Every year deliberately lit fires rage across Indonesia. They destroy pristine rainforest, endanger orangutans and contribute to climate change. A young carbon trading entrepreneur goes in search of a solution.
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The people
The Indonesian archipelago is made up of over 17,500 islands, with a great diversity of ethnic and indigenous cultures. Across the five main islands - Sumatra, Java, Borneo (Kalimantan), Celebes (Sulawesi), and Papua (formerly Irian Jaya) – thousands of indigenous communities live in varying degrees of isolation. When ‘The Burning Season’ was shot in Indonesia, the crew encountered two of these groups: the Orang Rimba and the Dayak people.
According to Indonesia’s Constitution of 1945, which recognises human rights and makes recommendations on social justice, the ‘warganegara pribumi’ (native Indonesians) are nominally afforded the same rights as the rest of the ethnically Malay-Indonesian and Javanese-Indonesian population. However, they have been unable to gain land title over their ancestral homes because Indonesian law doesn’t recognise traditional land ownership for mobile groups.
The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues recently observed that the explosion of biofuel crops threatens to destroy native cultures, particularly in Indonesia, by displacing them and driving them into nearby cities. Indonesia and Malaysia are high-risk locations due to the fact that together they produce 80 per cent of the world's palm oil – an increasingly used ingredient in biofuels.
This is of particular relevance in the case of the ‘masyarakat terasing’ (isolated people), who live in remote forests, mountains or swamps. They may lead nomadic, semi-nomadic or settled lives, but typically they live far from modern society. Incursions into their homelands by Big Agribusiness can have devastating impacts on their traditional lifestyle.
