Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Wild forest fires & the wind that brings haze

It's the time of the year when wild forest fires break out (not without human intervention of the most stupid & unscrupulous kind), in Indonesia, and the nonchalant south-western winds carry the resultant fumes all the way to Singapore & Malaysia. Happens over & over again. The elites in this country buy air purifiers and make Facebook posts calling for boycott of palm oil; but nothing really changes. Some clever marketeers distribute free haze kits, images on one's news feed of orangutans burnt alive makes one sick in the stomach, kids begin wheezing, the poor continue labouring through the terrible air conditions, and a state of emergency gets declared in an already impoverished Sumatra. There's only one conclusion to be made here: the world is perverse in all sorts of ways.

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