A few days later, we drove north, 20 hours on punishing mountain roads, toward the Malaysian border and the West Kalimantan district of Sintang. There, a meeting was planned with the local county governor, or bupati, to discuss a similar situation.

North of Sintang, a grim commercial town of concrete and rebar at a fork in the Kapuas River, two palm plantations were being developed on peatland bogs. These plantations, too, were located on tracts that Indonesian government maps had at one time explicitly labeled protected peatland, which should have placed them under the moratorium on palm development. The maps had since been changed. Yet there was no mistaking that this was peatland: Paths submerged into black goop, teams of dragonflies swarmed over the hot water, reeds and forest grew from their depths. And here came a flatbed truck, carrying an excavator toward the entrance gate, where a guard in a neatly pressed dark blue uniform turned away visitors.

The permits named two obscure companies, but a villager at the gate told us that he thought both plantations were run by the same company and that it had been clearing the forest for months. It’s not uncommon for Indonesian companies to use layers of subsidiaries to hide their connections to illegal palm operations. “We call them shadow companies,” said Eric Wakker, a founder of Aidenvironment Asia, an environmental consultancy that has investigated the two plantations. Upon further scrutiny, it appeared that the two companies may indeed have been linked to the Salim Group. They shared a business address with a Salim subsidiary in Jakarta and employed the same plantation managers in Kalimantan. Salim was also a buyer of the palm that would come from the Sintang plantations.

The connection matters because the Salim Group has benefited from more than $1.5 billion in loans and capital from foreign investors, including the American firms BlackRock and Vanguard, and Salim companies have pledged that their palm oil is not a product of recent deforestation or peatland destruction. Satellite images from 2017 confirmed that the forests on the Sintang plantations were now virtually gone. (A Salim Group executive, Mark Wakeford, declined to comment about the Sintang companies.)

At the bupati’s house, an elegant, 19th-century Dutch-built compound bursting with tropical flowers, I pressed him to explain how these peatland forests could be cut down when the government insisted that such land clearing had stopped. The bupati, a doctor named Jarot, had moved to Borneo from Java and had developed a local reputation as a conservationist. He greeted us jovially, barefoot and dressed in bluejeans and a crisp, untucked blue button-down shirt. He said the rural districts must balance economic growth with sustainability, and while he has pledged to control corruption and illegal permits, he also described himself as helpless against the currents of a central government that is close to the big corporations and constantly changes both the rules and the playing field. United Nations forest programs pay communities to leave their trees in the ground. Such funding would help him strike a better balance here, he said, casually shrugging off the plantation case I asked about. “We do what we can do,” Jarot said. “We cannot do it by ourselves. ... We need a fiscal incentive.”

An aide offered a more nuanced explanation. The phrases “peatland” and “forest” have distinct legal meanings in Indonesia, he claimed; not all treed areas are forests, and not all peat-filled bogs are peatland. In the strictest legal sense, he was correct. The Sintang regency alone, according to Indonesian government estimates, contains more than 160,000 acres of old-growth, heavily treed land that it has not designated as “forest” under the law and more than 86,000 acres of nondesignated peatland. After a request from the companies, the government maps for Sintang were revised to change the peatland borders. New maps show the bog boundaries tracing perfect 90-degree angles and straight lines — lines that happen to match the boundaries of the companies’ land holdings. How do you account for such details in a life-cycle analysis?

7. ‘It Was a Mistake’

This September, with late-season heat pounding Washington, Zenzi Suhadi cleared security at the Russell Senate Office Building, preparing to brief Senate aides about the impact that palm-oil development was having on Indonesia’s environment. I asked if he was nervous, and he said no. “These are just people. I don’t have to face any tigers.” He didn’t seem to be joking.