Environment in Indonesia

Indonesia is a tropical country that has a lot of islands and only has two weathers,
which are rainy and summer season. Indonesia has a lot of places with rich soil that can grow
so many plants, Indonesia also supports the world’s second highest level of biodiversity after
Brazil. In the other hand, Indonesia as an archipelago country, has quite large of marine area.
Indonesia also has so many varieties of animals that lives in the forest and sea. Not just that,
Indonesia’s soil has a lot of mining resources like silver, gold, aluminum, asphalt, coal,
natural gases, fossil fuel, etc. That means so many Indonesian people depending their job on
nature, like farmer, fisherman, oceanographer, geologist, wildlife biologist, miners, etc.

So, what if I say that environment in Indonesia is starting to damaged? Is it means that
so many people that depending their job on nature will lose their job or even their home?

Yes, people knows that Indonesia is a rich country and so many business industries
like palm oil, gold, natural gases, fishing is taking place here. If it’s too much, it will destroy
our environment.

Indonesia is the world highest palm oil producer. Palm oil is very useful for our daily
activities, for example, for food needed, shampoo, detergent, soap, machine lubricants, and
biofuel (mixture of fossil gases).

In 2020, the world needed 40 million tons of Indonesian palm oil. But to provide it,
we need 18 million hectares of land. It means massive deforestation happened or they burned
the forest in huge scale. It significantly increasing Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions. So
many animals lose their habitat because of that, people who lives around the forest are
affected, heavy smog ruined people’s daily activities, some of them hospitalized and some of
them died.

Palm oil plantation could create natural disaster like flooding and landslide. Palm oil
tree can absorb so much water, the palm tree roots soak up huge amounts of water, destroying
the soil in summer and the soil will get drought. Not just that, waste from palm oil industries
that flew into the river could make fishes died, people couldn’t use water from the river, and
people couldn’t depend their lives (make money) from river again. It makes them move and
looking for another job in another area.

Enough about the damages from palm oil plantation, now I’ll explain about plastic
pollution. If we go to the beach, mountain, or anywhere, we might see so many plastics
wasted everywhere especially in the beach. Let’s just be honest, so many Indonesian people
are ignorant.

Why is that so? They don’t care about green healthy environment, just some of them
do. Indonesia is bad at organizing plastic waste or other non-biodegradable waste and just
throw it away, let it pile up like a mountain of trash. Government should emphasize people
about trash regulations and organize the trash well, separate it for biodegradable, non-
biodegradable, and recyclable. But they didn’t and just put it in a bag and phew throw it and
let it be a mountain of trash. Yes, not all people did that because there are some people that
love environment and some scavengers that recycle plastic and can for money in order to
survive.

In ocean, there are so many trashes like plastic bags, bottles, cotton buds, or other
non-biodegradable waste. Animals that starving ate it, for example, a sea turtle thought that
plastic bag was a jellyfish, the sea turtle ate it and later died because it wasn’t food, it was
plastic that hard to digest. You can google it and search what our plastic waste did to animals,
it’s terrible. According to scientists, we will have more trash in the sea rather than fish. Since
plastic took so long to decompose, which is 460 years, it would amount to a total of 600
million tons of plastic in the ocean. Overfishing and our waste is the problem. Imagine, when
we die and our body decomposed, and the plastic waste that we use for our entire life still
exist until the next 4 centuries. That’s scary, plastic last longer than us.

That is why I’m trying so hard to not using plastic straw or some other plastic waste
like plastic bag that not yet recyclable in Indonesia, but I admit that we can’t live fully 100%
without plastic. But I’m trying so hard to avoid it and always bring my reusable cutleries
including straw everywhere. I hope government will emphasize the regulations of plastic
waste and organize it better than now, so there will be solutions from plastic problems like
Singapore. Also, I hope government will handle situations about gas emission problems and
planting more trees to prevent flooding.