Welcome to the Jungle
Another day. Another day of travel. An hour flight from Jakarta to Pekanbaru, Riau.
One person in the group I’m traveling with reckons that this plane – a Lion Air Boeing something or other – has twenty additional rows than an identical plane owned by a European or American company. Indeed, the crush of people boarding the plane has the feel of a crowded dance floor, or a run on a fire exit at a heavy metal show in Jersey.
I’m in seat 37E – middle seat! second to last row! Lucky me. I board from the front of the plane and, once I’ve made my way to a row in the low-30s, realize that passengers are also boarding from the rear. A tighter than normal plane now has two streams of traffic: one moving from front to back, another from back to front. Several stewardesses busily cramming baggage into the overhead bins add a further complicating factor to these opposing streams of traffic. I’m in the second to last row. Press. Press. Press pass other passengers and crawl/fall into my seat. My knees touch the seat in front of me. And I’m not the least bit tall.
But you know that.
A gentle ascent out of Jakarta and a cruise through billowing equatorial cloud patterns. So soft even looking at them makes my eyes heavy. A patch of bumps and the seat belt sign illuminates. I think this is called “chop” in pilot parlance. We begin our descent into Pekanbaru before I’ve read a dozen pages in my book.
Just a few hundred feet above the ground and details of the landscape emerge.
“See those fires,” Lafcadio says, “That’s clearing and burning.” I look up from my book.
Sure enough, craning my neck toward the window, leaning over the sleeping passenger in the window seat, I see a small fire on the edge of an area of vegetation – a thin, grey stream of smoke stretching up from the forest floor, dissipating as it floats skyward.
I stretch closer toward the window, looking farther out toward the horizon. More small fires.
Then another fire. And then another.
“These are the green deserts,” Lafcadio says. Hardly deserts but surely not what I would consider a tropical rainforest.
Another fire.
Then a patch of four fires, ahead. Two more small fires burn between the cluster of four in the distance and the wing of the airplane.
As the landscape comes into focus, I see plot upon plot – as far as I can see – of palm oil plantations. Tropical rainforest cleared of trees and replaced by ordered rows of oil palm trees. This is the process that lies behind your bar of soap, your bowl of cereal, or the novelty and good intention of possessing a bio-fueled automobile. From above the trees appear to be green stars, rows and columns crisscrossing the landscape. Plots marked off from adjacent plots by clearly distinct borders. Are they paths, irrigation canals? It’s like flying over the Midwest and seeing those circles of irrigated agriculture land except here they are square concessions, seeming lush at first glance rather than flat. Here it looks vastly more brutal, though. The burning. The absence of trees we’re its obvious there were thousands, tens-of-thousands. Millions? A scared and charred landscape. The mark of human intervention – order rows of monocrop – where there must have been great diversity of vegetation.
More small fires. Some clustered together. Sometimes a single line of grey smoke twisting toward the sky.
“Wait until we get into the Kampar Peninsula,” says Lafcadio, smiling. “This is nothing.”
The ordered rows and columns of green stars end and are replaced by only slightly less ordered rows of red-roofed structures.
We land and I disembark from the airplane, from the back. I learned my lesson the first time. No more crush through thirty rows of passengers. I lilt down a set of stairs, step onto the tarmac – God I love disembarking onto the tarmac! – and into a gust of hot, humid air of a tropical evening. The sun one-quarter obscured as it sets behind a line of tall trees.
Above the entrance to the airport terminal is a typical sign welcoming us to Pekanbaru.
It might as well say: Welcome to Pekanbaru, Riau. Welcome to ground zero of Indonesian deforestation.
