The Ancient Order of Bali
Long-Form/Podcast: In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery
Written by Matt Castle • Non-Fiction • March 2023
In the 1970s, the Indonesian island of Bali went through a period of rapid
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change. Along the stunning beaches on the southern side of the island,
tourism boomed. Parking lots were put up, together with swinging hot spots
and hotels of various colours. Hip young travellers from North America,
Europe, and Australasia had “discovered” the island and began exploring its
awesome surfing breaks, drinking in the newly-built bars, and spending
money. There were consequences, good and bad, for the Balinese people.
Living standards increased—as did the island’s population. The rest of
Indonesia experienced growth too, and the country soon needed more of a
vital food staple: rice.
As developers paved paradise along the coast, in the hills and mountains of
Bali’s interior the authorities implemented a program of policies dubbed
Bimbingan Massal, or “Massive Guidance”, intended to increase rice
production and modernise agriculture in line with the latest international
thinking. Massive Guidance was a credit scheme funded by the Asian
Development Bank, which strongly incentivised adoption of new Westerndeveloped farming methods in the form of ‘technology packets’ containing
fast growing and high-yielding rice varieties, artificial fertilisers, and
pesticides. These innovations had already lifted millions out of poverty and
hunger elsewhere in the world, as part of a global transition from traditional
to high intensity farming practices—the so-called Green Revolution.
The authorities knew that Bali already boasted a remarkably bountiful
landscape of traditional wet rice cultivation. Rice is semi-aquatic, and around
6,000 years ago, humans discovered that submerging the crops under several
centimetres of water for large parts of the plant’s growing cycle kept weeds at
bay, greatly improving production. But there was no reason—the experts
figured—why Green Revolution methods couldn’t increase the island’s rice
production yet further.
From 1970, the government urged Bali’s growers to dig deep into their new
technology packets and repeatedly sow as much high-yield rice as possible as
quickly as possible. For a few years, this approach bore rice. There were small
but measurable increases in yields, sufficient to convince the authorities that
the program showed promise, but maybe wasn’t quite massive enough.
In the middle of the decade, things started to go wrong. Plagues of insects and
other pests attacked rice crops, often faster than the new pesticides could beat
them back. And farmers in some areas experienced faltering irrigation flows
and dry fields—something previously almost unknown on Bali’s verdant rice
terraces.
In the midst of this emerging disaster, a young, long-haired anthropologist
from America arrived on the island. When he realised the scale of the slow-
motion catastrophe, he started asking some fundamental questions.
Eventually, with the help of modern computing, he and his team of American
and Balinese scientists would slowly reveal a never-before-seen organisation
that had shaped the island for a thousand years—one which was now in
danger of collapse.
Long before the American arrived,
Bali’s rural landscape had
captivated travellers from distant
shores. One such visitor, a British
naturalist named Alfred Russel
Wallace, arrived in northern Bali in
June 1856, as part of an eight yearlong exploration of the natural
history of the region. Although his
primary interest was the collection
of biological specimens, Wallace
A view of Bali's iconic rice terraces
found himself strangely attracted to Bali’s rice terraces. He later wrote:
The whole surface of the country is divided into irregular patches,
following the undulations of the ground, from many acres to a few
perches in extent, each of which is itself perfectly level, but stands a few
inches or several feet above or below those adjacent to it. Every one of
these patches can be flooded or drained at will by means of a system of
ditches and small channels, into which are diverted the whole of the
streams that descend from the mountains. Every patch now bore crops in
various stages of growth, some almost ready for cutting, and all in the
most flourishing condition and of the most exquisite green tints.
Wallace had seen plenty of rice fields and irrigation channels before. Yet these
ones were somehow…different. Intricate, and efficient. A marvel of
engineering. It was the middle of the dry season, yet the well-watered terraces
were bursting with healthy crops. Somehow, Balinese farmers were able to
provide their fields with the necessary water all through the year. Wallace
later singled out Bali’s lush, productive landscape in his famous scientific
travelogue, The Malay Archipelago, contrasting it favourably to the barren
appearance of other islands during the dry season. The island’s elaborate rice
irrigation network, Wallace noted, “produces the effect of a perpetual spring.”
But Wallace was only able to spend two days on the island before moving on
to the next stop on his journey. Although his stay on the island was not long, it
proved significant.
