Listen. I want to tell you a ghost story.
It’s about Indonesia, and it starts the way all the worst
stories do—with somebody forgetting. Or maybe not forgetting exactly. Maybe
choosing not to remember, which is worse, if you think about it. And you should
think about it, Constant Reader, because this particular amnesia has teeth.
In Indonesia today, when folks get into shouting matches
about who’s really killing the forests—and brother, do they shout—there’s this
narrative that keeps bubbling up like something dead floating to the surface of
a swamp. Goes like this: Back in the colonial days, when the Dutch ran the show
for three hundred years (three hundred years, Jesus wept), the forests stood
tall and proud. Then independence came, and wouldn’t you know it, the
Indonesians themselves stripped the land naked as a jaybird in about five
minutes flat.
That’s the story, anyway.
But like most stories that sound too neat, too convenient,
this one’s got a rotten core. It’s built on what I call historical
amnesia—which is just a fancy way of saying people have forgotten the monster
that was really doing the killing all along.
The Beautiful Lie
They called it Mooi Indie. Beautiful Indies.
Pretty name for something ugly, don’t you think? That’s how
it always works. The worst things in this world often come wrapped in the
prettiest packages. A clown at a birthday party. A St. Bernard that’s gone
rabid. A colonial empire that calls itself civilized while it’s busy turning
living, breathing land into nothing but dollar signs and export manifests.
Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about in those
sepia-toned photographs of palm-lined avenues and whitewashed plantation
houses: colonialism wasn’t just exploitation. It was systematic
exploitation. It was methodical. It was a machine, and like all machines, it
had one purpose—to consume.
The Dutch didn’t see forests when they looked at Java or
Sumatra. They saw ship masts. They saw railroad ties. They saw tobacco, coffee,
sugar, rubber—anything that would sell in Amsterdam or London or Paris. They
saw money, and they reached for it with both hands.
The Machinery of Destruction
Now, you might be thinking: Sure, Riyan, but they didn’t
have chainsaws back then. They didn’t have bulldozers or those big machines
that can clear a football field in an afternoon. How bad could it really have
been?
And that, friend, is where you’d be dead wrong.
See, the Dutch didn’t need machines. They had something
better, something cheaper, something that didn’t require fuel or maintenance.
They had people. Millions of them, pressed into service under a system so
brutal it makes your average horror novel look like a bedtime story for
toddlers.
The evidence is there if you bother to look. Java’s teak
forests—ancient, massive, the kind of trees that had been standing since before
Columbus got lost looking for India—cut down to build ships and rail lines.
Sumatra’s rainforests, dense and dripping with life, cleared away for tobacco
plantations that would supply European cigars.
The machinery might have been primitive, but it was
efficient. Terrifyingly efficient. Because when you don’t have to pay your
workers, when you can work them until they drop and then just get more, well…
you can accomplish quite a bit. You can tear down a world.
The Cultivation System (Or: How to Bleed a Country Dry)
It started in 1830.
The Netherlands was broke. The Java War had emptied the
coffers, and Europe’s endless squabbles weren’t helping matters. So the Dutch
looked at their colony—and I mean really looked at it, the way a vampire looks
at a neck—and decided the East Indies needed to become a cash machine.
They called it the Cultivation System.
Let me tell you what that meant in practice, because the
name makes it sound almost agricultural, almost benign. Like something you’d
learn about in a high school history class before falling asleep in the back
row.
Each village had to give up twenty percent of its farmland.
One-fifth of everything they had. And not for rice or vegetables or anything
that might actually feed their families—no, this land was for export crops.
Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Indigo. Tobacco. The stuff Europeans wanted, the stuff that
sold for real money in real markets.
And here’s the kicker: when harvest time came, the villagers
had to sell everything to the government at fixed prices. Not market rates.
Fixed prices, set by the same people who were forcing them to grow this crap in
the first place. It was a rigged game from the start, the kind where the house
always wins and the players always lose.
For folks who didn’t own land—and there were plenty of
them—the system was even worse. Sixty-six to seventy-five days a year working
on government plantations. That’s more than two months of forced labor. For
little or no pay.
Two months might not sound like much until you remember that
most of these people were subsistence farmers. Two months away from your own
fields could mean starvation. Could mean watching your kids go hungry. Could
mean death.
Multatuli—now there was a guy who saw the truth and wasn’t
afraid to write it down—called it what it was in his book Saidjah and Adinda.
He showed how colonialism crushed people and destroyed their connection to the
land in one smooth, vicious motion. Social injustice and ecological
catastrophe, two sides of the same blood-stained coin.
When the Forests Fell
To meet those export quotas—and brother, there were always
quotas—forests had to go.
