Taken during a rave in an oil palm plantation on Sumbawa in Indonesia, the photographs from this project explore the exploitation of some of the most diverse rainforest ecology in the world — through logging, burning, mono-cropping and soil depletion.

In 1815, a volcano on this very island erupted, spewing an ash cloud that lowered global temperatures and caused the “Year Without Summer.” That climate event is credited with spawning Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Today, global demand for palm oil fuels forest fires that burn annually during the dry season, blanketing a vast area of the Asia Pacific region in toxic haze and destroying an important carbon sink.

A dance party in the midst of an environmental disaster: we fiddle while Rome burns.