•
•
•
It was more than a century later when the American anthropologist J. Stephen
Lansing arrived in Bali. His original interest was the island’s unique human
history and religion. Within the vast multi-island nation of Indonesia, Bali is a
largely Hindu community surrounded by Muslim-majority islands. Lansing
first visited the island in 1971 as an undergraduate, living with a Hindu priest’s
family for several months while studying Balinese language and culture. By
the end of his visit, he knew two things for sure: that he wanted to be an
anthropologist, and that he would be back. In 1974, he duly returned to Bali
to undertake fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation. This time, he would be
investigating the history of the many temples dotted around the island. The
temples come in a variety of sizes and types, being dedicated to a wide range
of different deities all considered, within the Balinese brand of Hindu
theology, to be manifestations of the same supreme God.
Discovering the purpose and history behind these temples was not always
easy for an outsider. To foreign eyes, they all look very similar, and unless
visited on festival days—when the old buildings come alive with colour and
celebration—many of them appear empty and abandoned. So Lansing relied
on conversations with local people to unravel the buildings’ stories.
But whenever he came across one particular type of temple—namely the pura
tirta, or water temples—these conversations veered off in an unexpected
direction. Local farmers batted away questions about myths and rituals and
suchlike, and started talking about rice: rice yields, rice pests, rice irrigation.
And the farmers weren’t happy. Crops were failing and their livelihoods were
under threat. Something was going wrong in their rice terraces, and it was
somehow connected to the temples. Lansing knew that the government had
recently started to impose Green Revolution changes on the island’s
farmers—and an idea was germinating.
But he still had a dissertation to
finish, and an anthropology
research career to establish. It was
not until nearly a decade later, in
1983—now working from the
University of Southern California,
and the proud recipient of a US
National Science Foundation
grant—that Lansing was at last
ready to return to Bali to study the
A Balinese water temple
water temples, and their
increasingly disgruntled farmer congregations.
It didn’t take him long to determine that his previous idea had growth
potential. The water temples Lansing had discussed with exasperated farmers
existed primarily to venerate the water goddess Dewi Danu, one of the most
important deities of Balinese Hinduism. But Lansing realised they might also
serve a practical function. Historically, and until very recently, the temples
had been involved in setting irrigation and planting schedules for rice
growers in their respective areas.
This dual role was possible because of the temples’ close association with a
centuries-old Balinese rural institution known as a subak. Subaks are water
management organisations comprising all the rice farmers in an area served
by a shared water source—be that a spring, a lake, or water impounded by a
weir across a stream. Subak members, typically numbering between 50 and
400 rice farmers, regularly meet to address issues of common interest—the
foremost being, the fair division of water for their fields—and to pool their
labour and resources to maintain the local irrigation network. In an otherwise
hierarchical and caste-conscious society, subaks stand out as highly
democratic and egalitarian organisations. An elected subak leader officiates in
monthly meetings conducted using strictly caste-neutral language. All subak
members have a say in proceedings, because all have a stake in the outcome
of the subak’s shared decision-making.
The physical results of subak decisions are visible all across rural Bali. As
Wallace had noted the previous century, the island’s landscape is a
particularly elaborate example of terracing, a practice used worldwide to
facilitate farming on steep hillsides. But on Bali, the dense mosaic of terraces
is supported by large river-spanning weirs; kilometre-long tunnels handhewn through the walls of sheer-sided mountain gorges; precisely engineered
wooden flow dividers allocating water between terraces; and flawlessly graded
irrigation channels which, from certain angles, fool the eye into seeing an
uphill flow.
In a landscape so clearly sculpted
by the practicalities of water
distribution, the cultural
importance of the water temples
was not so surprising. But Lansing’s
close-up study of individual subaks
allowed him to recognise that subak
boundaries and membership
correspond precisely to the areas
Up close with the rice terraces
and congregations served by each
local water temple. Each water temple was located close to the local subak’s
water source, and subak meetings were held in the temple courtyards. In
these meetings, priests and farmers saw no distinction between the spiritual
and practical aspects of water management. Ultimately, all water belongs to
Dewi Danu, and fair allocation of her aqueous blessings is viewed as a form of
worship, symbolised by the distribution of tirtha, or holy water. Lansing also
identified a separate tier of larger supra-local regional water temples
similarly co-located with upstream water sources, which hosted regular
regional meetings of subak leaders. In this way, subak decision-making at all
levels was imbued with the Highest of All Possible Authorities. As a Balinese
saying puts it, “the voice of the subak is the voice of God.”