Massive forests. Ancient forests. The kind of forests that
took thousands of years to grow and only decades to destroy.
In Java, it was deforestation on a scale nobody had seen
before. Mountain slopes that had caught and held rain for millennia were
stripped bare, turned into coffee plantations and sugar fields. And when those
trees were gone, the rain had nowhere to go but down. Fast. Taking the soil
with it.
Erosion. Sedimentation. Flooding downstream. The whole
hydrological cycle going to hell in a handbasket.
A German geographer named Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn traveled
through Java in the 1830s and ‘40s, and what he saw horrified him. Volcanoes
like Merbabu, Sumbing, and Sundoro—their slopes had been almost completely
deforested. In Pengalengan, between 1839 and 1847, he watched dark wilderness
transform into open land dotted with 750,000 dadap trees and fifteen million
coffee plants. Fifteen million. All because of forced cultivation.
The change was so drastic, so fast, that even colonial
officials started to worry. In 1846—get this—the Resident of Buitenzorg sent a
warning to the Governor-General. Keep cutting down the forests like this, he
said, and you’re going to end up with a drier climate, irregular rainfall,
water shortages. You’re going to destroy the very thing that makes this land
valuable.
They knew. Even then, they knew.
According to researcher Wiratno, Java’s forest area went
from 10.6 million hectares in the eighteenth century to 3.3 million by the end
of the nineteenth. That’s a loss of more than seventy percent in just one
hundred years.
Seventy percent.
Let that sink in for a minute.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (But People Do)
Now, I can hear some of you saying: Sure, Riyan, but
those numbers are small compared to modern deforestation. Indonesia loses
millions of hectares every year now.
And you’re right. The absolute numbers are bigger today. But
context matters, doesn’t it?
This was the nineteenth century. No chainsaws. No
bulldozers. No industrial logging equipment. And yet they managed to clear one
to two million hectares in Java alone between 1830 and 1860. Coffee exports
quadrupled in just ten years, jumping from 50,000 pikul in 1830 to 200,000 by
1840. Each pikul represented more cleared land, more destroyed habitat, more
erosion waiting to happen.
Reports from colonial residents in places like Besuki and
Pasuruan tell the same story. Within tens of kilometers of each sugar factory,
forests vanished. Lowland forests rich with biodiversity—monsoon forests, young
teak stands—completely cut down. Often burned in factory kilns, because why
not? The trees were already dead. Might as well use them for fuel.
The fact that the colonial government eventually passed the
1865 Forest Regulations, that they started implementing protective measures in
the 1870s—that tells you something, doesn’t it? It tells you the destruction
had gotten so bad, so obvious, that even the people profiting from it were
starting to worry.
Enter the Free Market (Spoiler: It Wasn’t Free)
In 1870, they officially abolished the Cultivation System.
Hallelujah, right? The nightmare is over. Time to
heal.
Except it wasn’t over. Not even close.
What replaced forced cultivation was something called
Economic Liberalism. The Agrarian Law of 1870 opened Indonesia to large-scale
European private investment. Through something called the erfpacht
system—basically seventy-five-year land leases—private entrepreneurs could
lease huge tracts of land for plantations.
And here’s where it gets darkly funny, in that way that’s
not funny at all: this “liberal” system produced deforestation that was just as
bad as the forced system. Maybe worse. Because now you didn’t have government
oversight, such as it was. You had private companies racing each other to clear
land for rubber, tea, tobacco, whatever would turn the biggest profit.
Competition is great for innovation, terrible for forests.
The Deli Tobacco Horror Show
Take Deli, North Sumatra.
When Jacob Nienhuys arrived in Labuhan Deli in 1863, the
region was mostly wild forest. Within years—years—those forests had been
transformed into tobacco plantations. Thousands of hectares of lowland forest,
home to elephants and tigers and orangutans, gone. Just… gone.
At least thirty private companies invested in Deli tobacco.
At peak production, the plantations covered vast areas. Peat forests, which
should never be cleared because they’re basically carbon time bombs, were
stripped away for high-quality tobacco that European gentlemen would smoke in
their parlors while discussing the white man’s burden.
By 1896, Deli tobacco sales hit 32 million guilders. An
economic success story, they called it.
Built entirely on forest conversion and resource
exploitation.
The plantation expansion required importing thousands of
Chinese laborers every year. Which meant more forest clearing for barracks, for
firewood, for food crops. Previously quiet landscapes turned into densely
populated industrial zones practically overnight.
Exploitation of nature. Exploitation of people. Two sides of
the same coin, spinning through the air, about to land
heads-you-lose-tails-you-lose-too.
Peat, Drainage, and Long-Term Consequences
When tobacco lands became scarce, the companies pivoted.
