Remember the days, as a child, when you used to run around freely and play in your backyard or those romantic evenings in your youth, where you would take those evening strolls with your loved one and what about those early morning jogs to kick start your day and keep your body fresh and healthy? Perhaps that was just yesterday for you? But to some of us, those were the good old days of yesteryears… sound farfetched? Not really because in some parts of the world like South East Asia (Malaysia in particular), the phrase ‘a breath of fresh’ air has been truly been reduced to being nothing more than a just saying.
You see what many fail to realise is, as different as we all are (race, religion, age, nationality) in the grand scheme of things, none of that really matters. Why? Because at the end of it all we share the same fate as we share the same one home (the irreplaceable green earth) and the same source of life sustainers (sun, air, water, etc). Therefore when we ruin it for ourselves thinking the effects are confined to our home, backyard, country or even region, that’s not just silly. It’s also irresponsible and downright ignorant – the route of all destruction.
Some events are naturally annually recurrent -just as we have 4 seasons that come and go, or how some countries have monsoon seasons and dry spells. However the irresponsible acts of mankind has disrupted the natural order of things, resulting in not only the climate/weather being more temperamental than before, but also an annual occurrence of climate/weather events that are artificially induced. One among the most prominent of such events is the occurrence of the haze.
In Malaysia, a tropical country located near the equator –the monsoon season was once upon a time the only recurring (annual) climate event but thanks to the acts of open burning in the neighbouring Sumatra, they now add the haze to the list.
The dreaded haze which is not a visual nuisance (it’s so thick on some days you just can’t see anything), but a health one (think skin irritations, respiratory issues, cancer, etc) as well begins terrorizing the people every end of July and goes on all the way until the end of August.
The cause of the haze is the annual open burning event that takes place in Sumatra, Indonesia. Companies- those that are too cheap and irresponsible (lack of CSR policies?) to care about the environment, select setting fire to the forests to clear land as the most cost/time effective method for them, never mind that it comes at the detrimental expense of both nature and her inhabitants.
Open burning on its own is a bad enough activity (global warming and the cruel death of animals who live in that habitat), open burning that is out of control is even worse and that is exactly what takes place annually at Sumatra. Fires are started by companies to clear the land, but the winds spread the fires uncontrollably wild and carry the effects all over to the neighbouring countries (with the closest Malaysia being the worse victim of them all). Varying in severity from say Australia’s natural bush fires, open burning in Sumatra is also done to convert peatland forests. Peat soil is highly flammable once drained. They produce more smoke and carbon emissions than other soil types so the haze brought on by it is nothing less than deadly.
It clears up in September, not by anyone’s doing but by luck and nature’s mercy – heavy rainfalls that put out the fires and wash down the haze but that just means it’s all gone to the ground and it leaves us with polluted ground water. And with the effects of global warming, what happens when the day the rain doesn’t come in September?
During the annual haze, the people can’t go out for their jogs, can’t stretch their arms to inhale that breath of morning fresh air because there just isn’t any. All that you smell is burnt air, with obvious debris and particles that you can see with your naked eye. On such days, schools are closed and everyone walks around with a mask.
So if you think that advert you just saw about polluted air, gray skies and masked citizens being mellow dramatic, think again because it’s closer than you think.
