Bearing witness to Indonesia’s environmental challenges: Sapariah Saturi

Indonesia’s environmental issues often feel too vast to take in at once. A nation said to have more than 17,000 islands, it contains the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest and one of its busiest commodity frontiers. For many Indonesians, the story of modern development is told not in charts but in the air they breathe. Some remember childhoods spent under yellowed skies, the sting of peat-fire smoke seeping through school windows, the sweet-acrid smell that clings to clothes long after the fires fade.

Others know the slow rise of the sea by the way the ground squelches underfoot in places where it didn’t use to. Or the way Jakarta’s air tastes metallic on mornings when the pollution monitors glow red. For Sapariah “Arie” Saturi, these scenes are not abstractions. They are a biography.

She grew up along the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, a region shaped by the uneasy coexistence of forest, peatland, and the ambitions of logging firms, palm-oil giants, and mining companies. Fires arrived each dry season in the 1990s, and with them the haze: darkened skies, eyes that burned after a few minutes outdoors, a kind of muffled stillness that settles over the landscape when the smoke grows dense enough to dull sound and color alike.

Masks were rare then. Children simply endured. Sapariah Saturi. Photo courtesy of Saturi.

Today Arie lives in Jakarta, where the problems are different but no less tangible. The capital sinks a little each year, traffic is a consistent source of frustration, and...This article was originally published on Mongabay