Earth, Humankind, and the Haze Disaster

The Earth, Humans, and Haze Disaster 1 is an essay written in the wake of one of the worst forest fires to occur in Indonesia, originally published as an op-ed in Koran Sindo on 7 October 2015 under the title Bumi, Manusia, dan Bencana Kabut Asap2. The essay draws on the book The Angry Earth3 by anthropologists Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, and on Lowell Carr’s notion of disaster as the collapse of cultural protection4. It reveals an imbalance in the mutual relationship between humans and the Earth. The haze disaster is framed not as the result of an “Angry Earth,” but as a consequence of human recklessness, systemic failure, and the erosion of preventive cultural structures—a warning born of human action, and one that continues to be ignored.