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As resentment over the war and the continuing American presence in Iraq boils on Indonesian streets, another deadly force is burning beneath its forests, threatening the health of the nation’s people and the lives of many of its plants and animals.
Half a world away, Alfred Whitehouse ’67 is doing what he can to put out the underground peat and coal fires and deal with a host of other environmental problems.
Whitehouse, project director for the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, assigned to the Indonesian Ministry of Mines and Energy Mining Program, manages and directs “government-to-government” technical assistance projects that strive to identify and solve environmental problems resulting from mining activities.
“In the United States, we are working on the last 5 percent of our environmental issues,” he says. “In Indonesia, they’re working on the first 50 percent.”
For Whitehouse, the job became especially difficult when he and Americans on his staff were evacuated from their Jakarta homes and offices last October, following a terrorist bombing at a Bali nightclub.
“The U.S. embassy was concerned that Americans were being targeted by terrorist groups and ordered the evacuation of all but the core people in the embassy,” he says.
The war in Iraq and continuing unrest kept him from returning to Jakarta until April 13. Although as a young man, Whitehouse dreaded the thought of going to Southeast Asia, he longed to return.
“I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to,” he says.
Solving Problems from Afar
Until his return, Whitehouse administered the program from temporary quarters in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, where his wife, Vana Nespor, took a job as associate vice president for academic affairs at Bay Path College.
“The coal fires in Indonesia first became a big problem in 1982, which was an El Nino year and a drought year,” says Whitehouse. “Before that, the Indonesian government decided to get into the pulp and paper business and converted large areas of rain forest to plantations. As they started opening up the land, the forests became much more prone to fire than they ever were in their natural, unlogged state.”
In that year, and again in 1997, an extreme drought year, forest fires scorched exposed coal seams, igniting hundreds of underground fires similar to the one in Centralia, Pa., that began more than 40 years ago and still burns today.
In 1997, Whitehouse says, about 700 such fires burned in one section of the island of Borneo alone, and although crews extinguished many of them using hand pumps and picks, many more are still burning.
In February, Whitehouse and other researchers called the coal fire problem in Indonesia and other parts of the world a “global catastrophe” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Denver.
At the meeting, Whitehouse described the threat to some of Indonesia’s national parks and a nature preserve that is being used as a reintroduction site for the endangered orangutan.
“What went up in smoke in Indonesia makes it one of the worst polluters in the world,” Whitehouse told meeting participants.
Whitehouse adds that the devastating coal fires are “only a small part of the job,” reciting a litany of specific problems that originate from Indonesian mines, including water pollution.
“Small-scale gold miners are still using mercury to process the gold ore that they recover,” he points out, explaining that the mercury has seeped into nearby waterways, killing fish and other wildlife. “It’s creating a terrible pollution problem and has caused economic losses at some of the near-shore marine industries. It’s a mining issue that has extended well past the boundaries of the mines. It’s going to be a problem for decades.”
Whitehouse, who arrived in Indonesia in 1995 expecting to stay only three years, says much of the work focuses on training Indonesians to use computer software and equipment and helping them develop and apply environmental regulations.
“There are an awful lot of issues,” he says.
A Circuitous Path
For Whitehouse, the path that led to dealing with those issues was a circuitous one that began with his A.B. degree in geology from Lafayette.
After graduation, Whitehouse began work at New Jersey Zinc Co. in Carthage, Ill., where he planned and supervised a three-state mineral exploration program. Then, in 1970, after several draft deferments, “I enlisted in the Army with the clear understanding that if I didn’t, I would be drafted,” he says.
Whitehouse began military life as a private, but enrolled in officers’ candidate school a year later, preparing for a commission as a field artillery officer and a likely stint in Vietnam.
“Two weeks before I was to be commissioned, I was told there would be changes,” he says.
The changes involved training in geology, and the newly commissioned Captain Whitehouse began serving with the Army Corps of Engineers in Pittsburgh, Pa., supervising a program that monitored 9,000 miles of waterways and leading a study of West Virginia wetlands.
Whitehouse served in that role until his discharge in 1976, then continued in much the same capacity until 1981, when he took a job as an environmental engineer for Buffalo Coal Co. in Bayard, W. Va.
By 1987, the coal and water experience had led him to a job heading mining reclamation and enforcement support programs in the eastern United States for the U.S. Office of Surface Mining. That job, in turn, led Whitehouse to Indonesia.
Through all those years, Whitehouse says, he has drawn on the skills he learned as a student at Lafayette.
“I’m more convinced now than I was even then about the value of a liberal arts education,” he says, explaining that he was able to explore his interests—and open his mind to new possibilities—as a Lafayette student.