When the Forest Speaks: An Ecopoetic Testimony from Batang Toru

This poetry-essay stages the November 2025 flood disaster in Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra as an ecopoetic event in which ecological materialism is coupled with lyric testimony. Drawing on the record of capitalist extractivism – the mines, hydro, plantations, and logging that have despoiled the Batang Toru watershed – the poem interrogates the connection between the desecration of the land and the humanitarian disaster. By putting the 442 dead, the 402 missing, and the 290,000 displaced into close juxtaposition with the names of the corporate actors – PT Agincourt Resources, PT North Sumatera Hydro Energy, PT Toba Pulp Lestari, PT Aceh Liquified Natural Gas, and others – the poem argues that this "natural" disaster is really a political-economic one, the material consequence of two decades of neoliberal resource extraction, two decades of corporate permits that, like tiny rips in the fabric of the Harangan Tapanuli forest, systematically stripped away the hydrological functions of the forest until it finally burst open. In this poem, the meditative and observational register refuses both pastoral nostalgia and apocalyptic melodrama to arrive at a forensic witness: a poetic account that counters the deadly causal chain of corporate permits to mandibles, quarterly earnings to collapse.