Abstract
Problems with studies, claims, and assumptions that have been made about the causes of fires in Indonesia's tropical moist forests are identified, and the kinds of concepts, methods, prioritizing, and data needed to resolve the problems are discussed. Separate sections are devoted to studying ignitions, studying fire susceptibility and fire behavior, and using the goal of causal explanation to guide interdisciplinary research.
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Notes
Estimates of the affected area vary, depending, at least partly, on varying definitions of forests (Tacconi, 2003, pp. 2–5). Factors probably contributing to the confusion are that smoke haze and its economic and health consequences were emphasized in media and Internet coverage of the fires during the El Niño drought in 1997–1998 and that the facile assumption made by many journalists, government officials, and the lay public seems to have been that whatever produces smoke haze must be a forest fire. In fact, much of the smoke haze–possibly most of it (Tacconi, 2003, p. 5)—came not from the burning of forest trees but rather from the burning of peat.
“Concrete events” in my usage include human actions as well as events such as forest fires.
For calculation of the forest remaining in three classes (high-, medium-, and low-density canopy) in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi as of 2003, see Tacconi and Kurniawan, 2005).
The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) is now called the World Agroforestry Centre.
The methodological injunctions here are ones generally applicable in research guided by the goal of causal explanation. Most fundamental is to be clear and focused about one's explananda, i.e., about what one is trying to explain. This is discussed explicitly in Roberts, 1996: 105 ff., and is implied in a number of my own publications (Vayda, 1996, 1997, 1998, and Vayda and Walters, 1999). A corollary is not to be sidetracked from trying to explain the designated explanandum events, like forest fires, to trying to explain other events, like particular ignitions or types of ignitions, before their causal significance with respect to the designated explananda has been seriously or sufficiently probed. Walters and I have criticized some political ecologists for losing sight of this corollary in their attempts to explain environmental change (Vayda and Walters, 1999: 169–170), but, as suggested in the mea culpa above, I myself lost sight of it at times in the course of my 1998–1999 research and writing on causes of forest fires.
This convention, which I do not regard as analytically useful, may reflect an everyday view of explanation whereby particular triggering events are favored over particular conditions, or changes in conditions, as causes and explanatory factors even if, as will be discussed later, counterfactual analysis indicates that occurrence of the explanandum events in question (e.g., forest fires) depends more on the particular conditions than on particular triggers. The methodological and semantic issues raised here are discussed in a general but pragmatic way in Hart and Honore, 1985: 71–73, and Miller, 1987: 60–61. In both, the example of fires as explanandum events is cited and counterfactual reasoning is used to support arguments in favor of sometimes including conditions as causes in our explanations.
Hotspots are “High Temperature Events” (HTE) detected by NOAA satellites and indicating fire activity. Although fire detection by such means is far from foolproof (see Flasse and Ceccato, 1996), hotspot data can still be used to identify significant spatial patterns in fire occurrence and spread. For a fuller description of the East Kalimantan hotspot data used in their analysis, see Steenis and Fogarty, 2001: 5.
But see below on the lack of quantitative data concerning ignitions.
Although forest rangers in one East Kalimantan nature reserve conducted motorcycle patrols no more than 6–7 km from their guard post, they simply noted where fires had occurred and, on the basis of quick visual inspection, assigned them to a preconceived category of causes, like unextinguished cigarette butts (Vayda, 1999: 30). Such cursory exercises do not constitute bona fide forensic fire-scene investigations.
For comparison of “forward” and “backward” causal inquiry, see Einhorn and Hogarth, 1987.
This Integrated Forest Fire Management Project (IFFM) was implemented jointly by GTZ and various Indonesian government agencies and services.
The hotspot database was built by Anja Hoffmann and Lenny Christy of the GTZ–IFFM project. January 6 was the day the 1998 fires started in East Kalimantan.
At the time of writing, the Indonesian government was planning, purportedly for border security, poverty reduction, and regional development among other things, the world's largest oil-palm plantation along 850 km of the border with Malaysia in Kalimantan (Witular, 2005; Down To Earth, 2005; and Saraswati and Rukmantara, 2005). This would encompass an area which, although increasingly subjected to illegal logging, still has substantial unlogged primary forest.
