Deja-Vu: Office Park Time in the Tropics

In the summer of 2024, I was staying in a small town called Kumai in Central Borneo, a place that, from Google Maps’ aerial photos and online travel journals, appeared to be an untouched, exotic landscape. I was volunteering with a small peatland rehabilitation center that summer, situated between a palm oil plantation on one end and a national park on the other. Not far from the small rehabilitation center, rows of oil palms stretched out in mechanical repetition, their thick, waxy leaves blending into a crisp, uniform line toward the horizon. As we drove past these orderly roads, I felt the strangest sense of déjà vu. A temporal rupture dislocated me from my body as the landscape of Borneo folded into my memories of the suburban office park landscapes in California. This striking similarity allowed me to understand how much of the world has been restructured by extractive industries.
That summer, my guide drove me through a palm oil processing plant. The plantation’s industrial core had generated a network of secondary industries around it, not dissimilar to the standardized, rural network of an office park. The impact of the palm oil industry is often framed solely in terms of deforestation and land loss, yet it also imprints a temporal order—a placeless, regimented logic that standardizes time and space. As we neared the processing plant, my guide pointed out small convenience stores selling instant ramen. Small roadside eateries were selling what he jokingly called “Kumai fried chicken.” In Borneo, I felt transported back to my childhood, to the nucleus of my town in California, where an office park stood surrounded by endless highways, homogeneous fields, and sun-scorched grasslands.
In the mornings and afternoons, I would wake up and take a walk around the city as these trucks drove in and out to work. Like the domesticated environments of California, sets of one- to two-story family houses dominated by garages supersized to accommodate a palm oil truck, which would be used to carry the fruits to the processing plants, lined the roads. The houses were built with concrete and ornamented with traditional wood symbols on the exterior, not dissimilar to the pastiche-covered houses I had grown up with. Upon closer inspection, one could already see the cracks of rebar peeking through the surface in areas overexposed to the heavy rain and humidity. One of the elders remarked that his dream would be to recover the building techniques that were lost in this rapid modern transformation.
This out-of-body recognition of time I experienced in Borneo was not just a personal recognition—it was a confrontation with the spread of a homogeneous, regimented temporal order that has become the global norm. The layered histories of the jungle were being rewritten, subordinated to the homogeneous, regimented logic of extraction economies. That summer, I experienced a landscape transformed by the imposition of plantation time, an imported temporal framework that had taken root in the heart of the Bornean jungles.

References:

1. Chao, Sophie. In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
2. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.