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Why You Can Have Your Beanfields Chips And Eat Them Too

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Growing up in Kentucky in the 60's, no one talked about reading food and product labels. The post WWll era had ushered in the high-speed age of American consumerism. Prepared food was considered innovative and fast food chains like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds were viewed as a novelty and a treat when my parents took us there.

I grew up on a steady diet of TV dinners, Big Macs, blueberry pancakes from Perkins, pancakes and apple fritters from Dixie Cream Donuts. Toxins and harmful preservatives were not a part of my daily conversation. Bugles, Fritos and Cheetos were my favorite study snacks, washed down with Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper after laying out in the sun using a metal refractor, slathered in baby oil tainted iodine to enhance my tan instead of sunscreen. No one worried about the ozone layer or the damage the sun might cause. We swam in chlorine-filled pools and had a sugar-filled Snickers bar as a treat after.

The search for plant-based snacks that taste good
While I wouldn't trade those toxin filled and processed food years for anything, times change and so have my concerns about my diet and that of my family. I read labels on everything I consume and I can honestly say that my children have rarely eaten processed or fast food. In fact my children's taste buds are so trained to crave healthy, plant-based options that Katie, my youngest, at two years of age, once spit out her McDonald nuggets during a surprise visit with a friend's Mom, bluntly stating that they were not like the "real" nuggets we had at home. Being the label reading, conscious consumer that I have become, in our house I only served Morning Star nuggets which are made of tofu.

It's one of my biggest challenges as a mother to find healthy options and not feel like I've deprived anyone's childhood of special treats. I'm always searching the grocery store for the healthiest and best tasting options I can find. In fact, cruising the aisles of Whole Foods on the prowl for healthy snack food my teenagers will love the taste of and I will be happy with it's nutritional value is one of my favorite pastimes. So I was most delighted when I discovered Beanfields Bean and Rice chips.

Beans and rice instead of corn
Beanfields, a family-owned certified B Corp, set out to create plant-based, Non-GMO tortilla chips that tasted good without using corn in 2010. They wanted to substitute that with an ingredient that promoted health, sustainability and ethical business practices - all of which are core to their values.

After much researching on the part of Reed Glidden, the president and founder, his wife and co-founder, Liza Braude-Glidden made the first batch of tortilla chips using beans and rice instead of corn.

The benefits of beans over corn
Corn has a high glycemic index and is more likely to be genetically modified while beans are one of America's superfoods. Beans are the most water-efficient source of protein available. Bean crop production lowers agriculture's greenhouse emission. The USDA lists beans as both a source of vegetable and protein. Planted-based diets help the environment. All of this fits into the Beanfields vision of using business as a force of good and what they call their guiding philosophy, kinder prosperity.

The making of a Beanfields junkie
I have become a Beanfields junkie. One of the many things I love about these chips, which now come in ten yummy flavors including Nacho, Ranch and Barbecue, is that they are certified gluten-free, Non-GMO Project Verified, vegan and allergy-friendly.

But what is equally important in my house is that they taste so good you forget it's a better-for-you snack. They have become a staple in my kitchen, where I offer big bowls of the chips to my children and their friends along with great piles of guacamole. I also consider myself an underground distributor, encouraging all my favorite sandwich shops to keep them in stock.

You can read more about Beanfields and how the Glidden family is revolutionizing the chip market with healthy and good tasting options here. I invite you to give them a taste and let me know what you think.

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Sea Change or PR Gimmick? Starbucks Tries Out Recyclable Cups in the UK
Few people know that Starbucks uses over 4 billion paper coffee cups per year and that those cups, made by clearcutting forests, are mostly not recycled. But the word is getting out and pressure is ramping up for the coffee giant to walk its talk on sustainability. Today's announcement indicates that Starbucks may finally be starting to change its ways.

Stand, which launched a campaign earlier this year calling on Starbucks to use recyclable paper cups instead of its current cups, is encouraged to see that the company will test out 'fully recyclable' cups in its UK stores. The announcement comes after intense pressure on the company over its wasteful practices in the UK.

Starbucks uses a coffee cup with a thin plastic liner that makes the cups waterproof, but that plastic clogs up recycling mills, which means that in almost all cases, they end up in the trash - even if customers put them in recycling bins. More than a million trees are cut each year to produce the Starbucks cups that quickly pile up in garbage cans - and then landfills - around the world.

