ETHNOMAD
Between the Sun and the Clouds
Trading Forests for Clay
Above: Steam and smoke rise into the night sky as a traditional brick kiln is brought slowly to heat on the outskirts of Lubuk Alung, West Sumatra. The firing process begins at dusk, when temperature, moisture, and timing must be carefully balanced to prevent cracking. This kiln forms part of Dr Tom Corcoran’s long-term research into alternative fuels for traditional brickmakers, work previously featured by the National Geographic Society during his Explorer of the Month profile. Each stage of the firing is monitored alongside the tukang bakar (kiln master), whose knowledge of flame, colour, and heat is central to both brick quality and reducing the amount of fuel needed for the four-day-long firing process.
Article by Dr Tom Corcoran / Photos by Jared Kholar
2,500 words Published by ETHNOMAD
Sumatra has never been a stable island. It sits along the edge of the Sunda Trench, where the Indo-Australian Plate is driven beneath Eurasia, storing pressure that releases itself in earthquakes capable of lifting coastlines and collapsing cities. Its mountains are young and steep, pushed upward faster than erosion can soften them. Rain falls hard and often, drawn inland by warm seas and rising air. Rivers are short, fast, and unforgiving. Volcanic soils are fertile but thin. Slopes hold only because roots hold them. This landscape depends on restraint.
For millennia, forest provided that restraint. Not as scenery, but as structure. The canopy intercepted rain before it struck the ground. Roots stitched soil to slope. Leaf litter slowed water long enough for it to soak in rather than rush downhill. In this way, forests absorbed shock and turned violence into flow. Remove them, and Sumatra remembers what it is.
Ramly stands beneath the trees in the Gamaran Protected Forest, his head tilted back, eyes tracking movement most visitors never notice. Above him, layers of life unfold. Orchids cling to branches. Epiphytes spill outward like suspended gardens. Insects move unseen between leaves. Birds pass through a vertical world where light still reaches green.
Between half and nearly all rainforest life exists here, above the forest floor. For the Minangkabau people, this upper world was never abstract. Trees with dense canopies were traditionally spared. Figs with buttressed roots, trees heavy with epiphytes, and those that hosted bees or hornbills were understood as anchors of the forest. Cutting them was not illegal. It was improper. The forest was not a store of timber, but a living system that moderated rain, heat, and water. That understanding still exists. It has not disappeared. It has been overwhelmed.
Not far from Gamaran, in the lowlands of Lubuk Alung, fire consumes forest daily. Brick kilns burn hardwood to meet the demand of a growing population seeking permanence in an uncertain land. Logs slide into fireboxes and vanish in smoke. From that smoke emerge bricks that will become walls, houses, schools, and shops. Each kiln looks small. Each decision looks ordinary. Together, they form one of the most underestimated drivers of forest loss in West Sumatra.
In Lubuk Alung alone, brickmaking consumes more than 25,000 cubic metres of wood every month. Over a year, that becomes 282,480 cubic metres. Converted into forest, it means nearly 7,000 hectares felled annually in a single district. This represents less than one-fifth of the estimated regional demand.
This is not deforestation in the dramatic sense. It does not appear as a single scar visible from space. It arrives as thinning. As perforation. As slopes crossed by access tracks. As hillsides that still look green from a distance, but no longer hold when rain comes hard.
Stacks of freshly cut hardwood wait beside the kiln, enough to fire a single batch of bricks. In traditional brickmaking, roughly one cubic metre of bricks requires an equivalent volume of wood for firing. The quality and moisture content of that wood matter greatly: wet or poorly seasoned timber burns inefficiently, increasing fuel demand and driving further forest loss. What appears here as a single pile is part of a continuous cycle, repeated kiln after kiln, quietly translating forest into masonry.
I did not come to West Sumatra to study brickmaking.
I was working across Indonesia with communities preparing for earthquakes in one of the most seismically active regions on Earth. Here, earthquakes are not rare events. They are expected. What varies is not whether the ground will move, but what will fail when it does. Time and again, the pattern was the same. People were not killed by earthquakes. They were killed by buildings.
