Stephen Lansing's Perfect Order

With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen
Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the
traditional Balinese rice growing practices. The intensely productive
terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. So are the
democratic subaks (irrigation cooperatives) that manage them, and so
is the water temple system that links the subaks in a nested
hierarchy.

When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything
went wrong. Along with the higher-yield rice came "technology
packets" of fertilizers and pesticides and the requirement, stated in
patriotic terms, to "plant as often as possible." The result: year
after year millions of tons of rice harvest were lost, mostly to
voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to
ever decreasing effect.

Meanwhile Lansing and his colleagues were teasing apart what made the
old water temple system work so well. The universal problem in
irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no
incentive to be generous to downstream users. What could account for
their apparent generosity in Bali? Lansing discovered that the
downstream users also had power, because pests can only controlled if
everybody in the whole system plants rice at the same time (which
overloads the pests with opportunity in one brief season and starves
them the rest of the time). If the upstreamers didn't let enough
water through, the downstreamers could refuse to synchronize their
planting, and the pests would devour the upstreamers' rice crops.

Discussion within the subaks (which dispenses with otherwise powerful
caste distinctions) and among neighboring subaks takes account of
balancing the incentives, and the exquisite public rituals of the
water temple system keep everyone mindful of the whole system.

The traditional synchronized planting is far more effective against
the pests than pesticides. "Plant as often as possible" was a formula
for disaster.

It seems clear how such "perfect order" can maintain itself, but how
did it get started? Was there some enlightened rajah who set down the
rules centuries ago? Working with complexity scientists at Santa Fe
Institute, Lansing built an agent-based computer model of 172 subaks
planting at random times, seeking to maximize their yields and paying
attention to the success of their neighbors. The system
self-organized! In just ten years within the model the balanced
system seen in Bali emerged on its own. No enlightened rajah was
needed. (Interestingly, the very highest yields came when the model
subaks paid attention not just to their immediate neighbors but to the
neighbors' neighbors as well. If they paid attention primarily to
distant subaks, however, the whole system went chaotic.)

In Balinese language and understanding, "rice paddies" equals "jewel"
equals "mind."

One result of Lansing's work is that in the 1980s the Balinese
government threw out the "plant often" and pesticide parts of the
Green Revolution and renewed respect for the water temple system. It
kept the providentially higher yield rice. Unfortunately, it also
kept pouring on the fertilizer. Balinese water is so naturally
nutrient-rich, the extra fertilizer just passes through the watershed
out to the sea, where it is destroying the coral reefs with algal
blooms. So far, the water temple system does not reach that far
downstream.

Lansing ended with a suggestion for Long Now about the perception and
practice of time. In the standard western perspective, time is long
but thin--- just past, present, future. In Bali, he said, time is
dense. The Balinese have ten kinds of weeks operating concurrently---
solar, lunar, and 7-day, 6-day, on down to a one-day week ("Today is
always luang.") It's like the difference between the shimmering
density of polycyclic gamelan music versus western romantic narrative
music--- beginning, middle, end.

The Long Now Foundation should figure out how to introduce Balinese
time density to the time-impoverished West, Lansing said.

--Stewart Brand

Steve Lansing's richly illustrated new book on all this is coming out
in April. It's titled PERFECT ORDER: RECOGNIZING COMPLEXITY IN BALI.
You can pre-order it from Amazon at:
http://tinyurl.com/cmj28--

Stewart Brand -- sb@...
The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
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