ABSTRACT
From August until the end of November 1997, with a short break from October 7-11 and another during the first week of November, many parts of Southeast Asia were covered by massive smog. The smog extended 2,000 miles from east to west at its peak points, and affected at least 100 million people. Satellite photographs showed that peat fires, occurring between 6 and 60 feet below ground, ranged over 2.5 million acres, and were likely to burn for years, releasing significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.1 Since then, the Southeast Asian smog has almost become an annual event, as big plantation owners and small slash-and-burn farmers in Indonesia and Malaysia ignore government bans and use the dry season to clear forests and grasslands for planting when the monsoon rains arrive. As I write, at the beginning of October 2009, smog shrouds an area of Southeast Asia extending from peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, most of Indonesia, to Brunei at its northernmost point.2 In this chapter I will focus on the smog of 1997, since the failures of government policy and leadership evident then largely remain to this day – although the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was passed in 2002, Southeast Asian governments, and the Indonesian government in particular, have been largely ineffective in implementing the ASEAN Agreement.
