The PSI has just gone into the "unhealthy" level at 150 as the blanket of smoke descends on our little red dot, drifting across from wanton burning off by Indonesian farmers. If it gets worse the schools might close (if the spate of food poisoning cases has not already), people will stop going out for the national pastimes of eating and shopping, and everyone's business will suffer

How long is it going to take to convince people that they have to start thinking not just of their short-term gains but of how what they do in their little corner of the earth affects someone a few hundred miles away as well? But I suppose it is an easy enough thing to say by someone living in relative comfort, and yet another for a poor cash-cropper worried about how to clear his land of the undergrowth in order to plant for the next season and make enough to sustain himself and his family..

So where does the solution lie? Really, nothing short of a transformation of human values is going to do it. As is stated,

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

If we utilize band-aid solutions when the wound is bleeding uncontrollably, we can not expect the flow to be stemmed. We need to identify the root cause of the bleeding and then staunch it. We can't just tell the farmers to stop clearing the land in the cheapest way possible. They have to be given a viable alternative, and at the same time equitable systems of reward must be in place to ensure that everyone who works for a living does not have to damage the environment that sustains them. People will live by their highest values if they are given a chance to do so.