Dear readers,
Since July, fires have engulfed hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests in the islands of Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua, marking what appears to be an annual disaster. Year after year, the cycle repeats: news of large forest fires appears in national media, millions of lives are endangered, citizens across the country demand that the government do something, the government promises to act; then months pass without significant reform, and the cycle of negligence continues.
The second episode of Second Thoughts dissects the political economy of forest fires. You can watch it now on our YouTube channel:
Or read the article:
While these horrors can be called an ecological crisis, they are by no means natural. Forest fires in Indonesia were, are, and will always be man-made disasters if the Indonesian government continues along its path of environmental malpractice.
But fires, in and of themselves, aren’t the main culprit. The culprit is the extractive and exploitative agroforestry industry that uses legal loopholes to expand concessions and maximize profits at the cost of the local environment.
This episode connects the dots between the centuries-long tradition of using fire to clear land and how it has been misused today to exploit land for corporate interests. Because traditional practices are easy, fast, and cheap, burning has become the go-to method for land-clearing in the agroforestry industry, especially for palm-oil companies. Add peatlands dried out over decades by ineffective food estate programs, and the problem has grown to the scale we see today.
The government should have acted decades ago; the next best time is today. Watch this episode to learn what these imminent reforms could look like.