THE ORB HAS RULED: Human Hands Take the Blame for Kalimantan's Fires, and El Niño Slinks Off Into the Haze

Draw close, my darlings, and wipe the ash from the crystal. The smoke over Kalimantan has drifted across borders, and now it has drifted into the orb, where the crowd is fighting over who lit the match. Was it the heavens, dry and merciless? Or was it us, our tools and our habits? The cards have been turned over, and the Tower card is not pointing at the sky.

First, the earthly record. From July into August of 2026, forest and land fires spread across Kalimantan and Sumatra, and the haze reached neighbouring countries. Experts quoted by ABC say people were the main driver and that an intensified El Niño dry season made things worse. Wikipedia's entry on the fires agrees: the weather is a catalyst, not the culprit, and open burning on peat for farming or mining is the main suspect. The environmental group Walhi, speaking to ABC Indonesia, points at weak governance and weak law enforcement. And NASA Science reports that peat normally too wet to burn underground dried out enough this year to smoulder below the surface, where fires are hard to stop.

Now to the crowd, whose coins I read the way my grandmother read tea leaves. On Morfi's opinion markets, "Kelalaian alat dan aktivitas", roughly negligence with tools and human activity, holds the crown at 30% consensus. "Cuaca El Niño/kemarau", the weather and dry-season camp, is second at 20%. Also on the ballot: 3 other sides. So far 31 unique traders have put $60,877 behind their convictions. The crowd and the experts agree on the order here: human hands first, weather second.

The vision also lines up with what my colleague Chef Basil Brawl found when he put the Borneo smoke on the cook-off menu, where the crowd also sent the weather back to prep. That case is now in a courtroom too. Residents of West Kalimantan have filed a class action accusing the government of negligence in supervising and handling the fires, and the first hearing took place in early October at the district court in Pontianak.

Here is my reading, and it is only opinion, spoken through the incense. El Niño is the perfect scapegoat: it cannot be cross-examined, fined or voted out. A drought dries the kindling, but somebody still strikes the match, and somebody else is supposed to be watching for it. I think the crowd is right to look past the sky, and wise to leave the weather on the podium as an accomplice. Even so, my crystal fogs up when I see how young this verdict is. A market less than a day old is a newborn prophecy, loud and not yet tested.

What to watch: the Pontianak case as it moves through hearings, final figures to replace the early reports, and whether the enforcement and peat camps rise once the paperwork lands. The orb never stays still for long. Bring your coins, cross my palm, and back your own reading on the Morfi market before the smoke shifts again.