Indigenous activist Kynan Tegar on Indonesia’s fires, and defending the Earth

Indigenous activist and filmmaker Kynan Tegar joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to discuss the impacts of the fires devastating Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo. Some 48,000 hectares (about 119,000 acres) of land have burned so far this year; Kynan says these fires are intentional on the part of agricultural corporations. “The process that has gotten us to this point right now, where fires are raging through the island, it’s a process that started maybe you can draw the line up to the 1970s, which was around the time where the Indonesian New Order period regime of Suharto was leasing out a lot of lands as concessions to companies,” she says. “A lot of times it’s logging, it’s palm oil concessions, it’s also gold mines.” Corporations have drained more than 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of peatland, she says. But the impact, she says, that isn’t receiving as much attention is the decreased access to freshwater for Indigenous and local communities, which both climate change and El Niño are making worse. “It’s quite an ironic thing. Like, it’s one of the world’s biggest rainforest[s], and a lot of the people there are struggling for water. So that, on top of the conditions created by the massive wildfires that has been happening since July … has put a lot of the people there in strain,” she says. Kynan released a spoken-word music video in 2024 to dramatize and tell the story of her community, Sungai Utik,…This article was originally published on

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