In 2008 Starbucks made a public commitment to make its cups recyclable by 2012, then the company extended the deadline to 2015, but there has yet to be a change in the cups. Starbucks has repeatedly asserted that the problem is not its cups but the recycling process, which varies from location to location. The company has suggested that recycling machines and systems around the world should be changed to accommodate its plastic-lined cups. That exorbitant expense doesn't make a lot of sense. How about making a cup, which costs a few pennies, that regular paper recycling machines can accept? If the customer is always right, then Starbucks, one of the biggest customers, and consumers of paper cups in the world, can surely get its cup manufacturers to deliver a better, recyclable cup.

Anyone who grabbed a cup of coffee to go this morning knows full well Starbucks' ability to change our culture. The company has literally transformed the world's relationship to coffee, and we know it has the ability and the innovation to transform its paper cups. We will keep pushing until we see a commitment from the company to switch to fully recyclable cups worldwide.

Already, thousands of supporters have joined Stand's campaign demanding a #BetterCup. Last month, volunteers erected a massive wall in front of Starbucks' Seattle headquarters made of 8,181 cups, which is the amount of cups served every minute of every day by Starbucks.

To find out more about our Better Cup campaign and download a copy of our 'Supermermaid vs. Starbucks Monster' comic, visit www.BetterCup.earth

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Keep It Simple, Stupid; Go For Net Zero Emissions
Since the signing of the Paris Agreement at COP21, I have been invited to several global events to discuss the text and its impact on business. I have noticed that when it comes to defining the targets for business, the largest focus is generally on Article 2: "the increase in the global average temperature to below 2 ̊C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C." A lot of discussions are based around this statement, looking at the real effect on 'such and such' measures, timing issues, the cross-implications of different measures on each other, challenging the baseline chosen to calculate the increase etc.

Some companies are even now writing a so-called 2°C strategy based on the reduction of emissions compared to business as usual. As if business as usual was still possible and desirable! They rightly speak about transition, but in lengthy terms unfortunately not adapted to the urgency expressed by climate change science.

We are carbon addicts so we are discussing how to overcome our addiction, in a mature way, trying to avoid too much suffering. However we seem to refuse to see the obvious; we are facing a huge transformation of our development model, not Kaizen type progress, and, there will be winners and losers. However, the losers have immense strength and lobbying power. We are in fact in denial of the necessity of change, in denial of our own withdrawal syndrome, as if the danger of not making this deep change was not existential.

Instead of Article 2 we should be focussing on Article 4, which states "...to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century." In plain English, getting to "net zero emissions" between 2050 and 2100.

Having led several turn-arounds, some of multi-billion companies with tens of thousand of people around the globe, I know that communicating in a clear and simple way is the first key success factor of a turn around.

We have run out of time to discuss the target, what we should agree immediately on now is its concrete implementation. The negotiators of the Paris agreement have shown the way in Article 4. It is a clear, understandable, undisputable way to "zero net emissions". We must stop losing time on refining the target and procrastinating, instead we must now go for it.

From the US Navy's KISS ('Keep It Simple, Stupid') design principle in the 1960s, simplicity is often at the centre of management theory. Zero tolerance was once used by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and has been described as the real key to success in a much lighter challenge, so why not use this simplicity to fight for our civilisations survival?

In our case, although there are different interpretations, everyone understands the baseline that 'net zero' aims for. This is a suitable way, within this kind of complex issue, to motivate and align internally and externally all the stakeholders around a simple but powerful idea. We need to focus on a course of action and not to come back to endless discussions about impact, measurements, why me and not another person or organisation, etc.

There is no contradiction whatsoever between striving to be below 2°C and net zero emissions except one; net zero is simple and actionable, the other is a collective consequence, but not a business goal.

Organisations that see this already are those associated with the B Team for example, where the two go hand in hand; "Achieving the transition to a thriving and just Net-Zero greenhouse-gas emissions economy by 2050 is the best way to operationalize the long-term goal of maintaining the temperature under the 2°C of warming threshold." This is already more ambitious and clearer than the Paris text, targeting the middle of this century, rather than somewhere in the second half.

Last year, Unilever's CEO Paul Polman, B Team member and Chair of WBCSD, called on business leaders to join in: "A target of net-zero emissions by 2050 is not only desirable but necessary. This is the time to redouble our efforts and further accelerate progress to decarbonise our economy. This is not going to be easy, but the earlier we act, the greater the economic opportunities will be."

