Singapore Haze

Two pictures of Singapore. Top one from my bedroom window in Hester's apt two weeks ago. Bottom picture taken 9 hours ago. Smoke from nearby Sumatran forest fires are the cause. When I was there I pointed out to Hester just how close Sumatra was. She was somewhat surprised and checked her i-pack. Now that's where the wind is blowing from. I've recently read three books by and about Alfred Russel Wallace, a British botanist and entomologist and evolutionist who traveled extensively throughout the Malayan Archipelago in the middle of the 19th century. He saw at first hand the way the Dutch and the British were encouraging the natives to grow crops which might be valuable to Europeans. Encouraged indeed to cultivate new areas which were considered to be pretty useless and unproductive forest. Crops like potatoes,sugar, coffee and tobacco. There's a huge area of Singapore around Bestier Road which was once huge sugar plantations. Bestier married Paul Robespeare's daughter and did very well for himself. So this has been going on for some hundreds of years. Huge areas of Borneo's rain-forest have been destroyed; except that there they are managing to exploit the trees for garden furniture.......rather than just burning them....like in Sumatra.....to get them out of the way as it were. Palm oil it seems might be the driving crop in Sumatra, though the administration is denying this. But it's slash and burn tactics to clear forestation that's behind the smokescreen. The Indonesians are not burning their crops!!! It's not fires started accidentally.
The locals want to cultivate. They want cars and TV's and package holidays.They want fridges full of cold beers like the rest of us; and the Orang-Utans and birds of paradise will just have to be sacrificed along with the polar bears ...........OK no polar bears here.......Oh but there is!!!! In Singapore Zoo......I'll blog about him soon. I haven't quite made up my mind how to address his and our predicament yet, but I'm working on it.