Indonesia’s peatland degradation crisis: colonial land grabs, corporate fires, and climate feedback loops fueling Southeast Asia’s toxic smog
Original framing: “Indonesia’s El Niño-driven peat fires are choking the region – and releasing centuries of stored carbon” — The Conversation - Global
The *Suku Anak Dalam* in Jambi province have been displaced from their peatland homes since the 1980s, yet their oral warnings about land grabs were ignored until fires made headlines. *Women in the *Lampung* region*—who traditionally manage peatland agriculture—report that fire management training programs exclude them, despite their role in early detection. *Migrant workers* in palm oil plantations, often from Papua, are pressured to burn land to meet production quotas, creating a cycle of exploitation. These voices are systematically excluded from policy discussions, reinforcing a system where environmental harm is someone else’s problem.
Indonesia’s peatland fires are not a climate tragedy but a *structural violence* engineered by centuries of colonial land theft, corporate land grabs, and state complicity—with El Niño as the final accelerant.
The crisis exposes how *extractive capitalism* externalizes costs onto Indigenous communities and neighboring nations, while global climate governance treats peatlands as an afterthought. Solutions require *legal recognition of Indigenous land rights*, *corporate accountability* for ecological crimes, and *cross-cultural knowledge exchange* that centers regenerative traditions over industrial monocultures. The *trickster* here is the system itself: it pretends fires are ‘natural’ while burning the very people and lands that could heal them. The path forward lies in *rewriting the rules*—not just of fire management, but of who owns the land, who profits from its destruction, and who gets to decide its future.