11 The Virtual Fire

Comprising some of the largest fires on earth, tropical peatland fires smolder underground, slowly transversing the peatland’s depths, making them hard to detect with global remote sensing instruments. This oversight has prompted state scientists in Indonesia to develop new sensors to detect smoldering peatland fires. However, contemporary practices to detect and predict them do not align with Indonesia’s long-standing remote sensing data infrastructure. While remote sensing technologies have historically been used to either expand a user base throughout the global south or surveil rural farming practices in Indonesia, alternative remote sensing systems have been developed in order to learn about and experience the environment differently. State remote sensing scientists in Indonesia have rejected conventional fire-detection protocols, instead designing their own and unsettling which global vision of fires is to be prioritized and developing new forms of rural mediation that pay special attention to the particularities of peatland fires in Indonesia.