PULANG PISAU, Indonesia — Bandi paddled through the black swamp, passing alongside banks of high brush outside Kalawa village here in the south of Borneo Island. The narrow canoe, known here as a ces, arrowed through the water, leaving a low ripple in its wake. “Since there’s been community forestry here, we can now protect the forest,” Bandi said as he traversed the peatland. “We look after the forests surrounding our village — they don’t burn.” A national drive to convert some 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of peatland into rice fields by then-president Suharto clear-cut a vast tract of Bornean rainforest in the 1990s, which many Indigenous Dayak considered to be a violation of customary rules. The project became a notorious environmental catastrophe. Much of the land alongside the Sebangau, Kahayan, Kapuas, Kapus Murung and Barito rivers was destroyed by fire. The aftermath left the landscape prone to floods in monsoon seasons and wildfires during droughts, seasonal patterns now aggravated by climate change. A decade ago the entire landscape was also ablaze here in Pulang Pisau, a district in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. In mid-2015, toxic wildfire smoke seeped under doors of Dayak longhouses, through the cracks in the timber frame, and past the blood-brain barrier of the people sheltering inside. The haze hung over most of Borneo for months as the fires spread across the peat. Around 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) burned across the country during that year’s dry season. The catastrophe will have likely…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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