The Smoke That Crossed the Sea

The story

One morning in Singapore, children woke up, looked out of the window, and found that the sky had gone missing. In its place hung a thick grey blanket. The sun was a pale orange coin. The air smelled of campfire, though nobody was camping. And here is the strange part: the fires making all that smoke were not in Singapore at all. They were burning in another country, far across the sea.

People in Southeast Asia call it the haze, and it has visited many times. To understand it, you must travel to the great islands of Indonesia, home to some of the largest rainforests and swamps on Earth.

Under parts of that land lies a special ground called peat. Peat is made of plants that fell thousands of years ago and never fully rotted, pressed into soft, dark, crumbly earth. Peat is packed with old plant material, and that means it can BURN. When peatland is drained and dries out, a fire can creep down into the ground itself and smoulder there, slowly, for weeks, like a fire hiding under a blanket. Rain on top does not easily reach it. Firefighters cannot easily reach it either. And smouldering peat makes enormous amounts of thick, heavy smoke.

Many of these fires begin when people clear land for planting, because burning has long been the cheapest way to clear it. In dry years, fires escape control and spread far beyond the patches first set alight. Then the wind picks up the smoke and carries it wherever it pleases. Smoke does not stop at a border. It does not show a passport. It simply drifts across the sea, and children in Singapore and Malaysia wake up under a grey sky made in another country. In the worst haze years, the smoke grew so thick that schools in more than one country closed their doors, and people wore masks in the street.

So what do you do about a problem that ignores borders? You cannot fix it alone. That is the real lesson of the haze. More than twenty years ago, the countries of Southeast Asia signed a promise to face the haze together. Today they share satellite maps that spot fires from space, so a fire can be found while it is small. Neighbours have sent firefighters and water-bombing aircraft to help each other. And in Indonesia, teams work to block old drainage canals so that water soaks back into the peatlands, because wet peat does not want to burn.

The haze has not been beaten. Some years are clear and some years are smoky, and the work goes on. But every clear morning is partly a gift from people in different countries choosing to work as one team.

So when the sky over your home is blue, enjoy it twice. Once for the sunshine. And once for the quiet promise between neighbours that helps keep it that way.