| Title | Burning in the Melting Pot: Diversity and Climate Crisis in Southeast Asia |
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Author |
Karunia Haganta |
Burning in the Melting Pot: Diversity and Climate Crisis in Southeast Asia
In her commentary on Southeast Asia Studies, Chou (2006: 128) states that Southeast Asia is difficult to define within clear boundaries. This is because Southeast Asia is so diverse. However, Southeast Asia’s diversity is not a weakness of Southeast Asian identity. Rather, this diversity and the absence of centralized power in Southeast Asia are its main characteristics. This diversity is not limited to humans, but also to non-humans. One of these non-human factors is geography, which Sutherland (2007: 29) divides into three: location, waterscapes, and wind. In terms of location, Southeast Asia is in the middle of two great civilizations, China and India. This seems to describe Southeast Asia’s position as marginal, but instead, Southeast Asia is the center of the movement that occurs not only between the two civilizations but many other civilizations. Southeast Asia’s position as a center was also determined by the monsoon conditions that were important for regulating trade movements. In Southeast Asia, this trade relied heavily on waterscapes, not only the sea but also river networks that were able to reach inland areas.
This human and non-human diversity makes Southeast Asia important as a lens, especially in the modern era, because this diversity transcends national boundaries. This diversity becomes incomprehensible if the image of Southeast Asia is still confined to national boundaries because this diversity is formed from a network of relations that transcends regional boundaries and even species (human and non-human) boundaries. Also important to note is Southeast Asia’s rich biodiversity (Lasco, 2010).
Negation and Exploitation of Diversity
However, this diversity is now threatened by the climate crisis. The climate crisis, like diversity itself, knows no boundaries. The climate crisis itself is shaped by the negation and exploitation of diversity. An example is deforestation. Deforestation drives climate change and rising temperatures, including El Niño (Wang, et al., 2019). These changes lead to forest fires. These forest fires exacerbate climate change and reduce forest area as well. This terrible cycle seems unbreakable. In Indonesia, El Nino caused massive forest fires in 2015 that caused emissions equivalent to those of the United States (Alisjahbana & Busch, 2017) and burned 2.6 million hectares of land, equivalent to US$16 billion and damaged international relations with neighboring countries, such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand (Eilenberg, 2022). This is despite Indonesia having recorded a decline in deforestation rates from 2011-2015 (Tsujino et al., 2016). Likewise, the 2019 forest fires were more severe than in 2015, even though deforestation decreased in 2017-2018 (Haniy, Hamzah, & Hanifah, 2019). Forest fires are also difficult to tackle because many occur on peatlands, which are difficult to extinguish when they catch fire. The problem is that peatlands are being used for oil palm instead of being conserved, which exacerbates forest fires (World Bank, 2016). These forest interventions in the form of plantations make forests more vulnerable to forest fires and natural events that can trigger forest fires, such as El Nino (Varkkey, 2016).
Therefore, special measures are needed to revitalize forests, not only to optimize their function of absorbing emissions but also to prevent forest fires. This effort cannot be based on technology or regulation but must be based on a deep understanding of the socio-political context of forest fires. Traditional farmers who clear their land using the slash-and-burn method are often blamed for forest fires (Eilenberg, 2022). The question is, if slash-and-burn is the main cause of forest fires, why have forest fires become more massive recently and not in the past? In fact, since December 2017, the Indonesian government has designed a Grand Design to deal with forest fires and in October 2019 formed a special team to end the practice of slash and burn (Eilenberg, 2022).
