Student Work
1∕3
Title
A Rarer Earth: The Many States of Peat in Central Kalimantan
Project Description
Layna Chen | Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) 2026
Primary Advisor: Keller Easterling
Secondary Advisor: Jordan Carver
Reader: MR Dove
Peat currently occupies a central place within climate discourse, with Indonesia’s peatlands as a key site of concern since the late twentieth century. Yet this contemporary understanding is historically unstable. Over the last two centuries, what we commonly consider peat has been repeatedly redefined by scientific and bureaucratic institutions. Within popular media, peat has circulated as a low-grade fuel, an infertile swampland, an agricultural soil awaiting rehabilitation, and a hydrological body requiring remediation. Tropical peatland fires, once treated as a scientific improbability, have become a recurring environmental crisis. This history of shifting definitions suggests that ‘peat’ is not a stable natural object awaiting discovery, but a phase produced through institutions and techniques that seek to manage it. Taking this instability as a starting point, this thesis examines the epistemological transformation of Indonesia’s peatlands through several key historical ruptures in which peat was made strategically legible.
The thesis is organized around five states of peat, moments when peat’s representation crosses a threshold of social and political meaning and becomes available to new forms of intervention and control. It begins with “gambut,” the Indonesian scientific and bureaucratic term that consolidated diverse local soils under a single administrative category. It then turns to “haze,” which analyzes how large-scale peatland fires transformed peat from agricultural soil into a transboundary atmosphere defined through remote imagery, pollution indices, and diplomatic response. “Sahep” examines how a local Indigenous term for peat became increasingly irreconcilable with peat’s new definition as a hydrological body requiring remediation. “Carbon” follows peat’s entry into environmental governance as a financial and planetary unit of value, while “Petak pematang,” meaning fertile land, examines how state-sponsored fertilization strategies have again altered the conception of these landscapes for locals. These combined states should not be read as a complete typology, but as a genealogy of production and breakdown. Together, they suggest that peat, a material so inherently unproductive, may never be fully represented.
Peat’s status in global environmental discourse has rested on forms of measurement and administration that have rendered other ways of knowing irrelevant. Interludes and narrative passages that appear alongside the analytical chapters, therefore, attend to locally specific and relational terms and practices that exceed centralized technical and administrative classification. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the inability to make peat fully legible and to imagine ways of living within it is inseparable from the ability to recognize forms of knowledge and care that fall outside of dominant measures of value.