bamboo

Second fieldtrip to Bali: books, disasters and birthday parties

We’ve just come back from a magical week in Ubud, Bali. As usual, the constant new interaction with Dave’s extensive network of friends and colleagues makes for an intense experience. And coming from Canberra and our decade-long drought, the lushness of Ubud floors me. Earlier this year, we went through a hot Canberra summer in which we obsessively saved sink water, shower water, bath water, cooking water, to feed our little garden. The ever-shrinking levels of water in the city dams, in which we were all implicated every time we turned on a tap, made for a long and quietly tense summer. Water restrictions made it illegal to turn on a fountain, or refill a public pond. Yet here in Ubud, there are ponds and water fountains everywhere, tall, leafy banana plants, plump water-loving plants with huge leaves fanning out, plants growing in water, there’s water flowing in the streets! Little waterways run alongside paved lanes, stone walls are covered in moss and creeping plants, humidity is high, rice paddies extend for miles, the jungle smells and grows in a rich spectrum of greens.

On the cool nights in Ubud, when it drops to 23°, I feel chilly on the back of a motorbike, but I hear that Canberra is having sub-zero nights. I shiver thinking of riding my bike around the lake; walking around frosty, scrubby hills of dry grasses; woolly scarves; misty breath; cold, smooth trunks of eucalypts; numb fingers wrapped around handlebars. Coming from a water-starved country at the start of winter, this lush town is outrageous.

The town has a pervasive aesthetic sensibility: fresh marigolds and frangipanis line wide steps, flowers made of pebbles are inset into concrete, tiny offerings to spirits of food and flowers rest on footpaths or sit tucked into corners. There is a magnificent outpouring of art and craft and music. Part of that is simply the nature of a tourist town, but regardless, the traffic is slow and the weather is balmy; we aren’t here for a holiday but I feel very relaxed. I’ve been writing my thesis sitting by a stone pool with water flowing into it, under a mass of frangipani and hibiscus trees, in a cheap guesthouse which doubles as a shop making musical instruments and holds nightly rehearsals with a full gamelan that we walk past on our way to the villas.

We had another interesting chat to Petra Schneider, the director of IDEP, about aid dependency and the problem of foreigners who see learning to speak the local language as a complete waste of time. I also met Lachlan McKenzie, a permaculture expert who helped developed IDEP’s permakultur manual. Lachlan’s starting to get more into disaster management and disaster response, and mentioned he might be interested in following up my research on characterising disaster response in general. It was nice to talk to someone who is a novice like me, not a disaster worker, who can understand having an interest in trying to understand what it’s all about. It will be interesting talking to Lachlan a bit later in the process, to get some feedback from the perspective of someone who comes from the NGO sector but from a community and environmental angle, not disasters. Sometimes I get the impression that the people I’m talking to don’t think it’s very valuable to be researching the nature of disaster response in general. But disasters globally aren’t getting any fewer, and there will always be new people entering the field, particuarly due to the nature of response: it might be development or NGO people, or someone who is just in the right place at the right time, thrown into a job. The inner workings and machinations of disaster response are not self-evident. In my case, I imagine that my examiners may well be coming from an environmental or resource management perspective, and unless there is a clear explanation of the complexities of the post-disaster environment, any analysis of an environmental issue is meaningless.

We’ve been fortunate to be allowed to raid the library of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, a few days before Linda Garland’s 60th birthday party. I have to admit, while the collections of ANU’s libraries dwarf EBF’s library corner, they don’t have a patch on EBF’s tropical ambience, where books on bamboo, design and environmental subjects tumble across musty wooden bookshelves and spread across tables; odd pieces of furniture and exquisite bamboo objects lie around half-heartedly, looking somewhere between works of art and discarded ideas. I used to think that nothing could beat Menzies library’s silent collection of 19th century Sanskristic texts and vast Buddhism section (one of the best collections of Asian-Pacific works in the southern hemisphere), but with the cool breeze coming through concertinaed glass doors, and with my legs dangling over the edge of the wooden floor looking out into a lush tropical valley, I could happily sit and read forever.

