More than a hundred thousand Bornean orangutans vanished between 1999 and 2015. Half the island's population, gone in sixteen years, and the largest single driver is the oil in your biscuit. Orangutans exist in exactly two places on earth now, Borneo and Sumatra, and both are being cleared at some of the fastest rates on the planet to plant oil palm. Around 350,000 hectares of Bornean forest have gone every year this century. The way it is cleared is the ugly part. The forest is not felled and milled, it is drained and burned. Developers cut channels into the peat to dry it out, then set the land alight, and peat does not burn like wood. It smoulders underground for weeks, sometimes months, throwing up a toxic haze that drifts across whole countries. In 2015 that haze became one of the worst environmental disasters in modern memory. About 2.6 million hectares burned. On many days that autumn the fires in Indonesia released more carbon dioxide than the entire economy of the United States. A study by Harvard and Columbia estimated the smoke caused around a hundred thousand premature deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, alongside half a million respiratory infections. The World Bank put the bill at sixteen billion dollars. All of it to clear ground for palm and pulp. The animals in that forest do not walk away. The orangutan is slow, and it starves among the stumps or wanders into the new plantation looking for food and is killed as a pest. In 2018 one was found on Indonesian Borneo shot a hundred and thirty times with an air gun, then stabbed and clubbed. Mothers are killed and their babies sold into the illegal pet trade. The Sumatran tiger, the rhino and the elephant are being pushed off the same burning map at the same time, each down to a few thousand animals or a few hundred, each running out of the one forest it has. The culprits are not hard to find. About 85% of the world's palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and investigators have traced palm grown on illegally cleared land straight into the supply chains of the largest names in the aisle: Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Mondelez. From there it goes everywhere. Palm oil sits in something like half the packaged products in the shop, the spread, the chocolate, the biscuit, the instant noodle, the tub of dairy-free ice cream, the very things sold as the lighter, greener, kinder choice. Almost all of it now carries a small stamp promising it was sustainably sourced. In one recent year the stretch of Sumatra known as the orangutan capital of the world lost more forest than in the previous four years combined. Stamp and all.