Some organisations such as IKEA are well on their way, with a goal to be 100% renewable by 2020; producing as much renewable energy as they consume. That commitment to 100% renewable power is gaining support thanks to the RE100 initiative. Shell has now moved ahead of the curve going from a 2°C scenario to a new pathway to net zero emissions. Chad Holliday Chair of Shell and former Chair of WBCSD was in Singapore two weeks ago to present this work.

We must now change the speed and dimension of our actions - choosing this clear way is the first necessary decision to make. We should not choose procrastination and complexity again but now go for a simple meaningful target; zero, nil, nada, niente, rien. Get rid of GHG emissions, stop discussing and just do it.

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Duany: The Promise of Suburbia Has Been Betrayed

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The transect / PlaceMakers

"The promise of suburbia -- to live in nature amid the easy flow of cars -- has been betrayed. Sprawl is not sustainable; its growth chokes on itself," argued architect and urban planner Andrés Duany at the Congress for New Urbanism in Detroit.

Duany calls for using New Urbanism, an approach he and others have promoted for the past few decades, in order to "preserve nature." New Urbanist developments can preserve nature because they can "make cities places people love to live in," so they stop moving to the suburbs, contributing to sprawl. New Urbanist communities, he argues, are also inherently healthy and just, because there people "walk, so they don't get fat," and "you don't need a car to get around." In contrast, car-based communities are "un-just," because the old can't drive cars and the poor can't afford them. Some 50 million Americans don't have cars.

New Urbanism can also result in a more balanced relationship with nature. "In Europe, they had to integrate with nature. In contrast, in America, our relationship with the wilderness has been adversarial." But Duany argues that if we use his model of the transect, which shows how cities can become denser as they move from untrammeled nature on the peripheries to dense urban cores, "we can bring nature into the city. Wildlife habitat can be assigned everywhere. The transect is also for bringing nature in."

Sprawl, Duany argued, is rooted in a dendritic, inefficient, car-based system that must be overthrown with a new grid-based, walkable system. Furthermore, it's one system or the other: "sprawl and new urbanism are incompatible and can't be intermixed."

Unfortunately, the "enemy" -- sprawl -- is backed by a range of "powerful" forces. There are "whole professions, like traffic engineers, who are vested in this system." The solution is to provide these "administrators" with a new set of guidelines they can manage. "They just want to administer something. Let's just change the manual, and then we can change what they administer."

He envisions New Urbanist communities in which there are multiple choices that coincide with human nature, and the stages of life. These communities have a dense core that can sustain nightlife, which is critical for young people, "whose job it is to date and mate." Once they've mated, they find a starter home, perhaps just out of the core. As they grown older and wealthier, they move closer to the periphery, where they have a larger house immersed in nature. Then, when they retire, they move back into a smaller apartment in the urban core.

Furthermore, human nature is to form hierarchies, and New Urbanist communities simply enable that basic tendency. "We can break up communities into wealthy mansions, mid-range, and low-range housing." But for Duany, the key is they all live near each other in walkable communities, which enables a local economy, e.g. the maid and nanny live walking distance from the mansions. Duany is also all for allowing people to chose whether they want to live in a homogeneous or diverse community.

Duany said New Urbanists have enabled these kinds of neighborhoods by participating in writing the U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD)'s Hope VI standards, which enabled 270,000 units of affordable housing to be added in a subtle way to mixed-income communities. "We can integrate but keep the housing for the poor to 10-20 percent."

He concluded that 30-60 percent of Americans want to live in New Urbanist developments where this kind of set-up is possible. "We just need to level the playing field to let the market operate." In these communities, "life is better; people are more satisfied."

F. Kaid Benfield, senior advisor to PlaceMakers, and author of the great book People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think About Greener, Healthier Cities, followed Duany, making many of the arguments outlined in his book. However, he further emphasized the need to better "integrate nature into the urban fabric," perhaps going beyond what Duany and the New Urbanist's transect offers. "We need nature inside cities, the kind that fits well." For Benfield, that largely means mid-size (8 acres or less) and pocket parks, along with lots of trees, green complete streets, and all other forms of small-scale green infrastructure. As an example of a perfect-sized park, he pointed to Russell Square in London, "which is a great size -- just small enough to reach but large enough to escape in."

