Two Michigan Girl Scouts are leading a growing crusade to persuade the national nonprofit group to stop using palm oil in Girl Scout cookies, writes The Wall Street Journal.

Rhiannon Tomtishen, 15, and Madison Vorva, 16, earned an award from the Girl Scouts in 2007 for a project to call attention to threats to orangutans in Southeast Asia, whose forest habitats have been devastated to make way for palm-oil plantations.

The teenagers then learned that all types of Girl Scout cookies are baked with palm oil. Since then they have rallied other troops and enlisted international environmental groups like the Rainforest Action Network in a campaign to change the recipe.

Girls Scouts of the USA, which switched to palm oil from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in 2006 to eliminate trans fats from its cookies, said without palm oil the cookies would not have the same taste, texture, and shelf life.

Scouts sold 198 million boxes of cookies last year, raising $714-million to fund scout councils nationwide.

See a Chronicle article about how the Girl Scouts handled a Facebook protest triggered by the Michigan scouts—and the lessons it holds for other nonprofits facing controversy.