But times were a’changin, and not for the better. Although the religious life of
the water temples continued, Lansing saw how Massive Guidance had
wrenched apart the spiritual and the practical aspects of water management.
The authorities distributed technology packets containing high yield rice
seed to farmers free of charge. Payment would be deducted at harvest time
when growers sold their crops back to the government—but if farmers
wanted to take full advantage of the new fast-growing varieties, they needed
to produce three crops a year. The temples had never scheduled more than
two crops a year, with a cleansing post-harvest fallow period of several weeks
between reaping and sowing. With the soil pressed into year-round service,
regular application of artificial fertilisers became necessary—and the plants
were much thirstier.
The priests carried on with their rituals, but responsibility for setting planting
schedules returned to individual rice growers. The government encouraged
each grower to throw open their irrigation channels and flood their fields
with as much water as their crops required, as often as required. It was every
farmer for himself. The government did not consider water supply to be a
problem, because there had never been significant water shortages on the
island before. And if necessary, technology would make up any shortfall, in
the form of gleaming new irrigation infrastructure—including modern metal
sluice gates and large machine-built dams and canals.
And so the Green Revolution rolled over the island. Starting from 1970, rice
growers gradually abandoned the old ways and adopted the new. This didn’t
mean they were happy with the changes. Officials discovered that in some
areas the recently installed metal sluice gates had, unaccountably, been raised
out of the water and left to rust. As the farmers—wide-eyed with innocence—
explained to the bureaucrats, this necessitated going back to the old wooden
fractional dividers. Despite such outbreaks of plausibly-deniable sabotage,
overall and over time a significant proportion of rice growers did change
their practices. Government pressure to use the new methods was intense. At
one point, temple-based irrigation scheduling was outlawed. Accordingly, the
complex interrelationships between rice plants, pests, and people shifted.
Then, from the mid 1970s, a torrent of disasters struck at Bali’s rural heart. It
was almost as if the Gods were angry—or perhaps one Goddess in particular.
Abrupt explosions of rice pests afflicted crops, including rats and other
rodents, insects, and rice-consuming pathogens of all kinds. In 1977, the island
lost hundreds of thousands of tons of high yield rice to a notorious species of
insect pest named the brown planthopper. Agronomists developed new
planthopper-resistant rice varieties, and the situation stabilised for a time—
but in 1983 the island’s rice crops suffered a devastating outbreak of the
disease tungro. So the farmers planted new tungro-resistant rice, only for their
fields to be afflicted by rice blast, which led to them planting even newer and
more disease-resistant rice varieties which, it soon transpired, were
susceptible to helminthosporium. Between deployments of new rice varieties,
government and development agency advisors encouraged farmers to reach
ever deeper into their technology packets and apply pesticides in escalating
doses. In this way, Balinese farmers found themselves caught up in a spiralling
pest-versus-people biochemical arms race. By the mid-1980s, aircraft were
spraying vast quantities of pesticides over Bali’s rice terraces.
Meanwhile, the island’s coastal
ecosystems were hit by an unexpected
plague of green slime. Much of the
nitrogen and phosphate fertiliser from
farmers’ technology packets had found
its way to the sea. This resulted in
destructive green algal growth
smothering the island’s prized coastal
coral reefs, in turn threatening the
island’s fishing and tourism industries.
Frustratingly, this eutrophication
happened despite research showing that
the fertile, mineral-rich volcanic soils of
the island should have rendered such
artificial supplementation superfluous—
at least if traditional rice varieties, with
Brown planthopper
their modest growth rates, had remained
in widespread use.
And in case there was any doubt which deity might be connected with these
events, the previously reliable delivery of water from the island’s irrigation
network began to falter. Farmers could no longer be sure of receiving the
necessary volumes of water for their crops at the required times. When the
Asian Development Bank sent its representatives into rural Bali to assess the
progress of the Green Revolution, the reports landing back on the desks of
the bank’s executives described “chaos” in the formerly impeccable irrigation
system.
