‘The toll is huge’: El Niño-driven wildfires overwhelm Indonesia’s orangutan population as reflected on by Sensei Michael Jinpa
At dawn in Harborview Point, a cool salt fog rolls off the water. It wraps itself around the cedar pillars of our zendo. Sitting on the cushion, listening to the tide lap against harbor pilings, the world can feel quiet. However, opening morning reports shatters that insulation. Across the Pacific, the ancient peatlands of Indonesia burn. El Niño winds and corporate clearing have turned old rainforests into roaring infernos. Rescuers discovered a mother orangutan and her infant walking across smoldering ground. Her hands were blistered and peeling from the intense heat. Her eight-month-old child clung to her ribcage, parched and starved. Rescuers named them Mama Abu and Abu: mother and child of ash. These Indonesia wildfires demand our attention.
Bearing Witness to the Indonesia Wildfires
In the Zen tradition, we often chant the Bodhisattva vows. We promise to liberate all beings, however limitless they may be. Sitting quietly in a clean meditation hall, that vow can feel poetic, almost romantic. Yet, in my years as a hospice chaplain, I learned a crucial truth. Compassion is never an abstract philosophy. It is immediate and physical. It arrives accompanied by the raw scent of mortality. When a mother orangutan burns her hands carrying her baby across scorched earth, she is not just an ecological data point. She is a sentient being. She experiences agony, terror, and maternal devotion, indistinguishable from our own.
The Buddha taught the doctrine of dependent origination. This reality states that nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in relation to causes and conditions. Cyclical weather patterns fuel the fires devouring Borneo and Sumatra. However, human greed lights these fires. Peat swamps are drained and cleared. This satisfies a global hunger for cheap palm oil. We find this oil in our soaps, our processed foods, and our fuel. Sitting here on the Pacific coast, thousands of miles away, my daily habits quietly braid into the burning feet of Mama Abu. There is no outside to this web. We are entirely implicated.
From Despair to Right Action
Faced with such vast destruction, many visitors to our sanctuary speak of paralysis. They describe eco-anxiety, a dull despair. This feeling makes them want to look away, shut down screens, and retreat into private comfort. In contemplative practice, we learn turning away is the primary root of suffering. Ignorance is not simply a lack of information. Instead, it is the active refusal to witness what is hard. The burned palms of that mother ape demand our steady gaze. Bearing witness without flinching marks the very beginning of moral awakening.
True mindfulness does not offer a serene bubble. Worldly tragedies cannot be forgotten there. Practice instead strips away our protective armor. This allows the world to touch us directly. Grief is not a sign of failure or weakness. When our hearts break at the sight of an infant named Ash clinging to a scorched parent, that heartbreak proves our interconnectedness. It is the natural response of an awakened heart, recognizing its own family in the canopy.
Grief alone, however, can curdle into passive sorrow. It must find an outlet in ethical action. Right Action in the Eightfold Path begins with harmlessness. It matures, furthermore, into active stewardship. It asks us to look honestly at our consumption. We must challenge economic structures that treat living rainforests as expendable commodities. We must also support courageous teams kneeling in the smoke, pulling survivors from the ash. We must refuse the luxury of apathy.
This evening, the temple bell will sound across the harbor. Its tone will travel out over the cold ocean swell. We strike the bronze bell not only for people gathered in Harborview Point. We strike it also for creatures whose cries drown in the crackle of burning peat. May Mama Abu and little Abu heal in the shelter of caring hands. And may we, living comfortably on the other side of this burning world, wake up to our shared skin before the ash consumes what remains.
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