Iceland’s Christmas advert about palm oil’s links with deforestation was banned last week, because it was said that the short Greenpeace-made animation was “political”. But how else to convey the devastation caused by the conversion of rainforest to plantations to provide cheap vegetable oil?

Veteran US entomologist EO Wilson, a world authority on biodiversity, offers the planetary view. Destroying rainforest for economic gain, he says, is like “burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal”. In his 2002 book The Future of Life, he asserts that the loss of forest over the last 50 years has been one of the most profound environmental changes in the history of Earth: “The forests are the abattoirs of extinction, shattered into fragments that are then being severed, adulterated or erased one by one. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone, an Armageddon is approaching.”

Full-blooded capitalists, along with many politicians and food corporations, play down the ecological hurt, seeing food for the world, an end to poverty and even cultural progress in the palm-covered landscapes. But it’s the novelists and poets who state the case for the forests best. Here is Richard Powers, in his 2018 novel The Overstory: “That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.”

Full-blooded capitalists play down the ecological hurt, seeing food for the world in the palm-covered landscapes

Today we see that the ecological violence involved in palm oil growing has gone hand in hand with social havoc and corruption. Kenyan Nobel peace prize-winner Wangari Maathai, who mobilised Kenyans to plant 30m trees, wrote in her autobiography, Unbowed, of the first time she saw large-scale deforestation when she flew over Haiti in 1992. “It looked like someone had taken a razor and shaved the land bare. When the rains came the soil just washed away. When people call for forests to be cut down I think of Haiti and vow to do all I can to prevent that happening.”

One devastating, early record of the destruction comes from Lake Toba in northern Sumatra, where 30 years ago a giant logging company illegally grabbed forest land to convert into massive plantations. Indonesian environmental advocacy group Walhi documented the damage done in a short book, Mistaking Plantations for Indonesia’s Tropical Forest. As the trees came down, the climate changed, the air and soils grew drier and fires and mudslides followed. Erosion increased, the rivers became polluted, food was contaminated, and the local rattan and resin industries were destroyed. The result there and elsewhere across Indonesia and Malaysia was conflict, pollution, social upheaval and misery, all in the name of cheap food.

Now the voices of indigenous leaders have joined those of the scientists. In a stark warning of climate change, Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa explained in 2013 in his epic The Falling Sky how deforestation foretells the end of life. Echoing Wilson he wrote: “The earth’s skin is beautiful and sweet smelling. The white people only know how to abuse and spoil the forest. They destroy everything in it, the earth, the trees, the hills, the rivers until they have made its ground bare and blazing hot. All that remains is a soil that has lost its breath of life.”