Fire is humanity's oldest companion. With fire, people drove back the cold, kept wild beasts at bay, cooked their food, forged metal and, in time, built civilisation. It was around a small flame at the mouth of a cave that early humans first gathered, shared stories and learned to become a society. Without fire, we might never have become what we are. Yet from the very beginning of history, fire has also taught one unchanging lesson: whatever gives life can just as easily bring destruction once it slips out of control.
In nature, fire is not always an enemy. In some ecosystems, burning is part of the cycle of life. Certain plants release their seeds only after being touched by heat, and others flourish only once fire has cleared away the old undergrowth that shuts out the sunlight. A burnt forest can sometimes rise again through green shoots pushing up from the ashes, as though nature were teaching us that destruction and renewal often walk side by side.
There is, however, a great difference between fire that belongs to the balance of nature and fire born of greed, negligence or arrogance. Natural fire follows the laws of nature, with a rhythm and limits tested over immense stretches of time. Fire set by human hands too often comes from the wish to gain more at less cost: clearing land by the cheapest means, finishing a job as quickly as possible, and leaving the consequences to the wind.
This is where the real problem begins. A forest fire is more than an ecological disaster. It is a mirror that shows how humanity regards the world it inhabits: as a home to be cared for, or as a warehouse to be emptied.
II. A Burning Forest Is More Than Trees
When a forest burns, what is lost is not only trunks and branches. What burns is the bird's nest, built patiently over years. What burns is the path of wildlife, handed down from one generation to the next, memorised by the mother and taught to her young. What burns is the spring that quietly feeds the river, and the river that quietly sustains the villages downstream. What burns is the clean air that was freely given, and for which humanity has never been sent a bill.
We tend to think of fires as events that can be seen: leaping flames, thick billowing smoke and blackened land. Such images are terrible, but precisely because they are so dramatic, they make us forget that the greatest damage is often invisible. The soil stripped of its fertile layer, the insects and fungi whose names were never recorded, the intricate relationships between living things that we notice only once they are severed: all of it vanishes without leaving a single photograph.
Nature needs decades to grow a forest. Fire needs only a few hours to erase it. This imbalance of time is the quietest tragedy of all, for what was built through the patience of generations can be destroyed by a single decision taken overnight.
We live in an age that worships speed, while nature works with patience. When the two meet, it is too often patience that loses.
III. Indonesia and the Paradox of the Green Nation
Indonesia is home to one of the largest tropical forests in the world. From the rainforests of Sumatra and Kalimantan to the interior of Papua, these forests not only sustain the lives of millions of people but also form one of the last bastions of the planet's biodiversity. Within them live tigers, orangutans, elephants and thousands of other creatures found nowhere else on Earth.
It is ironic, then, that a country blessed with such forest wealth has again and again become the stage for forest and land fires. Over the past decade, the area burnt in Indonesia has been highly erratic, soaring in some years and subsiding in others. The year 2015 marked the darkest point, when around 2.6 million hectares of forest and land were consumed, making it one of the largest ecological disasters in Indonesia's modern history. The economic losses were estimated at Rp221 trillion, or about US$16.1 billion, a sum that exceeds the cost of many of the nation's infrastructure projects.
After a period of decline, the fires surged again in 2019, reaching about 1.65 million hectares. The year 2023 was troubling once more, with more than 1.16 million hectares burnt, an increase of over fourfold on the previous year. That jump was a reminder that a fall in the figures in one year is no guarantee that the problem has been solved, especially when a long dry season returns.
These data show that fires in Indonesia are not wholly random or incidental events. They behave like a chronic illness that occasionally eases but never truly heals, flaring up whenever conditions allow and, each time, leaving deeper scars on the same body.
IV. Indonesia in the World's Mirror
Viewed from a global perspective, Indonesia is not in fact the country with the largest burnt area each year. Worldwide, between 340 and 370 million hectares of the Earth's surface are burnt by vegetation fires annually, an area several times the size of our own country. Most of this occurs in grasslands, savannas, scrub and dry regions of Africa, Australia and South America.