While landscape architects and designers may find some things to agree with here, what was left out of this discussion was the idea of cities as ecosystems. University of Virginia professor and author Tim Beatley, with his biophilic urbanism, shows that dense, walkable cities like Singapore and Wellington, New Zealand, can also be more biodiverse and create those rich connections to nature that sustain life for many species, even in cities.

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Mars Rover Curiosity Gets Smarter
Curiosity has gotten smarter: the Mars rover now has the capability to select ChemCam laser targets autonomously, allowing the four year-old prospector to choose its own targets for remote evaluation.

ChemCam has been a godsend for qualifying geological targets for closer evaluation by the roving laboratory. It can also provide remote analysis of interesting formations that cannot be physically reached by the rover--for instance, something too high or beyond an obstacle that the rover drivers do not want to risk crossing.

ChemCam--short for Chemistry and Camera complex--consists of a high-powered laser that operates in conjunction with a telescopic spectrometer mounted on Curiosity's camera mast. This technique is called LIBS, for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy. The laser can be fired at targets up to about 25 feet away, and in the brief moment that a plasma is formed by the extreme heat from the laser, the spectrometer can extract information about the elemental composition of the rock or other target area.

ChemCam has greatly expanded the rover's capability to explore areas otherwise unavailable to Curiosity, and has saved a lot of time by allowing scientists to take a chemical snapshot of an interesting target in order to decide if it merits further, closer investigation by contact tools, such as those on the end of the robotic arm. These include optical instruments for microscopic imaging, the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and sample gathering for evaluation within Curiosity's onboard lab.

This new capability will allow Curiosity to select targets autonomously, first identifying a promising rock formation, for example, using software with criteria specified by the science team, and then firing the laser and recording the analyses for future transmission to Earth. This is particularly useful when the rover is making a long drive and is not in contact with controllers at JPL, or is otherwise out of contact due to the Mars orbiters that are used to relay information being out of range.

Since it began operation in 2012, Curiosity has used the ChemCam laser method over 1400 times with 350,000 laser bursts. The newfound autonomy should cause the rate of ChemCam investigations to rise appreciably.

More information can be found on Curiosity's website at http://go.nasa.gov/2abitag.

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Did Arabic Scholars Discover Evolution in the Ninth Century?
One thousand years ago, when the United States of America did not exist and Oxford and Cambridge were backwaters of ignorance, the light of human reason shone brightly in places like Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad. During the Abbasid caliphate for much of the 8th through middle 11th centuries, and also sporadically thereafter, tolerance of certain non-Muslim groups was enshrined in law. This was not as extensive as the constitutionally guaranteed religious (and non-religious) freedoms we enjoy in the West today, but it did mean that non-Muslims such as Musa Ibn Maimun (also known as Maimonides), Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Yuhanna Ibn Bukhtishu, could not only practice their Judaism or Christianity, but could also make enduring contributions to the social and intellectual life of the then-dominant Muslim culture.

It may not be a coincidence that many aspects of our understanding of the world have roots in this age. Arab and Persian scholars (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) not only translated the writings of the Greeks, but also made original contributions about mathematics, medicine, and social science (among other topics). Regarding biology, one of the more interesting claims that surfaces from time to time concerns evolution:

The theory of biological evolution in its complete form was presented by a great early zoologist, al-Jahiz in the ninth century.

wrote the Turkish theologian Mehmet Bayrakdar in a 1983 issue of the London-based Islamic Quarterly.
But in its complete form?

Not quite. There are indeed some tantalizing quotes that evoke evolutionary ideas from medieval Arabic scholars. The Englishman John William Draper famously referred to "The Mohammedan Theory of Evolution" in his 1874 book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, probably in reference to the Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in his 14th century The Muqaddimah,

creation ... started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The last stage of minerals is connected with the first stage of plants, such as herbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish ... the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the next group.

And 500 years before Khaldun, al-Jahiz articulated a kind of biological selection in his Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals).

In 1930, the Spanish scholar Miguel Asin Palacios translated one such passage from al-Jahiz:

In sum, no animal can survive without nourishment. The hunting animal cannot escape being hunted. Every weak animal devours those that are weaker; every strong animal cannot avoid being consumed by those that are stronger.... God, in sum, made some beings the cause of life to others, and in turn made these the cause of death to yet others.