As the economy shifted and aspirations changed, timber-and-bamboo houses were giving way to masonry houses. Brick had become the material of permanence, of progress, of safety. Yet the industry supplying it operated without standards. Brickmakers were price takers in a competitive market where anyone with access to clay, fuel, and credit could build a kiln. Quality varied widely. In an earthquake zone, that variability translated directly into risk.
At the same time, another pattern was emerging beyond the buildings themselves. Brickmaking was quietly stripping forests across the surrounding mountain ranges. Not through dramatic clear-felling, but through steady thinning. Timber was removed to feed kilns. Slopes were opened by access tracks. Canopy cover weakened incrementally. During the monsoon months, the consequences became increasingly visible: landslides where forests once stood, rivers running thick with sediment, floods reaching farther into lowland communities.
This was not an environmental side effect. It was the slow dismantling of the systems that stabilised the land.
Arguing against brickmaking was neither realistic nor ethical. The demand was real, and the work sustained families. The question was what fed the kilns. During this work, I encountered another force reshaping Sumatra: oil palm. After oil extraction, the hard kernel remains as waste. In West Sumatra, this by-product was being shipped to Malaysia to fuel power plants, while nearby brick kilns continued to burn forest timber. Locally, the kernel is known as sawit.
On paper, sawit made sense. It burns hot and evenly. It has a high calorific value. It could dramatically reduce demand for forest wood. In practice, introducing it meant confronting something far more complex than fuel choice. Brickmaking here is centuries old. Family ties bind brickmakers to timber suppliers. Credit, labour, and fuel move through kinship networks as much as markets. Changing what enters the kiln meant unsettling relationships that extended well beyond fire and clay.
The problem was never only technical. It was cultural, economic, and social, layered as carefully as the bricks themselves.
Women work the brick yard in long, disciplined lines, moulding and turning fresh clay bricks by hand. After two days of drying, weather permitting, the bricks are lifted and stacked in the centre of the yard to continue curing, while newly formed bricks take their place along the edges. This slow, rotating rhythm forms a living production line, governed as much by sun, cloud, and humidity as by labour. In Minangkabau society, these yards often stand on matrilineally inherited land, placing women at the structural centre of brick production, even as financial risk and decision-making pressures continue to shape each stage of the process.
I first met the family during earlier work in a small brickmaking village called Pasir Putih (White Sands), in Lubuk Alung District. Anjung, his wife Uni Tati, and their three children, Yarni, Boy, and Asti. In Minangkabau villages, however, there is never only one family. Life is lived outward. People move between houses, yards, kilns, and shops. Before long, everyone is kin. Brickmaking ties them together, directly or indirectly, through labour, fuel, credit, and land.
Anjung and Uni Tati lived in a modest house across from the brick yard. Attached to it was a small shop, which they agreed to rent to me as an office, with a narrow back room where I could sleep. Without ceremony, this became my base. I came and went over weeks and months, returning between trips elsewhere in Indonesia. At some point, without anyone naming it, I had been adopted.
I spent long stretches helping Anjung make bricks. Mixing clay. Moulding. Stacking. Measuring. Testing. Thinking. As I do everywhere I work, I did not arrive to impose solutions. The work comes first. The labour. The listening. Only by doing the hard yards does the economic logic reveal itself, alongside the cultural obligations and environmental limits within which people operate.
Whenever I returned to Pasir Putih, even after only a few weeks away in Jakarta, it was customary to bring small gifts, the oleh-oleh as the Minangkabau call them. Eri, my next-door neighbour, always arrived first. He was usually short and rotund, but this time he looked different. Leaner. Stronger. He laughed and told me the forest had taken his belly.
Eri and his wife ran a warung, a small food house that barely sustained their family. Logging in the nearby forest had changed that. The work was brutal, he said, but reliable. He spoke of money with relief, of strength with pride, and of another child on the way. His story was not one of ignorance or carelessness. It was a calculation shaped by need. Much of the wood Eri and others like him cut feeds the expanding building industry, and a large share of it ends up in brick kilns.
Brickmaking here is old. Handmade clay bricks were used in Sumatra long before colonial maps fixed borders. Temples built two thousand years ago still stand as proof. What has changed is scale. Cities like Padang are growing rapidly. Bamboo and timber houses are increasingly associated with poverty. Brick has become the material of aspiration, permanence, and status.
