Sicily has a four-legged early warning system for Mount Etna. It has a beard, it eats gorse, and it is beating several million euros of monitoring equipment by half a day. The shepherds have known this for as long as anyone has kept goats on that mountain. The herd tells you. No drama about it, no bleating, no rearing up and pointing at the summit. They simply decline to go up the hill that morning, and if the goats will not go up, neither do you. Oldest volcano warning system in Europe. Costs nothing. Runs on scrub. For most of history the scientific response to this has been a polite nod and a change of subject. Then in 2011 a German turned up with a box of trackers. Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour has an unfashionable habit of asking local people what they already know before deciding they are simple. He collared goats living year-round on the slopes and started logging where they went, and when, and how fast. On 4 January 2012 the data went peculiar. The animals turned down the high pastures they use every day of their lives, all of them, and headed for the trees. The seismometers were quiet. The gas monitors were quiet. In a control room in Catania, a great deal of very expensive equipment was reporting a perfectly ordinary Wednesday. That evening Etna started throwing lava and ash into the sky. Six hours. The same signature has now turned up before eight major eruptions, and at the extreme the goats move fourteen hours ahead of the mountain. Ahead of the tremor. Ahead of the gas. Ahead of everything the volcanologists are paid to watch. Nobody knows how they do it. The best guess is sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide venting beforehand at concentrations no human nose could ever find, which would mean the animals are smelling the future and declining to comment. Wikelski's own summary is that they know in advance, we have no idea how, but they do. The institute says there is not yet enough data for a formal warning system. More eruptions, more animals, more species. Which is the correct scientific answer and a very funny one, since the shepherds reached sufficient confidence somewhere around the Bronze Age and have been acting on it every day since. Rome had geese who saved the city by making a racket when the Gauls came over the wall, and honoured them for it every year afterwards. Etna has their spiritual successors, doing the same job by refusing to walk uphill. We have a word in English for a man who behaves like a goat. It means he eats anything, wrecks anything, and understands nothing. The goat currently outperforms a seismograph.

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.