Some of the books we got our hands on included
• Building Withough Borders: Sustainable Construction for the Global Village (ed. Joseph Kennedy)
• Towards an Integral Approach of Sustainable Housing in Indonesia (2007)

I was chuffed to notice a nicely bound photocopy of Resilience Thinking on the shelves, which I’d brought over to Java a year earlier. Back then, we’d made the rounds with copies of the book and given a copy to Ben Brown from Mangrove Action Plan (who is a forestry expert and closely connected to Arief from EBF). He ended up writing a report on the state of mangroves in Indonesia based on the concept of resilience in the book, and the report got translated into Indonesian and circulated around government circles. A good third of the report was a summary of the introduction to systems thinking from the book, and apparently it was quite influential. Cheers Ben.

On our last night, we went over to Linda Garland’s 60th birthday party, held at her home in the EBF valley. The undulating grounds were transformed even more into a magical fairytale with hundreds of bamboo lanterns lining the paths and candles hanging through the tree canopy. It was wild, with over 600 guests, including the Balinese elite and the old hippie vanguard of Bali (not necessarily mutually exclusive groups) and their now teenage children; a Balinese buffet banquet stretched out across a gaggle of tables, drinks, a two metre long birthday cake in the shape of a six and a zero; a hundred performances starting in the afternoon and meandering through the evening: a Balinese kacek performance of the Ramayana, an intense Balinese gamelan, a live band …

I ended up having an enthralling argument with Samual Schultz of FART (Fast Action Response Team), who believes that only helping the poorest of the poor is worth anything, anything else is white man’s bullshit. According to him, only doing stuff matters; reading and writing is ultimately worthless. As a research student, clearly I’m going to be at odds with that opinion …

A few limoncellos later, I was fortunate to be able to interrogate lovely Lee of the F.A.R team. We did the big questions. “What do you see as the biggest problem with disaster response?” and “in an ideal, imagined reality, where everything works perfectly, what would disaster response look like?” His answers was interesting. Biggest problem? Bureaucracy. The further away you get from the problem, the harder it is to solve it. The ideal scenario? Capable and self-sufficient community-based response.

The last answer was interesting. I don’t know how you would equip every community in the world to be self-sufficient, with a knowledge base capable of responding adequately to any future disaster. Lee has a generator, water purification system and food enough for his surrounding community: how would you do it for 10,000 households? Or for every household, in every community in the world?

I agree that we need to move away from a purely reactive model of dealing with disasters, and that is slowly happening, with increased international acceptance and integration of the Hyogo Framework, for example in Indonesia with the National Action Plan for Disaster Risk Reduction. But I agree that realistically, there will always be a need for disaster response. It doesn’t look global efforts towards disaster risk reduction - at an international or at a community level - will supplant the need for disaster response any time soon. And in that case, we return to the question of how can we do it better. In terms of global sustainability, if we acknowledge the reality of disaster response as a perpetual feature in the global humanitarian sphere, we end up again with the idea that disasters do not sit in some special category outside the global sustainability agenda. Acting on a small scale, a handful of communities, maybe environmental considerations are less critical. But once you start to add up the environmental impact of disaster response across an entire disaster, across the world, over years, it becomes clear that there are some massive opportunities for improvements. It involves both understanding relationships with the local environment on a community level, and understanding environmental impact on the mass scale.

Even though I’d nearly left the party at 7pm to go to bed, I got caught up in the crowds and we ended up dancing barefoot on a deck under the stars to a DJ playing Cuban music in the early hours of the morning, before crashing on some random exquisite bamboo daybed made of enormous black bamboo culms, and eventually zipping off back through the rice fields and winding through the cool and dark Monkey Forest valley, back to reality.

The next morning I woke up early and had some refreshing hot tea infused from marigolds that I had stolen from the birthday cake.

© Kim Williamson 2008