That shift accelerated violently in 2009, when a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck near Padang. More than 110,000 buildings collapsed, and up to 100,000 more were damaged. Reconstruction demand surged overnight. Bricks were needed immediately. New brick yards appeared across the lowlands. Kilns multiplied. So did the demand for timber.
To rebuild just 100,000 homes after that earthquake, more than 1.2 million cubic metres of timber were burned in brick kilns. At average forest yields, this translated into nearly 30,000 hectares of forest consumed solely as fuel. The urgency to rebuild compounded the damage. Bricks were produced in haste, quality declined, and post-earthquake assessments later showed that many buildings failed not because the earthquake was exceptional, but because the bricks were weak.
Once again, urgency overrode quality. Shelter funds prioritised speed over safety. Emergency timelines displaced standards. Speed mattered more than durability. Little has changed since.
Estimates by local authorities showed that even now, millions of bricks that fail to meet seismic standards are still being laid into homes across the Padang region every month. These houses sit on fault lines, on slopes, and in flood-prone valleys. Forest loss compounds disaster risk twice over: first through degraded watersheds, then through unsafe housing. Earthquakes weaken slopes. Deforestation removes restraint. Heavy rain triggers landslides. Floods follow. Each hazard amplifies the next.
Inside a brick kiln in Pasir Putih, I explain early tests of alternative fuels, using a kiln entrusted to me by Uni Tati. Crouched beside me is Ramly, her brother, who grew up logging in the nearby Gamaran Protected Forest of the Bukit Barisan range. For Ramly, the kiln and the forest are not separate systems. Fuel, labour, and risk converge here, at the same wall of clay and fire.
Brickmaking is deeply gendered, and here matriliny matters. The Minangkabau are the largest surviving matrilineal society on Earth. Land does not pass from father to son. It moves from mother to daughter, held collectively through female lines that anchor families to place across generations. A woman does not own land in the Western sense. She holds it in trust for daughters not yet born. Kilns stand on women’s land for this reason. Clay pits, drying yards, and brick stacks are often managed by women whose authority comes from inheritance rather than title. In this sense, brickmaking is not simply an industry. It is an extension of matrilineal land stewardship. Yet this authority has limits.
While women own the land and often the kilns, decision-making power above the household level remains overwhelmingly male. Village councils, district offices, forestry departments, and credit structures are dominated by men. The result is a deep asymmetry: women bear responsibility for land, labour, and continuity, while decisions that affect fuel supply, forest enforcement, and industry regulation are made elsewhere. This imbalance becomes most visible under pressure.
Cash flow governs brickmaking. Bricks take weeks to mould, dry, fire, and sell. Payment is often delayed. Credit fills the gap. When builders demand bricks on loan, it is frequently women who carry the cost. When moneylenders intervene, repayment is often taken in bricks rather than cash, quietly converting women producers into labourers for external capital. Under these conditions, production is rushed. Wet bricks enter kilns. Fuel burns inefficiently, resulting in lower quality. Forest demand rises, and this is not a cultural failure; it is structural stress.
As I continued to work closely with Anjung, moving between kilns and timber stacks, he taught me the daily routine and was no doubt glad of the free labour. It took me time to understand where authority actually lay. It was only later that I realised the actual boss was Anjung's wife, Uni Tati. She not only owned the yards Anjung worked, but also ran several brick kilns passed down to her by her mother on the periphery of the community-managed forest. The land was hers through matrilineal inheritance. The kilns stood on her ground, so the risk was also hers.
Brickmaking, Uni Tati told me, is a life lived inside margins. Too much rain, and a month’s labour can dissolve overnight. Unfired bricks left uncovered during a sudden storm can slump back into clay. Yet if bricks are kept covered too long, they fail to dry properly. Moisture trapped inside demands slower heat during firing. Raise the temperature too quickly, and bricks crack from within, ruined before they are ever sold.
Every decision is a gamble against weather, time, and debt. Brickmakers function inside a cycle that rarely loosens. Loans must be repaid. Orders must be filled. Rain does not wait. “We work between the sun and the clouds,” Uni Tati said, gesturing toward the open yard where rows of bricks lay drying. “Both can destroy us.” When I suggested experimenting with new firing methods and alternative fuels, she did not refuse. Instead, she paused. Then she agreed to give me one of her kilns. I knew it was not a small gesture.