In short, Massive Guidance ran into massive problems. One analysis showed
that despite the rapid-fire changes and millions of dollars of investment
poured into the island’s agricultural system, in the four years leading up to
1978, Bali’s average per hectare rice yield increased by a measly 2%—at the
cost of significant environmental and social disruption. And thanks to the
increased energy inputs into the system—much of it embedded in the
production of fertilisers and pesticides—Balinese rice farming was no longer
the model of efficiency so admired by earlier generations of visitors.
In Lansing’s anthropological opinion, these problems were due to the
incompatibility of modern Green Revolution methods with the island’s
traditional subak system. He repeatedly tried to warn the authorities that
their policies risked lasting damage to Bali’s culture, agriculture, and
environment. But to no avail. The opinion of one long-haired Californian
academic carried as little weight as the protests of the farmers themselves.
The authorities pointed towards the success of the Green Revolution
elsewhere, and asserted that the underlying problem—if indeed there was
one—was not enough Green Revolution.
Despite such setbacks, there was still science to be done. As Lansing mulled
over what he had learned, he began to suspect that the implications extended
beyond the problems of Balinese rice farmers and into something more
fundamental. Specifically, the study of systems. Lansing’s academic
background meant that he was singularly well-placed to investigate these
implications. As an undergraduate, he had read voraciously across the
physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. On entering
college, his intention was to major in physics. However, his life-changing six
months with the priest’s family in Bali turned his career in a different
direction. And now, something about Bali’s traditional irrigation practices
stirred his dormant mathematical instincts. Massive Guidance was causing
the traditional irrigation system to break down, with unforeseen and
unfortunate consequences—but why had the old system functioned so well in
the first place?
At this point Lansing realised he needed more data, and he needed help. In
1986, after several years based mostly in Bali, he returned to the US and
secured the assistance of a marine biologist and systems ecologist named
James Kremer. Kremer had experience with a cutting-edge analytical
technique known as “computer simulation modelling.” Although the two
academics did not know each other well, both held faculty positions at the
University of Southern California, and both were aspiring surfers. Kremer
invited Lansing to his local beach in Redondo, near Los Angeles, and it was
there—as the waxed-up researchers bobbed gently in a lull between waves—
that the two first discussed the gnarly problem of Bali’s rice paddies. Initially,
Kremer wasn’t sure how he could help. Fortunately the surf that day wasn’t
big enough to interrupt the necessary explanations, and despite some
ongoing qualms from Kremer, both men were soon heading to Indonesia.
Back in Bali, Lansing had already forged links with local scientists, including a
senior researcher at the Ministry of Agriculture, Wayan Alit Arthawiguna, and
a conservation biologist named Sang Putu Kaler Sura. Their deep
understanding of the local environment and culture proved invaluable in the
months and years that followed. Lansing had widened his attention to larger
groups of subaks spanning entire watersheds, and the team had conducted
field surveys, videotaped subak meetings, and collected local agricultural and
environmental data. Over time, more academic contacts and colleagues were
pulled into the project to help answer a snowballing array of rice cultivation
and water temple-related questions. Ultimately a large, constantly morphing
team of mostly Balinese and American researchers—including biologists,
computer scientists, economists, historians, and archaeologists—pieced
together a comprehensive picture of the island’s traditional water templesubak system, and how it had come to be.
Kremer’s background in computer simulation modelling proved to be crucial
for the investigation. But when Lansing first showed his biologist colleague
around the island’s rice terraces and water temples, Kremer remained unsure
how he could help. His expertise was in systems ecology, a broad-based yet
mathematics-heavy discipline that spans the interface between biology,
chemistry, and physics. His particular interest was marine ecosystems—but
Lansing was insisting on showing him an unlikely mix of land-based Balinese
culture, religion, and agronomy.
As he considered subak practices in more detail, however, Kremer was struck
by the ecological relevance of what he saw: the benefits of repeated flooding,
fallow periods, and the harvesting of eels and small fish from rice paddies for
food, contrasting with the negative impacts from the new short, fast-growing,
and thirsty rice varieties that were replacing the traditional tall, slow-growing
and pest-tolerant types, and the associated increase in fertiliser use. He
realised that the rice planting schedules traditionally set by the water temples
could be linked to other parameters, such as rainfall and rice yields, and their
relationships described mathematically using differential equations—in the
same way he might have connected fluctuations in microscopic algae levels to
the numbers of grazing zooplankton in the more familiar setting of a coastal
marine ecosystem. Perhaps he could contribute something useful after all. By
the end of his first visit to Bali, Kremer was ready to switch on his Macintosh
personal computer and start inputting data. The ecologist had a model to
build.
