Traveling north from
Bali’s international entry point of Denpasar, traffic gives way to villages and
villages gradually give way to emerald terraced paddies of rice. Continuing
northward, the rice paddies become the dominant feature of the landscape,
stretching across beautiful swathes of hillsides, and falling away from the
crater lakes that feed them life-giving water.
Visitors who venture
this far inland will want to stop their car or motorbike to photograph epic
vistas for the folks back home. Those who take the time for a stroll through
the rice paddies will notice narrow streams carve between the paddies like
bloodlines, with miniature waterfalls connecting higher paddies to lower.
Subak is the term for the system of irrigation
itself, including canals and tunnels that carry water from the volcanic crater
lakes to the coast. It’s also the name for the voluntary associations of paddy
rice farmers who share a common water source for irrigation.
Bali’s subak is a
classic example of what experts call a complex adaptive system (CAS). Academic
study of CAS has developed only recently across diverse fields; generally
speaking, a CAS involves many autonomous components or agents learning,
adjusting and adapting to changing conditions as they interact both with each
other and their environment.
Examples include neural
networks, social networks, stock markets, ecosystems, the Internet and the subak
system.
Humans and the landscape
here have co-adapted over a thousand years without direction from a centralized
authority. The system self-corrects for periodic disruptions as varied as
pests, dry weather, volcanic eruptions, or colonial invaders.
All male farmers in a subak
must attend the meetings, participate in decision making, and pay a tithing to
the collective. They all receive holy water through their subak temple’s
priest, who collects the holy water from the priests at the island’s highest
water temple Pura Ulun Danu Batur at the top of Mount Batur. Farmers belonging
to a subak contribute both time for meetings and part of their harvest
to their water temple. Their responsibilities also include rituals and rites
performed on the Balinese lunar calendar.
Balinese society still
operates according to castes that usually dictate how one person should speak
to another. During subak meetings, everyone speaks to each other on a
common level, without reference to caste. This encourages democratic
participation. Violation of this egalitarian convention can prompt fines.
Anthropologist Stephen
Lansing, the world’s foremost non-Balinese expert on subak, and his
colleague James Kremer designed a computer model to test whether the subak
system could come about through spontaneous self-organization, rather than
being directed by a central authority. Simply by virtue of sharing the same
goals—optimizing yields, minimizing pests, ensuring adequate water supplies—the
model showed how coordination like the subak system promotes high yields
not only for a few, but for everyone. Nature tends to punish—with lower yields,
pest infestations, or water shortages—those who defect from the cooperation,
such that over time, the subak associations of farmers become a
self-sustaining equilibrium.
Water temples across the
island provide forums in which farmers of each subak gather to agree
upon planting schedules in order to use their common water source equitably and
to coordinate fallow periods that control pest outbreaks. Farmers in a subak
are thus also congregants of a given water temple. These are democratic
participatory institutions, but they are also religious institutions. All Balinese,
revere the Goddess of the Lake Dewi Danu as well as the Rice Goddess Dewi Sri.
Beyond the
infrastructure of canals and waterways for irrigation, the subak social
structures for management of water flows and pest control were invisible to
outsiders for generations, manifesting tacit knowledge of best practice in
balancing the demands of the earth, the spirit and the community.
Balinese people are
imbued from early childhood with their philosophy of Tri Hita Karana,
which emphasizes right relations with God, the natural environment and fellow
human beings. The subak system is an island-wide manifestation of this
holistic philosophy that embraces that need for balance between reverence for
the divine and the messy business of getting enough for everyone to eat.
“This is the theatre in
which we can look for comprehensive solutions instead of piecemeal solutions,”
said Lansing, who has studied Bali’s subak for over three decades.
Lansing, among others, has criticized the Green Revolution’s narrow and myopic
focus on increasing grain yields. The Green Revolution—in which international
donors funded directives for large scale adoption of monoculture with intensive
use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides—swept much of the developing world,
including Indonesia, in the 1960’s.