Handing over a kiln, even temporarily, meant absorbing risk she could not easily afford. If the firing failed, the loss would not be theoretical. It would be immediate, measured in broken bricks and unpaid debts. Her willingness was not rooted in optimism, but calculation. If the experiment worked, it could loosen the grip of timber dependency and improve quality. If it failed, she would carry the cost.
Yet Uni Tati was clear about one thing. “It is not me you need to convince,” she said. “It Uda, the Tunkang Bakar.”
Yarni pulls plastic sheeting over rows of unfired bricks as a sudden rainstorm breaks across the yard. In West Sumatra, weather governs brickmaking as strictly as labour or skill. Rain can erase days of work in minutes, yet insufficient sun delays drying and risks failure in the kiln. Families track cloud, humidity, and heat with the same care they give the clay itself. In this matrilineal household, Yarni will one day inherit both the land and the kilns, succeeding her mother, Uni Tati, as custodian of production, risk, and continuity.
The tukang bakar, the traditional fire master. His authority does not come from land or inheritance, but from mastery. He reads the kiln the way others read tides. He watches flame colour, smoke density, and the sound of combustion. He knows when heat must rise, when it must hold, when it must slow.
This knowledge is not improvised. It is inherited. Learned through family lines, through countless hours of observation, through failure remembered rather than forgotten. When Tukang bakar speaks about fire, others listen. There is science in this, even if it is never named as such. The density and dryness of the wood, the colour of the flame corresponds to temperature. The glow inside the kiln tells him which instruments would confirm their presence. His body has learned what thermometers measure.
In this space, authority is layered. Uni Tati owns the land and therefore bears the financial risk. Tukang bakar controls the fire. Neither can succeed without the other. Change cannot occur through ownership alone, nor through knowledge alone. This is where matriliny meets craft hierarchy. A woman can inherit land and still depend on male expertise to transform the earth into shelter. A man can command the fire and still work on land that will never be his. Introducing new fuels or firing methods disrupts this balance. It challenges not only habit, but status. To change the kiln is to ask a master to doubt what his eyes already know. That, Uni Tati understood, was the real risk.
Among the Minangkabau, forest, land, and womanhood are bound by obligation rather than ownership. Decisions are judged not only by immediate benefit, but by how they will be spoken of two generations forward. A woman who depletes land risks something more enduring than poverty. She risks moral failure. This ethic once regulated forest use. Men worked the forest, but women enforced restraint through inheritance and social sanction. A man who cut irresponsibly answered not to a distant authority, but to his mother’s lineage. Shame carried weight. Reputation mattered.
This moral order has never existed in isolation. Minangkabau life has long been shaped by a negotiation between adat and Islam, where matrilineal inheritance persists alongside male religious authority. In practice, restraint in the forest has been governed not by doctrine alone, but by the daily balancing of custom, faith, and obligation.
Belief reinforces this system in ways that are neither symbolic nor naïve.
The tiger, Hari Mau, occupies a particular place in the Minangkabau understanding of the forest. It is spoken of not simply as an animal, but as a presence that watches, remembers, and responds. Forest workers describe the tiger as a guardian of balance, a being that allows safe passage to those who act with restraint and brings misfortune to those who do not.
Stories circulate of loggers who ignored adat and later became lost, injured, or plagued by bad luck. When disoriented in the forest, some still tap the buttress of a fig tree three times, calling softly for guidance. These acts are not performed ironically. They are gestures embedded in long familiarity with the land.
Whether understood as spirit, memory, or moral inheritance, such stories carry instruction. As Joseph Campbell observed, myth does not explain the world away. It teaches people how to live within it. In Minangkabau society, these narratives encoded generations of observation about forest behaviour, danger, and consequence, translated into forms that could be remembered, transmitted, and respected.
Long before forestry departments or conservation plans existed, this moral ecology shaped conduct. It slowed the action. It imposed caution. It linked personal behaviour to collective outcome. The forest was not governed by enforcement alone, but by meaning.
What has weakened is not belief itself, but the conditions that once gave it force. As outsiders enter the forest without kin ties, as cash demand accelerates decision-making, and as authority shifts away from matrilineal sanction, the stories remain, but their leverage diminishes.