Deforestation and forest fires are tangible forms of the negation and exploitation of diversity that cause the climate crisis. Forest fires and deforestation are largely caused by the conversion of forests into oil palm plantations. The establishment of plantations, especially oil palm plantations, uses a method of territorialization that demarcates its territory (Li & Semedi, 2021: 9), especially to exclude the “other”. The “other” here has many meanings, from human to non-human. For example, many orangutans are eliminated because they are considered pests in oil palm plantations (Schreer, 2023). The relationship between palm oil and the military is not limited to the similarity of patterns, but also the role of the military as an apparatus for guarding palm oil territories that is ready to eliminate any “intruders”, such as the shooting of claimants of plasma forest rights in Bangkal, South Kalimantan, Indonesia (Long, 2023). This destruction of diversity is followed by the creation of new diversity to be exploited by plantations, namely bringing in migrant workers. In vulnerable conditions, migrants must be prepared to face horizontal conflicts with the surrounding population (Li & Semedi, 2022: 12).
Who is responsible for this negation and exploitation? In the Southeast Asian context, it is neoliberal capitalism combined with racism. First, capitalism turns nature and people into cheap commodities – cheap nature and cheap labor (Patel & Moore, 2017). Cheap nature means that nature can be exploited without any disruptions that require capitalism to spend capital. This includes, for example, visions of green development that require high costs to ensure their environmentally friendly nature (Moore, 2016). An important foundation for creating cheap nature is cheap labor. Cheap labor is labor that is ready to be hired with minimal wages and high compliance and without any guarantee of their protection and needs. The two are connected and even create each other. In coastal Southeast Asia, the climate crisis has caused many communities to lose their livelihoods. Abrasion, rising sea temperatures and levels, and salination of seawater due to climate change have reduced marine life, and coastal communities need to find other livelihoods (Kulp & Strauss, 2019). Here, coastal communities become cheap labor due to cheap nature that is overexploited and the impact of the climate crisis. They must turn to the equally exploitative tourism sector, reclamation projects, or even the export of sea sand like in Cambodia to Singapore (Fabinyi, et al., 2022).
Second, neoliberalism operates to exploit beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Returning to the forest fire case above, Indonesia is often blamed by Singapore and Malaysia for the haze of forest fires in Indonesia that reached these two countries. It is ironic that the forest fires are caused by the rapid flow of international investment, including from Singapore and Malaysia (Nofitra, 2018; Tan, 2019), into palm oil plantations. This investment is also generally followed by a disciplinary process that is generally directed at communities, especially workers, rather than capitalists. This disciplining always implies a colonialistic assumption that local communities are unable to utilize the surrounding nature for their good. Investment and global value chains are seen as “saviors” that aim to save people from themselves.
This racist assumption is also what makes communities targets for development and not to be heard or involved in policy-making. Southeast Asia has a long history of racist capitalism. Alatas (1997) shows that colonialism constructed the myth of lazy natives in societies in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia to legitimize their power. Through this stigma, colonialism was perceived as the bearer of modernization that would supposedly save the natives from their laziness and backwardness. The conditions in the 16th to 20th centuries that Alatas observed may have been more obvious because the culprit was Western colonialism, but today this pattern is hidden behind the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Pluriversal and Plural Ecologies: Bring Back Our Diversity
With such massive impacts, it is not wrong that the climate crisis is referred to as slow violence by Nixon (2011). Slow violence is formed from the accumulation of damage arising from the exploitation of racist neoliberal capitalism. The diversity that characterizes Southeast Asia must be negated and exploited for the benefit of capitalism and has no protection in the face of the climate crisis. At this point, diversity needs to be brought back in its pluriversal vision.
Ecology needs to be seen as a more or less coherent set of relationships between humans and non-humans (Sprenger & Großmann, 2018: ix). In practice, this set of relationships intersects with various things, ranging from exploitation to different views between cultures. This is what underlies the plural ecologies approach. Plural ecologies combines political ecology, anthropology of ontologies, and political ontology (Sprenger, et al., 2023: 2). Political ecology talks about power relations both materially and discursively in the relationship between humans and nature, including the relationship between humans themselves in the management of nature, such as the conflict between capitalism and the proletariat which leads to the formation of cheap nature and cheap labor.
