OCTOBER 7 — “You want to save the world, but you don’t want it to change.” — Ultron to the Avengers

KL’s skyline of late looks funky. It’s like the city is situated 20,000 feet above sea-level. Looks like heaven... but smells like hell.

The haze is like purgatory veiled in dry ice. And purgatory in Christian teaching is that place where souls are cleansed and refined (for, literally, heaven’s sake).

Is there something our unenviable air quality readings can teach us as a nation? As a region? Can the haze, uh, cleanse us of anything?

Imagine a mega-sensei checking the pulse of our region. What would he be listening for other than the haze? What would he be concerned about apart from the immediate symptom?

My guess is he wouldn’t be pumped up about simply removing the smoke and pollution from the skies — he’d also want to ensure the land as a whole is clean.

I’m thinking this sensei would say that South-East Asia is suffering from over-consumption, over-construction, over-everything.

The haze is like an elemental dump-site taking flight. It’s our trash thrown back at us.

Because we all know the forest fires are tied to economics and cost-cutting measures performed in near-indifference to anything else.

Industrial-scale agricultural burning – primarily for palm oil and pulpwood production in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia – uses cheap and fast practices to clear land.

When coupled with extremely dry weather, voilà, our cities look like Genting Highlands in the evening.

Can we blame the Indonesian farmers? Sure we can. But in the end we mustn’t ignore the overall greed of society which has led to this.

We now know that the haze is correlated with a rise in cardiac arrests, asthma cases and so on (see note 1) so, well, this is yet another example of how corporate and/or governmental prioritisation of money-making extracts a toll from the people.

TLDR: The lack of care for the environment is killing us.

The haze is yet another symptom of capitalism which extols income and revenue at the expense of its human subjects. And this time the region, instead of merely families and communities, suffers.

The Jubilee proposal

In the Bible – particularly the book of Leviticus chapter 25 – the Jubilee was proposed as a once in 50-year event in which, for an entire year, the land lies fallow.

All debts are cancelled, prisoners set free. It was like a socio-political reset. Most importantly – in the context of the haze – it was also an economic and environmental time-out.

Let the land, the air, the animals and Nature as a whole take a break.

Quit worrying about GDP and just consume what’s already produced. No need to bother with “Customer Experience”; muse instead on “Imagine the Land as Customer”.

Rest. Relax. Chillax.

Of course, capitalism knows no year-long Jubilees (and, sadly, there is no evidence the Jubilee was ever implemented in history). It only understands two-week work-from-hotel vacations.

Essentially, the haze reminds us that economics isn’t everything

Recall in 2010 that an Icelandic volcano blew up, and 95,000 flights were grounded? Many travellers lamented their fate on TripAdvisor, but let’s face it: It’s not every day that Mama Earth tells the hubris-soaked humans to stop whatever they’re doing and just be.

“You want to fly to London? Nope. Not gonna happen. Ash-cloud. You can row there if you wish”.

Maybe Ultron wasn’t entirely wrong. We often don’t want real change, so now our cities, the very region north and north-east of Kalimantan, look like Everest base-camp at dawn.

Note 1: The key study for haze and cardiac arrests is Ho, Andrew Fu Wah, et al. “Air quality and the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Singapore (PAROS): a time series analysis.” The Lancet Public Health 7.11 (2022): e932-e941. For asthma it’s Kulkarni, Anagh, et al. “Short-Term Exposure to PM2. 5 and Emergency Department Visits for Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.” JAMA Network Open 9.9 (2026): e2636306.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.