The forest still listens. The question is whether people still know how to speak to it.
Uda, the tukang bakar (kiln master), feeds hardwood into the fire through the night, reading temperature by eye rather than instrument. By watching the colour of the flame and the glow within the kiln, he gradually raises the heat toward vitrification, which begins around 900 degrees Celsius. Heating too quickly risks cracking bricks from trapped moisture; failing to hold temperature long enough leaves them weak. His task is to balance fire, time, and restraint, maintaining peak heat for hours before allowing the kiln to cool slowly. This knowledge, learned through years of observation and apprenticeship, remains central to brickmaking in West Sumatra.
As brickmaking expanded and cash flow tightened, pressure entered the matrilineal system sideways. Women continued to inherit land, but fuel supply, credit, and enforcement moved beyond their control. Outsiders entered the forest without kin ties. Shame lost its force.
Women speak of this shift indirectly. They talk about land becoming “noisy.” About rivers that “do not listen anymore.” About hills that feel “lighter” after rain. These are not metaphors. They are observational language shaped by long familiarity with place.
Much of the timber burned in Lubuk Alung comes from Gamaran Protected Forest, designated in 2013 and covering roughly 1,000 square kilometres of steep, biodiverse terrain. Its boundaries remain fluid, shaped by customary land use and limited state presence. Enforcement is minimal. Responsibility diffuse.
Gamaran shelters Sumatran tiger, tapir, gibbons, and possibly the last rhinoceros. It also shelters water. As canopy thins, rivers silt. Flooding intensifies downstream in Padang. Coastal reefs cloud near Pariaman. The marine environment reflects the land.
Climate change magnifies every weakness. Rain arrives heavier. Seasons shift. Extreme events compress into shorter intervals. Forests once absorbed shock. Thinned forests transmit it. Recent floods and landslides across Sumatra are not anomalies. They are rehearsals. There are alternatives.
Palm kernel shells, known locally as changkang sawit, burn hotter and more evenly than wood. One tonne replaces more than twelve cubic metres of timber. Trials show reductions in wood use exceeding sixty percent, with improved brick quality and lower costs. Firing becomes more controlled. Women can manage kilns directly. Profit margins improve.
Yet adoption remains slow. Timber suppliers hold social capital. Wood is familiar. Sawit requires coordination, transport, and trust. Tradition, when unexamined, becomes inertia.
Some loggers want out. More than eighty forest workers have trained as guides. Tourism now brings over a thousand visitors a month. Adventure routes expand. Agroforestry plantations take shape at the forest edge. Income diversifies.
This is not romanticism. It is a measured change. But it depends on restraint, coordination, and education. Forest integrity must hold. Tourism must not replicate extraction. Brickmakers must transition to fuel. Policy must engage rather than retreat. Sumatra does not forgive delay. It records it in collapsed slopes, flooded valleys, and fractured homes. That night, the kiln burns low and steady.
Uni Tati stands back from the heat, watching the glow settle into the colour Tunku Bachar is waiting for. He crouches close, eyes fixed on the fire’s mouth, reading shifts too subtle for anyone else to name. The bricks inside hold their breath. Too fast, and they will crack. Too slow, and the firing will fail.
Nothing here is abstract. Forest, debt, belief, and inheritance all pass through this opening in the earth. The land belongs to Uni Tati’s daughters, not yet grown. The fire answers to Tunku Bachar’s judgement, shaped by a lifetime of watching flame. Above them, clouds gather or hold. Beyond them, forests thin or endure.
If the kiln holds tonight, the bricks will stand. If it fails, the loss will be immediate and personal. This is how decisions are made here. Not in policy rooms or disaster reports, but in the careful reading of fire, the patience of drying clay, and the willingness to carry risk forward for those who will inherit what remains.
In West Sumatra, the future of the forest is already being negotiated, one kiln at a time.
Uni Tati sits beside one of her kilns at the edge of the brick yard, describing the calculations that shape each firing: weather, fuel, debt, and time. A mother of three and owner of multiple kilns built on matrilineally inherited land, she carries responsibility for decisions that affect household survival and forest use. Without affordable alternative fuels, the limits of the forest will continue to dictate the limits of her business.
