Forest and land fires across Kalimantan, particularly in the east of the Indonesian province, have been burning for weeks with no sign of being fully contained. The crisis has raised difficult questions about what is driving the blazes: corporate land clearing, local farming practices, or simply the drought.
Margarita Seting Tekwan Beraan, a Dayak Indigenous leader in West Kutai, said some localised rain had fallen in the area three days earlier. It was not heavy, but enough to take the edge off the punishing heat.
"We just don't know whether it was artificial rain, because the government has been pushing cloud seeding, or whether the wet season is simply on its way," she said.
But broadly, she said, the fires and the drought conditions fuelling them had not eased. Only a handful of areas remain in reasonable shape, including the district capital of Barong Tongkok, Sendawar.
Despite widespread claims that the fires were deliberately lit, Margaretha said she believed the situation largely resulted from extreme dry conditions.
Indigenous communities in Kalimantan have no intention of burning the land and forests, she said. When drought hits hard enough, fires become all but inevitable, triggered by layers of dry coal sitting just beneath the surface.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many of the areas now ablaze have burnt before. Without enough time to regenerate, the forest has not restored the natural ground cover needed to protect the soil. In dry weather, these degraded areas catch fire with alarming ease.
Then there's corporate land use. Margaretha said nearly half the land in West Kutai was held under commercial use rights, known locally as HGU, or was controlled by companies. The latest figures show half of the burnt area falls within company concessions.
"I work with eight villages in the Silukmurai subdistrict. Almost all of their land is company land. The area that still belongs to the community is tiny," she said.
The villages at the centre of the fires are already highly exposed. Roads have been cut into what were once remote forest settlements, and surrounding land has been logged and cleared.
"These communities used to live in forest areas. Then their land became plantations or mines," Margaretha said.
What remains are small plots farmed over and over. Nearly all of it is former swidden, and in the heat, that kind of land needs only a small spark to ignite.
In dry conditions, Dayak communities across Kalimantan follow a longstanding rule: no one opens new fields. This year, Margaretha said, they had delayed farming altogether.
They will not burn their own land for fear the fire could jump to a neighbour's plot. In Dayak farming culture, communities traditionally build firebreaks and choose their burning days carefully, guided by the lunar cycle.
At this point in the calendar, she said, residents are strictly forbidden from burning.
"That traditional knowledge has always existed. People never burn alone. They work in groups, and someone always stands guard to make sure the fire doesn't spread," Margaretha said.
By custom, Indigenous communities clear their fields at the tail end of the dry season so that rice planting coincides with the first rains. As for photos and videos circulating online that appear to show oil palm being planted on freshly burnt land, Margaretha said only large corporations had the resources to do that. Without water reserves on the ground, young palms can only survive if water is trucked in from a distance.
Fires on this scale do not happen every year. Margaretha recalled major blazes in 1982, then again in 1997 and 1998, and another round more than a decade later.
She called for closer cooperation between communities and government. Villages have already set up community fire brigades and trained volunteers in firefighting, she said, but they need the government to supply water tanks and proper equipment. Routine patrols of high-risk areas by residents should also become standard.
Kalimantan is home to certain plant species that naturally reduce the fire risk in areas where they grow. Margaretha asked why they weren't being used.
"Why aren't those plants being cultivated in fire-prone areas?" she said.
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