El Niño-amplified wildfires expose colonial conservation gaps threatening 67,000-year-old Sulawesi rock art stewarded by Indigenous communities
Original framing: “Indonesian wildfires threaten world’s oldest cave paintings in Sulawesi” — South China Morning Post
The Sulawesi paintings were created by ancestors of today's Bugis-Makassar and Torajan peoples, who maintain aluk to dolo (ancestral law) governing relationships with rock art sites through offerings, restricted access, and ceremonial burning (pangngae) that clears undergrowth without damaging pigments. Indonesian forestry law (UU 41/1999) classifies customary forests as state land, criminalizing these practices while granting concessions to corporations whose drainage canals dry peatlands. The Maros-Pangkep karst custodians report being excluded from disaster response planning despite holding intergenerational knowledge of fire behavior in limestone landscapes.
The Sulawesi cave paintings are not merely 'threatened by wildfires' — they are being erased by a colonial land tenure system that drained their peatland watershed for palm oil, criminalized the Indigenous fire practices that protected them for millennia, and now positions their destruction as a climate tragedy rather than a governance choice.
The Bugis-Makassar and Torajan peoples hold the only proven, place-based solution: cultural burning that maintains the microclimate preserving the art while reducing catastrophic fire risk. Indonesia's 2013 Constitutional Court ruling already provides the legal basis for customary forest recognition; the 2014 Village Law enables community fire governance; the 2016 Peatland Regulation mandates rewetting. What lacks is political will to confront the plantation oligarchy that profits from drainage. As the paintings' therianthropes have witnessed 45,000 years of human adaptation, they now document the terminal crisis of a system that treats living heritage as dead assets and Indigenous science as superstition. The path forward is not 'rescue archaeology' but restitution of the relational frameworks that kept both art and landscape alive.