Rice terraces in Bali
While Kremer looked at the overarching ecosystem implications of subak
practices, other collaborators helped unpack smaller scale dynamics within
the system. In particular, the team’s understanding of what happened at
individual farmer level was enriched by later input from an economist named
John Miller. Miller realised that the allocation of water within a subak could
be described by a branch of mathematics known as game theory.
The team in Bali had already observed that neighbouring upstream and
downstream farmers cooperated closely when it came to sharing out
irrigation water. But in theory, upstream farmers held all the cards by being
able to control irrigation flows for the benefit of their own crops. At first
glance, there was no obvious reason for upstream farmers to coordinate with
water-limited farmers lower down the mountains. But—as local biologists
and the farmers themselves could attest—upstream farmers actually had a
powerful incentive to cooperate: pest control. When farmers synchronised
planting and harvesting over contiguous areas of hillside, the simultaneous
flooding of their fields during the post-harvest fallow period provided a key
pest control function. Pest species—such as the cereally-offending brown
planthopper—found themselves starved of food across an unhoppably wide
and riceless expanse of flooded land. Their populations would plummet. But
when different farmers offset their cropping cycles by planting in a piecemeal
and uncoordinated way, the landscape became a fine-grained patchwork of
fields at different stages of growth and inundation. This patchwork was a
haven for rice pests and pathogens of all kinds. Pests—unlike water—can
move uphill almost as easily as down, and can quickly shift their attention to
patches of juicy new growth. After a few short growing seasons, this
unsynchronised planting produced explosions of pest populations—as
Massive Guidance demonstrated so effectively—while conversely, the
traditional practice of synchronised cropping kept pests under control.
But synchronised cropping also meant synchronous demand for large
volumes of water in the same areas during the growth and fallow phases of
rice cultivation. These sharp spikes in demand had the potential to cause
water shortages for downstream growers.
Game theory provided a framework to analyse and understand the trade-offs
required to resolve the dilemma. For the upstream farmer, planting would
ideally be synchronised as much as possible for maximum control of pests—
when water supply was not an issue. But the downstream farmer had to
balance both pest control and water requirements, treading a much finer line.
Miller’s game theory analysis showed that for many scenarios, the combined
harvests of both downstream and upstream farmers would be larger if they
negotiated a shared irrigation strategy—either aligning their planting
schedules or not, depending on pest levels and water availability. In terms of
overall harvest size, this worked far better than each farmer making
individual planting decisions, and it often held true even if the upstream
farmer incurred a short term harvest penalty. In the long run, upstream
farmers benefited from releasing some of ‘their’ water so that those
downstream could synchronise their planting to keep rice pests firmly in
their place—at least to the extent that the capacity of their shared water
supply permitted. They just needed a coordinating mechanism—which, the
team already knew, was provided by the regular subak meetings hosted by the
local water temples.
But what was happening at larger scales? In fact, thanks to James Kremer, the
team already knew the answer: exactly the same thing.
In 1988 Kremer completed his computer simulation model, ‘BaliMod.’ It was
a remarkable achievement, successfully capturing the functional relationships
of 32 key environmental and agricultural parameters—including rainfall,
irrigation flow, rice type and pest levels—affecting 172 digitised subaks strung
along two Balinese rivers. Although the model’s wide angle view couldn’t
address the rationale behind individual farmer decisions in the same way as
Miller’s later game theory analysis, simulations run from the model showed
subaks controlling pests, minimising water shortages, and maximising
harvests in precisely the same way.
And BaliMod showed this happening across
the entire simulated rice-growing landscape.
Within the no-consequence confines of the
model, the researchers could vary the extent
of synchronised planting and call down
drought or floods at will, to see how the
system was affected over the course of a year.
