Ecocide in Indonesia

In 2015, fires in the Indonesian territories of Kalimantan and Sumatra consumed over twenty-one thousand square kilometres of forest and peat lands. A cloud formed that contained more carbon, methane, ammonium and cyanide than the entire annual emissions of the German, British or Japanese industry.

As the acrid cloud drifted north and westwards, it engulfed a zone that extended from Indonesia across Malaysia and Singapore to southern Thailand and Vietnam. Scientists estimate that this resulted in more than a hundred thousand premature deaths, and that the fires might push the world beyond 2ºC of global warming, into the realm of potential and unpredictable calamities, faster than expected.

Human rights lawyer Baltasar Garzón, through his organisation, Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón (FIBGAR), commissioned Forensic Architecture (FA) to gather evidence regarding the causes and consequences of the fires, toward the aim of an international trial.

We understood the vast ‘carbon cloud’ as a harbinger of a new international crime of ecocide—one that will only become more relevant in the years to come.

“Ecocide is the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”

– Polly Higgins’ proposal for the Rome Statute

Carbon Cloud and the sources of fire, 2015.

Some of the roots of the 2015 fires can be traced back to repressive policies of the Indonesian government in the second half of the twentieth century, when local and international companies collaborated with the Indonesian armed forces to appropriate vast tracts of land from indigenous populations, and then employed those same populations in exploitative conditions.

Expansion of palm oil plantations into the territories of the indigenous Dayak communities. This plantation work lead to massive forest and peat fires in 2015, resulting in extensive damage to these communities and the ecosystems of which they are a part. (Forensic Architecture/FIBGAR)

The fires took place mainly in dried peat lands, made up of thousand-year-old decomposed organic matter. In their undisturbed state, peat lands are fire-resistant, but decades of canal digging by large agri-business operators, draining and drying the peat to prepare it for the monoculture plantation of palm oil, left it highly flammable. Peat can smoulder underground for weeks, and that smouldering heat can ‘creep’ many kilometres from the original source of the fire.

The sources of fires in 2015, began from both within and outside the plantations, some crossing the concession borders. As a result, the cleared land was not confined within the boundaries if the concession site. In the case of a concession belonging to the Best Agro Group, the boundary of the plantation had expanded by %30 into the national forests, within less than a year from the 2015 burnings (marked in yellow).

Source of fire within the boundaries of the concession site belonging to the Best Agro Group.

The borders of many of the palm oil concessions in Kalimantan are shared with the border of mauritoriums, inhabited by various forms of life. As the borders are further pushed and pulled with the intentional use of fires, the livelihood of many of such species will be endangered. On of the key casualties of the Indonesian fires is the Orang-utan which translates as the man of the forests.

Shared border between moratoriums and palm oil concession sites.

On June 24th, 3023, Greenpeace and Friends of National Parks Foundation (FNPF) discovered this orang-utan skull buried near the borders of two palm oil plantations (run by subsidiaries of Eagle High/BW Group and Bumitama Agri Group) near Tanjung Putting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Location of orang-utan mass grave between two palm oil plantation site.

A Greenpeace investigation team with FNPI documents an orangutan skull beside an oil palm plantation owned by PT Bumi Langgeng Perdanatrada, a subsidiary of BW Plantation Group, near Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan.

That these remains of an orang-utan were found in a shallow grave suggests an attempt to hide its killing. It is thus the strongest testimony that the perpetrators have themselves understood it to be a crime. The GIS reader (held by the hand of another humanoid) locates the grave in absolute terms in relation to the planet. This image suggests a different conception of the universal: rather than seek for apes to be protected by individual form of (almost) human rights we could ask for the extension of a certain kind of collective, environmental “orang-utan rights” to humans and with it a certain “becoming humanoid” of humanity.