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TODAY Tuesday 24 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Tuesday 24 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Fire? Again?
Michael Lerner was in here last month and he politely disagreed with our list of the Twelve Biggest Environmental Stories of 1997. Liberty Tree had the Kyoto conference and its attendant noise as #1 and the fires of Southeast Asia as #2. Michael thought Southeast Asia was right, but that the really important environmental story from there was the collapse of national currencies. The globalization of the availability and terms of credit had been made vivid. Any talk of resilient decentralized economies -- which E.F. Schumacher and others had thought were the prerequisites of true ecological sustainability -- seemed beyond the realm of practical discussion.
Michael may have had it right, and the first evidence may be today rising in columns of smoke from the Indonesian archipelago. It looks as if the Southeast Asia financial crisis -- plus some ill-timed drought conditions -- has prompted an earlier-than-expected round of the Southeast Asia fire crisis.
Both the New York Times and Reuters yesterday revealed that Indonesian officials had reported an extensive outbreak of illegal forest fires in the province of East Kalimantan, on the eastern shore of Borneo. Hit by sharp losses of purchasing power, small farmers and plantation owners alike are desperate to expand clearings to raise more crops. Despite formal government prohibitions, the growers are slashing and burning like there was no tomorrow. The writ of national environmental policy doesn't extend all that far into the bush. Tinderbox conditions help many of those fires leap out of control and spread quickly to unsettled areas. Reuters reports that the Indonesian environment minister is particularly anxious about those remote forest fires. They can be attacked only from the air, and he fears that the current economic crisis will preclude counter-measures as extravagant as water bombs.
The smoke and haze doesn't yet compare to the suffocatingly dense clouds that covered the region last fall, but on the other hand no one expected anything like a recurrence so soon. Indonesia's neighbors in squeaky-clean Singapore are fretting conspicuously.
Here's an unpleasant circle of causation to greet the millennium. Financial crash plus artificial climate disturbances induce ecological disasters which can't be effectively remediated because of financial crisis. Let's see what happens.
TODAY ON THE SITE
Actually, you may be interested in going off the site to follow the latest breaks in the fire store. Other than reading Seth Mydans' dispatches in the Times, we recommend you go online for two enviro news services that keep tabs on important world stories: Planet Ark (Australia) and Environmental News Network (USA) go great with the morning coffee.
Recent "Today" columns:
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle
2/18: Optimistic Feds and the Future of Kyoto
2/17: The New Great Game
2/13: Windmills
2/12: Stuart Eizenstat's Smart Bomb
2/11: Alligator in the Coal Mine
2/10: Inconvenient Public Opinion
2/9: Remember Penn Station
2/6: Adam Smith and Automobile Efficiency
2/5: Clean Water, Naturally
2/4: Roll, Storms, Roll
2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.