“My research with
James Kremer showed that the Green Revolution failed because planners did not
understand the role of water temples in managing the ecology of the rice
terraces,” explained Lansing. “We showed that the temple networks are a
real-world example of a complex adaptive system.”
The collective
management of water resources has proven sustainable for a millennium. Bali subak’s
recognition by UNESCO as World Heritage differs from Cambodia’s temples at
Anchor, for instance, because the subak heritage is still alive, a
testament to the functionality and sustainability of democratic, collective
management, at least on this small, culturally homogenous island.
The communal leadership
model of the subak has proven successful where the Green Revolution’s top-down
leadership failed. Yields increased with the Green Revolution, but nutritional
quality, environmental health and holistic sustainability were sacrificed.
Well-intentioned Green
Revolution planners in the 1970s failed to see the practical as well as
spiritual importance of the subak system with its water temples,
priests, goddesses and rituals, according to Lansing. Planners brought in
technology packets with high-yield rice varieties and chemical fertilizer that
continues to degrade Bali’s traditional rice culture, soils and even coral
reefs surrounding the island.
The subak
irrigation system carries volcanic soil naturally rich in potassium, phosphorus
and nitrogen down through watersheds. Ecologists discovered that most of the
chemical fertilizer adopted during the Green Revolution proved excessive and
washed off into the ocean, harming nearby coral reefs.
While the Green
Revolution challenged the subak from the top-down, the dominant tourism
economy in Bali today challenges subak from all sides, paddy by paddy,
as restaurants, hotels and villas multiply and encroach. Property taxes are
based upon potential economic value of land where it is developed, rather than
the productive history or potential of farmland. Even farmers with consistently
strong harvests face ever-increasing land taxes, rising due to development next
door. This puts enormous pressure on farmers to sell or lease their land rather
than continuing to grow food. The momentum of tourism development on this model
leads to ever diminishing food production on the island to feed an ever
increasing population of locals and visitors. Moreover, as land is converted
away from agriculture and associated cultural traditions including rituals,
offerings, temples and rice paddies toward concrete structures to serve a mass
tourist market, Bali’s strongest draws for tourists will weaken inexorably.
Invaluable as endangered
cultural heritage, Bali’s subak may also prove instructive in contexts beyond
Bali’s shores. Supporters of the UNESCO bid hope that it will not only raise
awareness about Bali’s traditional methods of sustainable agriculture but also
provide a new model for UNESCO World Heritage sites that empowers local
communities to keep more of their earnings.
“We are hoping that this
will trigger an increased involvement on the part of communities both in terms
of design and implementation and in terms of sharing revenues,” said Maria
Osbeck, Research Fellow in water management and rural development at the
Stockholm Environmental Institute. Farmers might more likely soldier on as
farmers if they feel they have a greater stake in the tourism-related revenues
agriculture can help attract.
“The subak system
represents a kind of wisdom that is vital for intelligent climate adaptation
and sustainable development,” observes Tom Hilde of the University of Maryland
School of Public Policy, who recently brought graduate students to Indonesia to
study development challenges. “To lose it would be not only to lose a thing of
great beauty, fascination and dynamism but also a powerful critique of the
failures of existing development paradigms.”
Agro-tourism might
provide a balance to help resolve these tensions. Educating tourists about the
role of agriculture in the intricate beauty of Balinese culture and topography
seems an important step. Who could fail to be amazed by the elegance of Bali’s
living heritage when offered an opportunity to appreciate its entirety?
UNESCO World Heritage
recognition might help tip the scales toward tourism that preserves a unique
and vibrant way of life that has stood the test of time but now faces threats
from outsiders who could unwittingly love the island to death. Though few
Balinese kids today would admit to wanting to be farmers when they grow up,
“Cultural Interpreter” sounds like a pretty cool job, and Bali could be
training many more of them.
Photo by Glenn Chickering
