Seasonality in the Anthropocene: On the construction of Southeast Asia’s ‘haze season’

Abstract

‘Seasons of the Anthropocene’ - where human activities interact with biophysical cycles to create recurrent environmental phenomena that are often hazardous - are emerging. This article offers the first problematisation of the emergence of a ‘season of the Anthropocene’. We investigate the ‘haze season’ and its use to describe the almost annually recurrent air pollution in maritime Southeast Asia caused by peatland burning in the region. Analysing over 36,000 news articles published in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore in the last three decades, we demonstrate how ‘haze season’ has gained salience in public discourse, functioning as a heuristic device to structure both adaptation and mitigation behaviours. During polluted months, media coverage emphasises adaptive responses such as staying indoors and mask-wearing, while in clearer months it shifts to mitigative themes such as corporate sustainability, legislation, and diplomacy. We also uncover early signs of desensitisation, evident in satire and humour about haze recurrence, and an emerging preference for interventionist adaptive strategies, such as cloud seeding, which reinforce a crisis narrative and deflect attention from underlying causes of haze. Our findings advance understanding of the political and institutional dynamics shaping environmental ‘seasonalities’ as contingent socio-material assemblages of ecological degradation, fire, and pollution. By conceptualising and empirically tracing how novel seasons are constructed and mobilised in public discourse, we forge a new research agenda of studying ‘seasonality’ in the Anthropocene, as an important lens through which we might better understand these mutually constructive relationships within the biophysical environment.