Neither I nor any of the numerous fire specialists I have consulted have succeeded in finding any reliable studies or good data showing cigarette butts as ignition sources for actual forest fires in Indonesia or anywhere else. According to one authority (DeHaan, 2002, pp. 139, 527), cigarettes have “been blamed in many more instances than they should” as sources of ignition even for fires in buildings. However, an experiment conducted in 1964 (Ford, 1995, pp. 105–106, 166) and another conducted in response to my inquiries in 2004 (Gönner, personal communication [2004]) indicated that unextinguished cigarettes may ignite wildland fires if certain special conditions are met, e.g., if relative humidity is below 18–22% and if at least 1/3 of the smoldering surface is in direct contact with fine fuels.
See Vayda, 2000, for a more detailed account of speculative forest-clearing and the Kelompok Tani.
For a historical parallel, consider what happened in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 in Michigan: Remedies were ill-conceived, focusing on fire prevention in villages and towns rather than in the surrounding timberlands where the fire had actually originated, having been caused by “unsafe lumbering practices” (Kreger, 1998).
Cf. Swetnam and Baisan, 1996: 29 for a somewhat similar view of ignitions in forests of the American Southwest prior to 1900. However, these ignitions were often caused by lightning strikes, whereas in tropical moist forests the heavy rainfall usually associated with lightning strikes limits their efficacy for ignitions. Regarding Asia's tropical lowland deciduous forests, Stott et al. (1990: 35) state: “The sheer number and variety of people crossing the forests clearly provoke a high probability for accidental wildfires.”
See note 6. I use the terms “cause” and “causal history” interchangeably in accord with the philosophical view (Lewis, 1986, Chap. 22) that causal explanation of events (like forest fires) consists of obtaining or imparting information about their causal histories. How much information is included in any particular explanation is a pragmatic matter, depending, inter alia, on what the explanation-seeker already knows and still wants to know (see Vayda, 1996: 23 and note 13 and references cited therein).
Even slower fire-spread rates have been reported from the moister forests of the Venezuelan Amazon (Uhl et al., 1988: 180).
On the general absence of quantitative information on fire behavior in Indonesian and other Southeast Asian forests, see Shields and Moore, n.d.: 8.
In the finer-grained research being recommended here, we would still be trying to explain extensive forest fires, albeit, in effect, regarding as our immediate explananda such “sub-events” as changes in fire direction, speed, or height and some reignitions (cf. Gruner, 1969: 148–150 on “events” and “sub-events” in historical analyses). On the progression from correlation to causation by moving to finer-grained research to account for lung cancer, duodenal ulcers, and other diseases, see Thagard, 2000: 256 ff. My arguments here are an endorsement of finer-grained research only when it may be expected to yield theoretically or practically significant answers to questions about causes (cf. Vayda, 1996: 17 and note 9). My objection to detailed ignition studies in the absence of studies more or less systematically connecting the ignitions to forest fires, is in effect, against according high priority to finer-grained research which is not, by itself, of much use for explaining forest fires.
For a discussion concisely distinguishing explanations based on identifying causal pathways or mechanisms from explanations emphasizing the subsumption of observable phenomena under generalizations, see Brandon, 1990: 159–161. The distinction is one that I have found useful (see especially Vayda, 1995: 223 ff.). Note that some philosophers (e.g., Cummins, 2000) say categorically that subsumption under generalizations is not explanation.
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Acknowledgments
My fieldwork on forest fires in East Kalimantan was part of the WWF-Indonesia Forest Fires Project in 1998 and was supported in 2000 and 2001 by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to CIFOR, where I am a Senior Research Associate. For valuable comments on earlier drafts or other useful advice, I thank Mark Cochrane, Jeff Sayer, Neil Byron, Pietro Ceccato, Unna Chokkalingam, Christian Gönner, Martin Hardiono, Anja Hoffmann, Tim Jessup, Peter Moore, Margaret Nolan, Gernot Rücker, and Brett Shields and three anonymous reviewers. I thank Margaret Nolan also for help with library research, and I thank Unna Chokkalingam, Dan Nepstad, Brett Shields, Luca Tacconi, and especially Anja Hoffmann for preprints or otherwise hard-to-find copies of articles or reports. For collaboration and camaraderie in the field, I must once again thank Ahmad Sahur, who first joined me in research in East Kalimantan in 1980. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CIFOR Workshop on “Remote Sensing and Forest Governance in Indonesia,” Bogor, June 22, 2004.
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Vayda, A.P. Causal Explanation of Indonesian Forest Fires: Concepts, Applications, and Research Priorities. Hum Ecol 34, 615–635 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9029-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9029-x