This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 23, 2019 - September 29, 2019

Irritation and frustration are two necessary ingredients for change. They nourish civil society actors to unrelentingly press for positive change. Our frustration and irritation at having to tolerate the haze almost every year should lead to such change, provided we are sufficiently informed about the various causes of the problem and united in our ability to urge those with power and influence to develop the political will and act.

The transboundary haze pollution, an almost annual phenomenon in the region since 1982, occurs during the southwest monsoon season between June and September, and is exacerbated by spells of dry weather. The haze affects several countries in our region apart from Malaysia. Hardest hit are Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and even the main culprit, Indonesia.

If we fail to do so, one possible scenario for Southeast Asia by the end of this century may sound something like the following excerpt from a news feature in a regional newspaper sometime in the 2090s: “It is estimated that about 50 million people will starve to death during the first half of the 22nd century as a result of the global failure of food supplies. Despite the great strides made in biotechnology and the various agricultural sciences, one thing that seemed impossible to supply but which is essential for growing food is a clean sky. Since the 1990s and well into the 21st century, forest fires had been progressively wiping out the great rainforests of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago. An added feature of this tragedy is the near-permanent grey skies shrouding practically the whole region and extending over parts of Western Australia and southern India for the last 30 years, euphemistically referred to as the ‘haze’ in the 1990s and 2010s. Fires are destroying the forests and acid rain is destroying the crops...”

Some people may laugh at this scenario and brush it aside as being too unrealistic and alarmist in tone. But others have come to realise that the smog is a global disaster and an international catastrophe. For example, between 1990 and 2005, Indonesia lost 28 million hectares of forest. Its rainforest cover has fallen to 49%, compared with 82% in the 1960s. It is precisely this sort of alarmism that is essential if we are to be serious about protecting our earth.

The first thing to realise is that our ecology, which involves the interaction between humans and the environment, is not without its political dimensions. Ecological issues are not free from the interplay of political forces. In this respect, there are some central problems confronting the ecology of Southeast Asia. One is that ecological problems such as the smog are intricately bound up with politics. Secondly, the solutions to such ecological disasters are no less political than technical.

Politics has to take some of the blame for the smog to the extent that greed and forest mismanagement have resulted in the forest fires of Sumatra and Kalimantan. It is estimated that in the 1990s, about 80% of the fires started in oil palm plantations, which then spread to adjacent wooded areas. These areas had been intensively logged over the years and, as a result, burn very easily. In addition, the conversion of forest to cash-crop-growing areas meant that the cheap slash-and-burn technique was used to clear land, increasing the risk of uncontrollable fires. Nowadays, much land is cleared for pulpwood plantations.

The firms said to be involved in the land-clearing practices responsible for the fires, however, put the blame on the traditional slash-and-burn method used by small farmers. This is most unlikely to be the case as the traditional slash-and-burn method is used to clear very small tracts of land in a way that respect and preserve the environment. Rather, it is the large forestry firms, which are said to have close links with high-level politicians or VIPs, that have been blamed by ecologists for burning the forests, instead of resorting to the more expensive alternatives of machine or manual clearance or the use of chemicals. Furthermore, these conglomerates make profits and pass on the costs of ill-health consequences and the various ecological losses.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has pointed the finger at large logging firms and plantations. Many of the forest fires in Indonesia have also been started deliberately as “a weapon in social conflict” used by large companies to drive out smallholders, and by smallholders to retaliate against what they see as injustice, according to a report by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Bogor, West Java. All this suggests that the problem is far from being a natural disaster. Far be it for nature to inflict such harm upon herself.

To the extent that this political dimension of the smog involves a role for civil society politics, we are then confronted with two other problems.

One is the lack of alarmism. There seems to be a lack of alarmism with respect to the short and long-term seriousness of health damage by the smog. The press in the region generally has not discussed the smog as a regional health disaster, although the experts have been warning us to this effect. In Malaysia, medical experts have been warning for years that the there are both short and long-term serious health consequences of the smog.

Dangerous elements in the smog include lethal substances such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, ozone and lead. Short-term effects include dizzy spells, memory disturbances, irregular heartbeat and damage to the nervous system. Long-term effects include low birth-weight offspring, infant death and low infertility. The effects of sulphur dioxide and lead have also been reported. Some estimates of the health effects were very alarming. Hong Kong University pollution expert Prof Anthony Hedley has likened the effect of the smog to millions of people in Southeast Asia taking up smoking and predicted tens of thousands of illnesses, including cases of chronic bronchitis, emphysema, diseases of blood vessels in the head, and lung and cardiovascular disease.

The other is the problem of anthropocentrism. What is quite alarming in everyday discussions of the smog as well as press coverage is the lack of interest in the broader ecological dimensions of the disaster. In other words, media coverage of the haze tends to be restricted to its effects on human beings, hence, its anthropocentrism. Even after several years of the smog, there appears to be little public awareness of the scale of environmental degradation perpetrated by the forest fires and the long-term consequences on Southeast Asia’s ecosystem and on the global climate.

The massive amount of carbon dioxide being released by the forest and peat fires of Indonesia will contribute to global warming by increasing the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. It has been reported that bees and plants were adversely affected by the smog in Malaysia. Several years ago, agriculturalist Zakbah Mian of the National Apiary Centre in Johor discussed how the lack of sunlight during hazy periods affect the ability of bees to feed themselves. The bees will usually leave their hives at dawn. During the smog, however, they will wait till the afternoon when visibility is better. With fewer hours to look for food, their growth is affected. Furthermore, the smog also reduces the supply of nectar and pollen, which is essential for the bees.

The smog reveals to us the dark side of industrialisation, development and the so-called Asian miracle. To the extent that there is a political dimension to it, it follows that the solution is also a political one. The only way to prevent this environmental catastrophe from recurring is if Southeast Asian governments and peoples go beyond merely admitting that the haze is a man-made smog.

It must be seen to be an international ecological disaster. The region must bear collective responsibility for it so that the governments, the media and citizens can work towards preventing this from happening again. If we are not vigilant about our regional ecology that constitutes one of the oxygen lungs of the world, the Asian miracle of the 20th century will become the Asian curse of the 21st century.

Syed Farid Alatas is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore

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