Post-Truth and the Making of a Scapegoat: How Borneo's Dayaks Became the Unlikely Villains of Deforestation
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| The Dayak system of shifting cultivation has proven to be environmentally sustainable for over 10,000 years. Photo credit: Melvari. |
🌍 DAYAK TODAY | PONTIANAK: In the humid heart of Borneo, where ancient rainforests breathe life into one of the world’s richest ecosystems, a new war is being waged. Not with chainsaws or bulldozers —though those remain ever-present—but with narratives, headlines, and public opinion.
Look closely at the illustration. The Dayak people's fields are lush and thriving, with rice growing abundantly amidst a forest that remains vibrant and intact. This stands as undeniable evidence that the Dayak system of shifting cultivation, practiced for over 10,000 years, is environmentally sustainable.
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Yet in the post-truth climate of today, such facts are easily overshadowed. A new narrative seeks to paint the Dayak's traditional farming practices as a primary driver of environmental destruction —an accusation as misleading as it is damaging. In reality, the real culprits of deforestation and ecological collapse lie elsewhere: in the relentless march of illegal logging, open-pit mining, and expansive palm oil plantations.
Thus, to blame the Dayak people is not just an error; it is a profound injustice —one that obscures the true dynamics at play and risks sacrificing some of the world's most ancient stewards of the land in the name of political convenience.
At the center of this storm are the Dayaks, the island’s Indigenous peoples, who have for millennia lived in intricate balance with their environment. Today, however, in an unsettling twist of the post-truth era, they find themselves branded as the architects of ecological ruin.
It is a narrative as seductive as it is false—and its consequences are profound.
The Rise of a Convenient Myth
In the world of environmental crises, simplicity often sells better than complexity. Wildfires engulf Borneo; satellite images show vast stretches of blackened forest; politicians and commentators rush for explanations that the public can digest.
And so, a myth emerges: that traditional farming practices—specifically, the Dayaks' age-old method of ladang berpindah (rotational swidden agriculture)—are to blame. Small-scale, controlled burning, practiced with deep environmental knowledge, is conflated with the large-scale, unregulated fires driven by corporate interests.
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In the post-truth climate, where the distinction between sustainable cultural practices and industrial-scale devastation blurs, this narrative finds fertile ground.
The irony is staggering. For thousands of years, long before concepts like "carbon footprints" and "biodiversity hotspots" entered the lexicon, Dayak societies were practicing sustainable land stewardship. Their techniques were honed not in laboratories, but through generations of observation, adaptation, and respect for ecological cycles.
Research tracing Dayak ancestry to Gua Niah—not Yunnan as earlier Eurocentric theories claimed—further underscores their ancient and intimate relationship with Borneo’s environment. Yet none of these facts seem to stand a chance against the relentless momentum of a scapegoating story too politically convenient to challenge.
When Facts Become Optional
In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth the Word of the Year, defining it as circumstances where "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."
Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of Indigenous peoples in environmental debates.
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The fires that scar Borneo today are overwhelmingly linked to industrial drivers: illegal logging syndicates carving highways into virgin forests; open-pit mines swallowing hills and rivers; palm oil plantations advancing like green deserts across once-diverse landscapes. Corporate interests, often backed by political patronage, thrive on regulatory loopholes and opaque land concessions.
And yet, the public narrative shifts—steering attention away from boardrooms and bulldozers, and instead zeroing in on villages where traditional practices persist. A controlled burn of a small patch of land, part of a centuries-old agricultural cycle, is portrayed with the same moral outrage as a thousand-hectare plantation inferno.
The simplification is deliberate. It provides a scapegoat small enough to blame but too weak to resist: the Dayak farmer with his firestick, not the multinational conglomerate with its legal teams.
The Cost of a False Narrative
The damage inflicted by this distortion is not merely reputational.
Policy responses influenced by post-truth narratives risk deepening the environmental crisis they seek to solve. When Indigenous communities are vilified, their traditional knowledge systems—arguably humanity’s best hope for sustainable management of tropical forests—are marginalized.
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Already, conservation policies that criminalize small-scale burning without distinguishing it from industrial destruction have disrupted Dayak livelihoods, exacerbated poverty, and eroded social cohesion. Worse, they have severed a crucial feedback loop between people and ecosystems that has maintained Borneo’s forests for millennia.
“Indigenous peoples are not the problem,” says Dr. Willa Knapton, an anthropologist specializing in Bornean cultures. “They are part of the solution. Displacing them from forest stewardship roles is ecological self-sabotage.”
There is ample evidence supporting this view. Studies across the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia show that forests managed by Indigenous communities have lower deforestation rates and greater biodiversity than protected areas managed exclusively by state agencies.
Borneo is no different. The Dayaks' intimate knowledge of soil fertility, fire cycles, medicinal plants, and watershed management forms a living encyclopedia—one not easily replicated by bureaucratic conservation models.
Toward a More Honest Reckoning
Reclaiming the truth about Dayak land stewardship is not an act of romantic nostalgia; it is a practical necessity.
It demands that policymakers, environmental advocates, and the global public recognize the difference between sustainability and exploitation, between traditional resilience and industrial excess. It calls for a reevaluation of whose voices are amplified in the discourse on climate change and conservation—and whose are silenced.
Correcting the record also means challenging deeper assumptions: that modernity always knows best; that Indigenous practices are relics of the past rather than blueprints for the future; that development must inevitably come at the cost of the environment.
It is a tall order. In a world increasingly shaped by emotion, disinformation, and vested interests, telling a more complicated, more truthful story requires courage.
But if there is any lesson to be learned from Borneo’s burning forests, it is that truth delayed is catastrophe accelerated.
And perhaps, just perhaps, the ancient wisdom of the Dayaks—long dismissed, now desperately needed—can help chart a different course.
Masri Sareb Putra is a researcher and writer specializing in Dayak cultural history and environmental issues in Borneo. His latest work explores Indigenous resilience in the face of ecological and political upheaval.