I’ve been walking to work in a daze for the past week, recalibrating my familiar routine with every step. There is a heavy fog enveloping my neighborhood and well, the entire island I live in. It is surreal and becoming an enormous wake-up call.
I am not being dramatic. I live in Singapore at the moment, and this once pristine island has been crippled with a gradually thickening white haze since Tuesday.
The Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) has hit 401 (the maximum is 500) at 12 noon on Friday. It is the highest in Singapore’s history. A PSI reading above 300 is assigned as “hazardous”, while Singapore government guidelines say a PSI reading of above 400 sustained for 24 hours “may be life-threatening to ill and elderly persons”. Healthy persons may have adverse reactions as well. The range for the past three days has been in the 200s. Doctors have been reporting as much as a 20% increase in medical consultations for haze-related ailments.
I shudder (and cough) to think of the hell that asthma sufferers must be going through right now. Those of us who have been blessed with more agile lungs are already feeling the squeeze. We have been advised to stay indoors and seal our windows. Your eyes feel like it has teeny-weeny bits of sand in them and your throat becomes tight and parched. It is not unusual to suddenly have to stop talking and go into awful hacking, fart-inducing coughing fits. We are wearing the N95 masks to protect us from 95% of the smoke particles. The N95 mask looks like half of a white bra. And so it looks like I have a bra on my face. In public. In broad daylight. As part of my outfit. My worst fears have indeed come true.
And so how did this mess come to be? Illegal burning in nearby Sumatra takes place in this June to September dry season to clear space for palm oil plantations. The slash-and-burn farming is used to clear vast tracts of land. It is unrelenting in its efficient obliteration of land. It involves cutting down vegetation and then setting the land on fire, to “prepare” it for cultivation. It is preferred because it’s cheaper and faster than using excavators and bulldozers.
And this is where it gets interesting. It is easy to start waving our collective fists against the greed of these large companies. Palm oil, after all, is a product that relies on the largeness of land. The larger the tract, the more oil it yields, the higher the profit. These businesses will also counter that their product sustains the lives of thousands of its employees. Organic waste matter produced in the processing, called biomass, can be converted into pellets and used as biofuel. Used palm oil can be converted into methyl esters for biodiesel.
The arguments can go on and on and on, until the rains come and the wind blows differently and the air clears again. But the lesson has been handed down. We can no longer insist on living as if what we do DOES NOT AFFECT others around us.
The Catholic Church calls this relationship our belonging to “The Mystical Body of Christ”, whereby every person, no matter how small or how weak, contributes to this web of relationships.
And so that is what I think about as I wear this thing on my face. Until the smoke clears.