Eco-apocalypse
Indonesia Is Burning. So Why Is The World Looking Away?
By George Monbiot
October 31, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Guardian"
- I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when
eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing
brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was
happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their
financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices,
before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have
an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.
What I did not expect was that they would ignore
it.
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as
you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility
in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being
prepared for
evacuation in warships; already some
have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold
rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of
the 21st Century – so far.
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the
Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s
idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween
episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week,
dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they
really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different
scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia.
It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than
anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a
columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It
should be on everyone’s front page.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno,
but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing
more carbon dioxide
than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released
more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
But that doesn’t really capture it. This
catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires
are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the
archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded
leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran
tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much
of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps
millions, more.
One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation
that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent
six months there when I was 24,
investigating some of the factors that have led to the current
disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic
species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have
vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over
photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.
Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the
impact on the people of these lands. After the last great
conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of
15,000 children under the age of three,
attributed to air
pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being
distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect
those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan
(Indonesian Borneo) have had
to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that
they must have difficulty recognising each other.
It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is
the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat.
When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks,
sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide,
ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for
hundreds of miles, causing
diplomatic conflicts with
neighbouring countries.
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have
been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals
have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation
companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant
monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to
clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters.
But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect
formula for environmental catastrophe.
The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants
to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism
and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary
The Act of Killing
shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a
million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the
approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of
organised crime, including illegal deforestation.
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation
with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange
camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and
schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG
Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass
killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some
places, especially West Papua,
the political murders continue.
Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t
hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems
to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s
policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm
oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some
plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to
stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials
have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the
country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has
already cost it
some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.
Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we
can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts
to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly
and opaquely.
Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever
are examples. Don’t
buy their products until they change.
On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting
Barack Obama. Obama,
the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s
recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The
ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of
these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.
Governments ignore issues when the media ignores
them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question
with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason
is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry
dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots,
where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead.
The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe
as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.
At the climate summit in Paris in December, the
media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract
diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost
without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be
removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when
the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other
industry that serves its customers so badly?
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