Rubber. Palm oil. Always something new to sell, always more land to clear.
From 1911, palm plantations spread into the eastern coastal
swamps and peatlands of Sumatra. Belgian firms, Deli Maatschappij—they all got
in on the action. To make the land “usable,” they built drainage canals.
Now, here’s something that’ll keep you up at night: when you
drain peat, you’re not just removing water. Peat stores massive amounts of
carbon. Drain it, and that carbon gets released. Plus, the dried peat becomes
incredibly flammable.
Those drainage canals the Dutch built in the early twentieth
century? They laid the groundwork for the forest and land fires that still
plague the region today. A slow-burning fuse that took a century to fully
ignite.
That’s the thing about ecological damage. It doesn’t always
show up right away. Sometimes it waits. Bides its time. And then, when you’ve
almost forgotten about it, it comes back with interest.
The Teak Monopoly and Other Nightmares
Meanwhile, in Java, the Dutch were playing a different game
with teak forests.
They enacted strict forestry regulations in 1897 under the Boschreglement.
Monopolized teak production and marketing. Exported high-quality timber to
Europe by the shipload.
Records show that thousands of large teak logs were exported
annually from forests in places like Rembang. One company—Perusahaan Dagang
Kongsie Sioe Liem in Surabaya—operated across multiple regions, just cutting
and cutting and cutting.
Ancient trees that had stood for centuries, gone to make
furniture and paneling for European mansions.
Beyond Deforestation: The Other Sins
But wait, there’s more! (And isn’t there always?)
The environmental damage wasn’t limited to cutting down
trees. Sugar factories discharged wastewater into rivers. Irrigation and
drainage networks were built by draining natural wetlands—wetlands that had
served as flood buffers and wildlife corridors for thousands of years.
And then there was the hunting.
Birds of paradise. Those stunning, exotic creatures found
only in Papua. Europeans went absolutely nuts for their feathers. Between 1905
and 1920, somewhere between 30,000 and 80,000 birds of paradise were exported annually
to feather auctions in London, Paris, and Amsterdam.
Do the math. Over a longer period—1820 to 1938—estimates
suggest more than three million birds were hunted and sold.
Three million.
The former Resident of Ternate, a guy named F.S.A. de Clerq,
saw what was happening and tried to sound the alarm:
· “To
this day, the birds are rarely seen along the coast, and hunting has moved
inland. Soon, there will be no remnants of God’s creation left to delight
birdwatchers as a natural wonder.”
Even colonial officials could see the writing on the wall.
But seeing something and stopping it are two very different things.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask
So here’s what you’re probably wondering: If the Dutch
caused so much damage, why did Indonesia’s nature still look relatively intact
at the end of colonial rule?
Good question. Uncomfortable answer.
The scale of destruction, while immense, hadn’t yet reached
the point where it transformed Indonesia’s overall geographic landscape. The
damage was concentrated in certain areas—sugar plantations in Java, tobacco in
Deli. Other regions like Kalimantan, Papua, Sulawesi remained relatively
untouched, mainly because Dutch political control hadn’t fully expanded there
by the early twentieth century.
Plus, the infrastructure the Dutch built served one purpose:
resource extraction. Railways connected plantations to ports. Roads moved
agricultural products. It was all designed to funnel wealth out of Indonesia
and into European bank accounts.
Infrastructure as a tool of colonialism, not a gift of
development.
The Truth We Keep Trying to Bury
So let’s get back to where we started, shall we?
That narrative about pristine forests during colonial times
and rapid destruction after independence? It’s a lie. Not a small lie. Not a
white lie. A big, ugly, dangerous lie that serves to obscure the real history.
The Dutch didn’t leave behind untouched forests when they
finally packed up and went home. They left behind forests that had been
systematically cleared, stripped, exploited for three centuries. They left
behind damaged peatlands that would burn for generations. They left behind a
blueprint for destruction that post-independence Indonesia, tragically,
continued to follow.
The environmental crises Indonesia faces today aren’t new
phenomena. They’re not even primarily post-colonial phenomena. They’re the
continuation of a trajectory that was set firmly in place during the colonial
period.
Understanding this doesn’t absolve modern Indonesia of
responsibility for ongoing deforestation. Not at all. But it does put things in
proper context. It shows us where the monster came from, even if we’re the ones
feeding it now.
Because here’s the thing about monsters, Constant Reader:
they don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re created. Nurtured. Fed. And once
they get big enough, they develop appetites all their own.
The monster that’s eating Indonesia’s forests? The Dutch
didn’t create it from nothing. But they sure as hell built the cage, opened the
door, and taught it how to feed.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Or in this case, historical amnesia.
Which might be the scariest thing of all.
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