Anthropocene landscapes

In a forest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, in early 2016, the bodies of three orangutans lay supine and unmoving, their fur burned from their bodies and replaced by a thick layer of clinging ash. One of the bodies belonged to an infant, a one-year-old, his tiny hands grasping for security from his mother. The landscape itself was burned as far as the eye could see. Similar fires in 2015 burned across Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo, covering around 261,000 hectares, and producing thick, yellow smog that resulted in over 100,000 premature deaths (Koplitz et al. 2016). The resultant fires reached uncontrollable intensities and posed a significant threat to Indonesia’s rainforests, some of the world’s most biodiverse, which nurture around 50 percent of the planet’s species. While fingers of blame were pointed in multiple directions, it was seven corporate executives who were ultimately arrested, their culpability etched into the industrial-scale plantations for palm oil, paper pulp and other agribusinesses that regularly employ slash-and-burn land clearance practices. Yet, in the midst of environmental disaster, as witnesses stood in the burning ruins of a landscape where all ‘earth others’ (after Plumwood 2002) had fled or perished, it is telling that it was the human catastrophe that registered most prominently: the fires were recorded as a ‘crime against humanity’ by a spokesperson from the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (Allen 2015).