These two observations--- continuity of existence across different forms of life (and indeed non-life) from Ibn Khaldun, and a struggle for existence among individuals from al-Jahiz--- are indeed relevant to the contemporary theory of biological evolution. However, this is a far cry from "biological evolution in its complete form". First of all, the goal of al-Jahiz's Book of Animals was, according to the German historian Herbert Eisenstein, "not actually the study of animal species, but a proof of the existence of the Creator that is evident from his creation" (p. 122 in Einfürung in die arabische Zoographie). Moreover, al-Jahiz was a gifted philosopher and theologian interested in biology, not vice-versa. He saw free will and the autonomy of God's creation as the reason why animals were "created" with the means (e.g., claws, fangs, spines) to attack others and defend themselves. According to Einsenstein (continuing the passage quoted above), al-Jahiz wrote that

when you see an animal ... of great danger, and concerning whom Man must be very careful, such as snakes and wolves provided with fangs ... thus may you know ... that God--- sublime and powerful is He--- gives to the steadfast, those who understand that free will and rational experience could not exist if the world were purely evil or entirely good.

Whether or not you think this argument is convincing (and it remains a key part of modern religion's approach to theodicy), the point is that al-Jahiz was less interested in the natural mechanisms by which life became diverse over time than he was in understanding nature in the context of monotheistic philosophy.

Another difference between modern biology and the natural philosophy of the Arab-Persian golden age was, ironically, the reality of the species. The notion that a group of interbreeding animals is thereby distinct from other such groups is not evident in pre-modern Arabic literature. Al-Jahiz was fascinated with hybridization and adaptation, and contemplated if and how environmental factors may have had an influence across generations of humans and other animals. According to another German translation of a passage from al-Jahiz, he wrote that maybe eels arose by cross-breeding fish with snakes. Maybe people from the western Caliphate (what is today Morocco and Algeria) look different from Arabians because of differences in the food and air. These were the kinds of discussions one can find in the prolific writings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Qutaiba, and others of their time. Were they more informed about nature than Europeans in the 9th century? Yes. Did ninth-century Arabs discover biological evolution? No.

As summarized by the Iraqi-British physicist Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders (and echoed by writers such as James Montgomery and Rebecca Stott), al-Jahiz articulated a mix of natural theology with Lamarckian evolution, in which behaviors and environmental influences of a given animal could have a direct influence on its offspring. This was more than just quoting Aristotle, and Europeans didn't get this far until many centuries later. However, although the Abbasid caliphate played a key role in upholding and advancing human reason, no one there or anywhere else during the middle ages discovered the major principles of contemporary evolutionary biology.

This well-corroborated theory about the mechanisms behind biological diversity recognizes that, in general, what a given animal does over the course of its lifetime (stretch its neck to reach leaves in the treetops, exercise its arms hammering horseshoes) does not directly influence its offspring. Yes, epigenetics and lateral transfer can make detours around the barrier of generational inheritance, but the essence of evolution is about variety, heritability, selection, and constraint. Evolutionary biology is not a static discipline, and in years to come there will be many more discoveries that shake up our understanding of how the mechanism behind biodiversity works. One such recent discovery is that physical laws underpinning cell growth may have a far stronger influence on certain aspects of anatomy than adaptive selection, as demonstrated in 2013 by a study of scale development in crocodiles. This discovery, and many others over the past 150 years, improves (not disproves) our understanding of evolution.

Eager proponents of today's monotheisms sometimes appear very keen to see in their cultural history and holy books indications of modern scientific discoveries. However, it seems to me that the real take-home message of golden age of the Middle East is not its contributions to modern science (and there are many), but the fact that some of its rulers valued ideas at least as much as ideology. Give scholars the resources to be able to study and write, and encourage curiosity about traditions besides your own. Scientific and civil advancements will happen (and have happened) for the same reasons in the 21st century as they did in the ninth.

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Schoolkids Write Book About Orphaned Orangutan
Writing in "first person orangutan" isn't easy. Just ask 10-year-old Caroline Mulcahy, a fifth grader at P.S. 107 John W. Kimball Learning Center in Brooklyn, New York. She and her classmates spent months during lunch and recess writing and illustrating a book, One Special Orangutan: The Story of Budi, about the plight of orangutans in Borneo.

