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Your letters: Annual smoke in Indonesia

It is wrong to harm nature

The Jakarta Post
Mon, September 21, 2015

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Your letters: Annual smoke in Indonesia

I

t is wrong to harm nature. There is no way of justifying it from any point of view. It is an annual event that some areas in Indonesia suffer from smoke from forest fires. Watching news on TV and reading it in the newspaper, we can see that the western part of this country is dealing with this dangerous smoke every year.

I am from West Kalimantan. Since I was a kid until 2011, I sadly celebrated that smoke for weeks. The smoke sometimes trapped me in my home and the local administration asked schools to send their students home. Some accidents even happened because visibility was too low.

All these things happen because of human beings, the only culprit in the disaster. For any reason, harming nature is unjustifiable. Harming nature by burning forest areas and creating choking smoke will accelerate people'€™s path to death.

It is right that some parties should be held responsible for this. The responsibility does not only translate into fighting the fires , but also making sure the disaster does not recur and raising public awareness of the importance of coexistence with nature. It is important to campaign against forest fires through seminars and dialog, rather than debate on social media. While offering no solution to the forest fires, exchange of (rude) words on social media will only spark more problems.

Local administrations play a very important role in preventing the disaster recurring in the future. They should not stop at making a policy, but also promote it to the whole of society because they have an equal right to know about and understand it. After that the government should initiate monitoring, not controlling. The purpose of the monitoring would be to see whether the familiarization succeeds.

The third step is evaluation. The government should review the policy it made based on the facts, which is common. Local people should also start reminding each other about how important it is to take care of nature. Deforestation is a big issue for almost all countries as it worsens global warming.

Everybody is responsible for the protection of nature. We may have burned forests and cut down trees and done nothing to prevent deforestation from happening. May Indonesia turn green again someday.

Liliana
Yogyakarta

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