Yet comparing Indonesia with the rest of the world on burnt area alone can be misleading. A figure in hectares says nothing about what was burning. In many parts of the world, fire is part of a natural ecological cycle. The African savanna, for instance, has evolved alongside fire for thousands of years. Its grasses recover swiftly, its soils are accustomed to the flames, and many of its plant species actually depend on fire to regenerate.
Indonesia faces a different problem.
Most forest and land fires (known in Indonesian as KARHUTLA) occur in tropical rainforest and peatland, ecosystems that were never “designed” by nature to burn. Peat is a deposit of plant matter that has decayed slowly over hundreds to thousands of years, waterlogged throughout. So long as it stays wet, it is a quiet store of carbon. But once it is drained through canals and then set alight, it becomes fuel that can smoulder beneath the surface, is fiendishly hard to extinguish, and releases carbon stored for centuries or millennia into the atmosphere within a matter of weeks. This is why fires in Indonesia have a far greater impact on the global climate than their area alone would suggest.
In other words, one hectare of burning peatland in Indonesia can have ecological consequences far beyond those of one hectare of grassland burning naturally elsewhere in the world. The same size does not always mean the same loss
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V. Peat, Smoke and a Debt to the Future
The tragedy of Indonesia's KARHUTLA also has a dimension that rarely appears in photographs of fires: the smoke. In the 2015 fires, more than 2.6 million hectares burnt and tens of millions of people were exposed to a haze that drifted into neighbouring countries. The morning sun turned a pale red, visibility shrank and face masks became a daily sight. The effects went beyond economic loss, to damaged public health, suspended schooling, disrupted transport and strained regional relations.
This is where forest fires cease to be a local matter. Smoke recognises no administrative boundary. It does not care whether a person lives in a village beside the hotspots or in a big city hundreds of kilometres away, whether they are a farmer or an official, a child or a pensioner. Everyone breathes the same air, and the most vulnerable, namely infants, the elderly and those with respiratory illness, bear the heaviest burden. The haze makes ecological suffering collective.
For this reason, burning peat can be described as an inherited debt. The carbon released today helps to warm the climate that our grandchildren will inhabit. The land ruined today will become a burden of restoration for them to bear, interest included. In this sense, KARHUTLA teaches a moral lesson: environmental damage may be done by a few, but its consequences are borne by everyone, including those who are not yet born.
VI. A Recurring Crisis: Why Is It So Hard to Learn?
What makes Indonesia's KARHUTLA so tragic is not only the scale but also the repetition. 2015 was a lesson. 2019 was a warning. 2023 was a reminder that the lesson had not yet been fully absorbed. Each time the flames die down and the smoke thins, public attention thins with it, and we return to our routines until the next dry season comes knocking.
Recurring fires raise a philosophical question deeper than merely who is to blame. Why do humans keep repeating the same mistakes? Why do short-term gains so often triumph over long-term interests? Why does the cheap cost of prevention always feel less urgent than the far greater cost of firefighting, when the former saves and the latter merely patches?
A forest needs decades, even centuries, to grow. Yet the decision to burn it is too often made in a matter of hours. Here lies the contrast between the ways of nature and the ways of humankind. Nature thinks in centuries. Humans often think in harvest seasons or annual profit reports. Until the gap between these two ways of thinking is bridged, by firm law enforcement, by sincere restoration of peatlands and, above all, by the awareness that a forest belongs not to one generation, fire will always find its way back.
Perhaps what we need is not merely stricter rules but a longer memory. For a nation that quickly forgets its disasters is a nation preparing for the next.
Epilogue: When the World Breathes the Same Smoke
On a map of the world, the fires in Indonesia may look like a small dot on the equator. In reality, every hectare of tropical forest lost diminishes the Earth's ability to absorb carbon, safeguard biodiversity and sustain life. That small dot turns out to be joined to the same lungs, the same sky and the same breath.
KARHUTLA is therefore not only Indonesia's problem. It is one branch of the great question now facing the whole of humanity:
Shall we go on seeing the forest as a resource to be exploited, or as a trust to be handed down?
Data can count how many million hectares have burnt. Economists can count how many trillions of rupiah have been lost. But there is one thing no statistic can easily measure, one thing that appears in no annual report yet will one day be claimed by time:
how much of the future goes up in smoke with every tree that turns to ash.