This power relation goes hand in hand with the encounter between ontologies. Ontologies in an ecological context are approaches relevant here that hold that worlds are made through practices and identifications that are historically, culturally, and contextually specific (Sprenger, et al, 2023: 4). This difference of view can be seen when observing many communities in Southeast Asia that have attachments to their surrounding environment that are formed from their long history and beliefs, including religious ones. The movement in Hanoi to protect trees analogous to their ancestors (Hüwelmeier, 2023) is one example. This movement and belief is directed towards Banyan trees and influenced by Buddhism, which can also be found in Thai society (Darlington, 2011). This position is contrary to cheap nature. When confronted with capitalism, this ontology will encourage resistance, becoming a political ontology.
However, the two seem difficult to combine because they criticize each other. The political ecology approach criticizes ontologies that are insensitive to the power relations contained within the ontology, such as the hierarchy of traditional and religious leaders with the community at large, as well as the ontology’s neglect of the political economy relations underlying the exploitation of nature. Conversely, the ontological approach also criticizes political ecology for refusing to see the differences in understanding that are formed from the local contexts that shape the ontology. In fact, as explained above, both ontological differences and power relations reach a crisis point arising from racist capitalism. Racist capitalism does not care about the ontology of the local community, even denigrates it, and turns the community into a proletariat for its benefit. Instead of being contradicted, the two need to be combined to understand the climate crisis formed by the negation and exploitation of diversity in Southeast Asia.
I propose a pluriversal vision to initiate a new understanding of the climate crisis in Southeast Asia and decision-making to address it. Pluriversal is simply “the entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential. That power differential is the logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity” (Mignolo, 2018: x). This definition challenges colonial logic, not just Western colonialism. Although in many theorizations pluriversal is an attempt to destabilize Western hegemony, this colonial logic does not only come from the West. In the post-colonial nation-state era in Southeast Asia, the nation-state became a racist apparatus of capitalism. This is Moore’s (2022) critique of abstract pluralism, which is unclear in defining who it opposes. In its resistance, pluriversal should not only fight the West but capitalism, including those from non-Western and even Third World countries.
It needs to direct its opposition to capitalism. Moore (2022: 51) calls this dialectical pluriversalism. Dialectical pluriversalism sees relationality as structured by webs of power and re/production in actually existing world history (Moore, 2022: 51). In its efforts as a universal project, pluriversalism needs to see that the common ground of all contemporary civilizations is the exploitation of capitalism, rather than the clash of civilizations. The logic of capitalism always seeks accumulation as cheaply as possible and can happen anywhere, including in Southeast Asia.
Can ASEAN Become Pluriversal?
No. ASEAN’s fate is similar to the abstract pluriversal that Moore (2022) criticized as Third Way politics. ASEAN tries to position itself as a middle power in the constellation of global great powers. In the end, ASEAN is dragged down, instead of being a middle power. In the latest controversy caused by China’s expansion through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it appears that ASEAN countries are powerless in the face of this project (Liu & Bennett, 2023). However, China appears to be a better choice than the West. However, the actual situation is the same. Whether it is the West or China, the project of global capitalism does not intend to accommodate the interests of the people.
The pluriversal vision can only rely on the movements of the people themselves. This movement is based on resistance to capitalism and is mainly driven by the proletariat. In criticizing the concept of civil society, Hadiz (1997) mentions that this concept often only accommodates the interests of the middle class in its political movements, while the aspirations of the working class are excluded. This is what has driven civil society so far, including those voiced in Southeast Asia in its democratization process in the late 1900s and early 2000s to fail and eventually fall back into oligarchy and political populism. What is needed is global solidarity, which goes beyond Southeast Asia itself, such as the Zapatistas (Krøvel, 2010) and La Via Campesina (Ody & Shattuck, 2023).
References
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Biography
Karunia Haganta, is an independent researcher from Indonesia. He graduated from the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Indonesia (Undergraduate) in 2023. Some of his publications can be seen through my Google Scholar or my LinkedIn, Karunia Haganta. He am very interested in collaborating in research, writing, or other things, you can contact Karunia through e-mail: karunia.haganta@gmail.com
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