The story is told through the eyes of a baby orangutan, Budi, who was rescued in December 2014 by International Animal Rescue, an NGO with a rehabilitation facility in Ketapang, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. For the first 10 months of his life, Budi was kept as a pet in a tiny chicken cage and fed only condensed milk--never solid food. "There was little space to move, and only a blanket and squeaky toy," Budi recounts in the book.

First time Budi holds a bottle. Photo courtesy of International Animal Rescue.

"The personal story of this one particular animal helped the kids identify with his situation and build their empathy," says Julie Fissinger, Mulcahy's mother and one of the parent volunteers who helped the students.

Budi's story is not unique. Since the early 1970s, 40 percent of Borneo's forest cover has disappeared, much of it stripped for oil palm plantations, and that trend will likely continue. In Kalimantan, for instance, 80 percent of the orangutan's range isn't protected, and clearing for oil palm plantations is pushing the apes into ever smaller forest fragments.

Searching for food, they venture onto the plantations where agricultural workers, who consider them pests, may kill them. Hunters also target orangutans for meat or the pet trade. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species notes that 2,000 to 3,000 orangutans have been killed in Borneo every year for the past 40 years, representing a loss of more than 50 percent of the original population. The World Wildlife Fund estimates today's population of Bornean orangutans at between 45,000 and 69,000. (Scientists also say there are roughly 14,600 orangutans in Sumatra.)

The killings leave a lot of orphans, like Budi. When Budi was rescued, the one-year-old was in bad shape. His body was swollen from malnutrition. He cried at even the softest touch. He couldn't sit up or walk, and he was too weak to hold his own bottle. It took intensive effort by the team at International Animal Rescue to nurse the young ape back to health.

Budi at baby school. Photo courtesy of International Animal Rescue.

Today he's a very different orangutan. He spends his days at "nursery school," where he climbs, eats, and hangs out with Jemmi, another orphan. "He's making a lot of progress, but being brought up by another species, I don't imagine it'd be easy," says fifth grader Sarah Millward, who helped write and illustrate the book.

The student authors are proud that they can help Budi, and other orangutans, by telling his story and by donating the proceeds of sales of the book to International Animal Rescue.

"It was born out of a love for animals," says Katherine Eban, a founding member of the Parent-Teacher Association's "Beast Relief" Committee, which runs the book project. Parent volunteers from the committee lead writing and illustration workshops for the students, and they organize the children's work into the final book.

A Growing Body of Work

This is the third time that fifth graders at the school have created a book to highlight and benefit an endangered species. The first was One Special Rhino: The Story of Andatu, which tells about the first Sumatran rhino born in captivity in Indonesia. The second was One Special Elephant: The Story of Penelope Petunia, which tells of a baby forest elephant in Dzanga Bai, in central Africa, who is threatened by poachers. (Jane Goodall wrote forewords to both.)

Henry Kurzawa and Maeve Igoe, PS 107 5th graders, celebrate the successful rescue of orphaned orangutan Budi while reading their newly published book. Photo courtesy of Ericka Novotny.

"The book project has become a rite of passage for the school's fifth graders," Eban says.

But its impact spreads beyond the page. For instance, Mulcahy and her mother now volunteer at the local animal shelter. And together with her friends Mulcahy raises money for the shelter with a lemonade stand. "It's simple," she says. "Drink lemonade and help animals."

The work has also affected many of the students' buying choices. "Now before I eat or drink anything, I always read the label and make sure there's no palm oil," Millward says. "It's not okay to be using it when we don't really need it, and it's more helpful for the orangutans to keep the forest whole."

Mulcahy too has stopped eating many things that contain palm oil to help orangutans. But, she admits, "giving up some foods, like Oreos, is hard."

Alan Knight, chief executive officer of International Animal Rescue, is encouraged by the students' efforts. "The fact that Budi's story has inspired the creation of such a wonderful book gives me real confidence for the future," he writes in the afterword.

Indeed, today's students are tomorrow's conservationists, with the P.S. 107 fifth graders a shining example. That alone inspires hope.

Laurel Neme is a freelance writer and author of Animal Investigators: How the World's First Wildlife Forensics Lab is Solving Crimes and Saving Endangered Species and Orangutan Houdini. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

This article was originally published on National Geographic under the title "Schoolkids Write Adorable Book About Orphaned Orangutan" It is republished here with permission. For full article, please click here.

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