“No Fire, No Food: Tribe Clings to Slash and Burn Amid Haze Crackdown”

In this article by an environmental news website, we learn more in detail about the philosophy of swidden ("slash-and-burn") agriculture and its difficult confrontation with Indonesian laws banning forest burning. The article interfaces with the indigenous Dayak Iban of Kalimantan, who describe a very different environmental sensibility than the lawmakers in Jakarta -- ‘We don’t burn the forest, we burn ladang’ [rice fields]. I learned that much of the forest could be considered not natural or out of human hands, but part of this cycle for perhaps centuries. If the burned land is left to grow for 10 years or so, it will return to its previous state, and as long as only a certain amount of land is being used for these purposes, the environmental impact is fairly small. Native swiddeners feel that governmental crackdown on burning (to prevent the unhealthy haze) unfairly targets small landowners like the Dayak Iban when it should really be focused on those burning the land to turn it into a permanent agricultural space for cash crops (a practice the government seems to itself have promoted in the past). For the Dayak Iban, the tradeoff becomes the risk of being punished by authorities if they planted and the risk of a food crisis were they not to.