Sure enough, they found that when cropping
schedules were patchy and poorly
coordinated across a watershed, pests ran
riot and harvests were significantly reduced;
an effect that was most pronounced when
high yield rice varieties were planted. When
the amount of inter-subak synchronised
cropping in the model was dialled up, pest
levels fell and rice harvests improved—but
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when it reached a certain threshold the pest
control benefit was counteracted by a marked increase in water stress. This
was caused by the corresponding increase in watershed-spanning spikes of
simultaneous water demand that occurred as rice cropping schedules aligned.
At this point, the physical infrastructure of the irrigation system could no
longer meet peak water requirements. Increasing synchronisation further
only resulted in parched and less productive—albeit largely pest-free—rice
crops. The researchers found that the intermediate range of synchronisation
between these two extremes reliably produced bountiful harvests that were
remarkably tolerant of environmental fluctuations. And when the team
mapped model outputs onto diagrams of watersheds marked with water
temple locations, another fact jumped out: this synchronisation sweet spot
occurred at the scale of coordination overseen by the larger, supra-local
regional water temples.
Lansing’s anthropological research showed how this regional coordination
worked at the human level. The regular meetings of subak leaders hosted by
the regional temples allowed information on water allocations and planting
schedules to “flow uphill”—and then, back downhill when the subak leaders
returned to their own temples and passed on other subaks’ decisions to their
members—alongside, of course, tirtha to indicate Dewi Danu’s approval.
Water temples thus functioned as conduits for information exchange at both
local and regional scales, allowing farmers’ planting schedules to coordinate
at multiple levels across the whole watershed-wide network.
Lansing later realised that both types of analysis—game theory and computer
simulation model—show that the Balinese subak system approaches a point
of maximum theoretical efficiency known in mathematics and economics as
‘Pareto Optimality’, or ‘Pareto Efficiency’. Pareto optimality describes a
situation where no change can be made to a system that would make
someone better off, without making at least one other person worse off. It is
generally considered to be an idealised, abstract state. Economists find it
useful as a theoretical construct, but don’t expect to see Pareto-optimal
systems operating in the real world. Yet the researchers’ findings suggested
that the original Balinese subak system came remarkably close to achieving
Pareto optimality.
When Lansing’s team looked at rice harvest data across the whole expanse of
a watershed—in both real and simulated Bali—they noticed that regardless of
whether they were located upstream or downstream, cooperating farmers
achieved very similar rice yields at harvest time. While economists are keen
to point out that there is nothing intrinsically fair or equal about Paretoefficient systems—the efficiency relates to the productivity of the whole
system, not the equal allocation of resources to participants—in practice,
Bali’s subak system reliably generates similar-sized harvests for all
participating farmers. This meant that growers were free from the insidious
effect of rice harvest envy—which was important in a system that depended
so heavily on cooperation.
Kremer’s computer simulation
model was compelling. After an
appropriate period of testing, the
team judged they had the evidence
they needed. Later in 1988, in a
large meeting room in the main
government Irrigation Office in
Denpasar, the capital of Bali,
Lansing and Kremer presented
BaliMod to a gathering of rapt
Indonesian officials and water
engineers. The model was built with
three language settings—English,
Indonesian, and Balinese—and
boasted a state-of-the-art graphical
Example output of the BaliMod software
user interface based on ‘HyperCard’ software, a precursor of twenty-first
century web browsers. Blocky pixelated pagodas represented the temples,
while jagged lines traced out branching rivers, irrigation channels and
watersheds. Using dropdown boxes, users could change the values of
significant parameters such as rainfall and pest levels, and run their
simulations.
After a lengthy session—Kremer demonstrating, Lansing translating—the
researchers paused to take questions. It turned out that the Indonesian
irrigation engineers were working on a project to establish shared cropping
across subak areas, but were finding it impossible to accurately measure
water needs by looking at individual subaks. When they realised that all the
subaks in a watershed functioned within a single connected network, this
suddenly made sense. Ultimately, they understood that there was no need for
a government department to negotiate cropping patterns and manage water
flows on a subak-by-subak basis, because the system was already selfregulating.
As the implications of Lansing and Kremer’s demonstration sunk in,
something shifted and clicked in the depths of Indonesian bureaucracy. This
time, it was no longer one lone American anthropologist repeating the same
old line about traditional irrigation practices being better than modern
agricultural methods. Now Lansing had a theory, plausible mechanisms, and
hard observational data—not to mention support from a growing group of
both Balinese and foreign scientists, and a shiny new computer model. This
time, it was enough.
