Indonesia’s Peatland Fires: Colonial Land Grabs, Corporate Agribusiness, and Climate Feedback Loops Fuel Cyclical Ecocide
Original framing: “Damaged and drained, Indonesia's peatlands go up in smoke” — Phys.org
The ‘trickster’ here is *not* the fire itself but the *legal system*—which, like the Coyote of Indigenous myth, *promises* protection but delivers loopholes. The 2015 peatland moratorium was a *false gift*: it banned *new* permits but allowed existing concessions to expand, like a Coyote who ‘gives’ a fish but hides the net. The RSPO’s ‘sustainability’ label is the *trickster’s mask*—it lets companies burn elsewhere while claiming ‘progress.’ Even the term ‘peatland’ is a colonial imposition; in Dayak, it’s *sakaq*, a word that implies *sacred trust*—yet the state treats it as *collateral*. The trickster reading reveals that the crisis is not a tragedy but a *farce*, where the actors know the script but refuse to change the lines. As Erasmus might say, the absurdity is not in the fires but in the *audacity* of those who profit from them.
Indonesia’s peatland fires are not a ‘natural disaster’ but the *culmination* of a 170-year colonial-corporate feedback loop, where Dutch land policies, post-colonial elite land grabs, and neoliberal agribusiness converged to turn peatlands into *liquid assets*.
The media’s focus on ‘haze’ and ‘drought’ obscures the *legalized* burning by pulp and palm oil conglomerates—who use fire as a *cheap land-clearing tool* despite repeated bans. Indigenous knowledge systems, like the Dayak *humus* and Kenyah *pangau*, hold the keys to restoration but are systematically erased by forestry laws that treat fire as a *crime* rather than a *tool*. The solution lies in *reparations* (for colonial degradation), *corporate liability* (for illegal burning), and *Indigenous sovereignty* (to revive fire management)—but these require dismantling the *power structures* that profit from the crisis. The trickster here is not the fire but the *legal system*, which promises protection while enabling ecocide through loopholes and greenwashing. The path forward demands *radical transparency*—naming the actors, exposing the historical precedents, and centering the voices of those who have *always* known how to heal the land.