supporters' anger and anxieties about human greed and capitalist destruction in the time of the Anthropocene, through its association with profit-seeking and the alienation of consumers from food production
Summary
The poor things have got nowhere else to go. What are they supposed to do? It makes my blood boil, especially when palm oil is so unnecessary. (Interview 30). Some 14 months after the incident, signatures were still accumulating daily This video captured and engendered further outrage at the actions of palm oil companies, highlighted the everyday complicity of British consumers, and increased financial compassion for the affected orangutans, often expressed through virtual 'adoptions' where supporters make donations to a charity ostensibly in aid of an individual named ape. This research contributes empirically to the existing consumer attitudes literature through in-depth qualitative examination of palm oil abstention beliefs and practices, rejecting the presumption of a utility maximizing rational consumer (still prevalent in said literature) It expands upon existing work through situating consumer practices in the context of wider ethical dilemmas regarding human-nature relations, while recognizing the moral ambivalences of the global political economy of palm oil. Despite the prevalence of this critique within social science, the homogenizing figure of the Anthropos is still present in some conservation discourses, reflected in invocations of a collective species-level 'we.'
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