The irrigation officials asserted that the Public Works Department, the
Agriculture Department, and the local tax office needed computers,
presumably to help them understand the model’s implications on their
respective spheres of influence. They were less convinced by Lansing’s
suggestion that farmers and water temple priests themselves might find the
model helpful or interesting. Nonetheless, the presentation left the authorities
with much to think about.
The slopes of Mount Batur, one of Bali’s two active volcanoes, are cloaked
with massed tiers of lush rice paddies and studded with shrines and temples
dedicated to the goddess Dewi Danu. But the mountain’s significance for rice
farmers extends beyond these slopes, and all across the island. Inside the
volcano’s caldera, 1000 metres above sea level, is a crater lake—Lake Batur—
and above this, on the crater rim, is Bali’s supreme water temple: Pura Ulun
Danu Batur. The temple site comprises a complex of walled compounds and
pagodas, and is one of the island’s most important religious sites. It is the
literal and symbolic pinnacle of the water temple system. Every year during
the rainy season, at a time dictated by the rising of the Pleiades constellation
in the night sky, local farmers and water temple priests undertake a
pilgrimage to the temple to make offerings and receive tirtha from the everwatchful water goddess. According to local mythology, Dewi Danu herself
dwells in the usually placid waters inside the caldera, as Bali’s very own Lady
of the Lake.
The supreme water temple, Pura Ulun Dana Batur
A few days after their presentation at the Irrigation Office, and despite
government scepticism regarding priestly interest in their computer model,
Lansing and Kremer lugged a bulky beige carry case to the temple at the top
of the volcano. When they arrived at the temple they were met by a cluster of
temple priests, including the Jero Gde, the high priest. The visitors removed
their shoes and sat cross-legged under the eaves of an open-walled pagoda
while they explained their intentions. Inside the case was a keyboard, mouse,
and boxy base unit with integrated cathode ray tube display—a Macintosh SE
personal computer.
Lansing and Kremer had not mentioned their intended volcano visit to the
Denpasar authorities. But the idea of presenting BaliMod to the government
bureaucrats without also showing it to the water temple priests and farmers
was unthinkable. It was their irrigation system, after all. But before the
researchers had time to set up the equipment and begin their demonstration,
more visitors arrived. Somewhat awkwardly, they comprised a small group of
government officials.
If any embarrassment ensued from this potentially tense situation, it was
quickly smoothed over. Despite their initial misgivings, the bureaucrats in the
Irrigation Office had independently concluded that a discussion about
BaliMod with the water temple priesthood might be beneficial for all
concerned, after all. Unsanctioned though it was, the presence of the
American researchers turned out to be a happy coincidence, as it provided an
opportunity for everyone to see and discuss BaliMod, and its implications,
together.
After the demonstration, someone asked the Jero Gde if he thought the
model might be useful to the Balinese priests and rice growers. It was a loaded
question, and one that Kremer—not wanting to unduly influence the people
at the centre of the system he was studying—had so far been careful to avoid.
The Jero Gde did not answer immediately. He looked away from the
gathering, as if to collect his thoughts. Then he replied, “Yes, this could be
useful for showing farmers how their subak is part of a larger network. It will
help them see how everything works together.”
Not long afterwards, the Indonesian authorities started the process of
selectively reversing their agricultural policies of the previous decade. To the
farmers’ great relief, they allowed water temples to coordinate rice planting
and irrigation schedules once again. Now the question was how long it would
take the system to recover—or if it would at all.
•
•
•
Meanwhile, Lansing restlessly probed the ramifications of what was now
known, in the academic literature, as the Lansing-Kremer model of Balinese
irrigation. After presenting the team’s findings in a lecture at the Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico in 1992, a question from an audience member got
the no-longer-quite-so-young anthropologist thinking. The question was
about whether the Balinese subak system displayed a property known as
emergence. In systems science, emergence is the phenomenon that occurs
when a system starts to display features
that its individual components do not
display on their own; for example, a
single termite is mostly harmless and
ineffectual, but a colony of termites can
build vast, complex mounds with
ventilation and cooling structures. In
other words, emergence is what happens
when a whole becomes greater than the
sum of its parts.
This, Lansing decided, was an interesting
question—and one he could investigate
by going back to BaliMod. He designed
his own simulation experiment that
tweaked the model, and the method of its
Lansing and Kremer in Bali ca. 1997
execution, in several important ways.
Rather than use realistic starting values for the model parameters, he would
begin with completely random initial cropping patterns. Then, after the first
year, he would let each subak decide its own cropping schedule for the next
growing season using a simple decision rule: to adopt the rice planting
strategy of the most successful of their four closest neighbours. If a subak’s
own harvest was better than any of its neighbours, it would retain its current
cropping schedule for the next year. He would then run the simulation for
multiple consecutive seasons, and monitor the outcome over time. When
Lansing discussed the idea with Kremer, his friend was cautious. Both men
considered it likely that the simulation would result in an indefinite chaos of
disorganised and inefficient rice production, with subaks flipping crazily
from one cropping pattern to another.
But it was order, not chaos, that emerged across the grid of simulated subaks.
After wild initial oscillations pest levels, irrigation flows and harvests
stabilised relatively quickly—in as few as ten growing seasons, or five
computer years of traditional Balinese double rice cropping. And the patterns
re-emerged no matter how vigorously the researchers varied the starting
conditions. In fact, using this type of numerical analysis—an aptly named hill
climbing algorithm—it was almost impossible not to grow a stable water
temple-subak network. Although real world subak planting decisions were
undoubtedly more complex than the simple approximation used in the hill
climbing analysis, there was no reason to suppose that the fundamental
dynamics were any different. After all, the results remained consistent with
observed patterns of rice cultivation on Bali.
Now, looking across whole watersheds and multiple growing seasons, the
researchers could see patches of synchronised and unsynchronised rice
cultivation flip and roil across the hills in response to shifting conditions, like
murmurations of starlings or shoals of fish recoiling from a predator. They
saw a dynamic system capable of adapting to changes in the environment,
while continuing to deliver optimal harvests. And they saw a system that was
not just self-regulating, but self-organising. It was as if the hills were alive with
the sound of subaks.
Pulling everything together, Lansing arrived at a startling conclusion. He
proposed that Bali’s thousand-year old irrigation and rice cultivation
network forms a phenomenon known to systems scientists as a complex
adaptive system. Such entities comprise multiple interacting, purposeful agents
that follow simple rules, yet spontaneously organise into complex, selfsustaining systems exhibiting features independent of their constituent
agents—in other words, they exhibit the emergence much studied and
discussed at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Such systems are
mathematically self-similar, in that they function in the same way at different
scales, and their underlying dynamics are non-linear, so that a small
butterfly-like change to an input (for example, diverting a small proportion
of irrigation flow from one set of rice terraces to another) has the potential to
result in a disproportionately hurricane-esque output (for example, a cascade
of altered cropping patterns further down the watershed). But as their name
suggests, such systems grow and respond to changes in their environment in a
coordinated way to maintain their structure, function, and identity. Although
the underlying dynamics may be chaotic, these adaptive responses are
usually sufficient to keep the system within a constantly shifting but
predictable range of potential states known in nonlinear dynamics as a strange
attractor.
The theoretical framework underlying complex adaptive systems, often
termed ‘complexity science’, is relatively well established in the physical and
biological sciences. Individual cells and organisms, power grids, brains,
immune systems, social insect colonies, and the internet have all been
described in these terms. But complexity theory is less recognised in the
social sciences, and scientists and academics have not always been
comfortable with the underlying principles. One well-known biologist,
writing in 1995, opined, “I have a general feeling of unease when
contemplating complex systems dynamics. Its devotees are practising factfree science. A fact for them is, at best, the outcome of a computer
simulation; it is rarely a fact about the world.”
So when Lansing and his colleagues
published their theories about Bali’s
subak system in the academic
literature, the green shoots of their
ideas met a flood of scepticism.
Much of the criticism circled
around one unaddressed issue: how
it all started. If the subak system
really was a bottom-up, emergent
phenomenon, how and why had it
emerged in the first place—given
Pura Ulun Danu Bratan
that top-down hierarchies are such
a feature of human societies in general, and Balinese Hindu culture in
particular?
And in any case, there were some top-down elements in Lansing’s proposed
set-up. Namely, the supreme water temple on Mount Batur. Perhaps the high
temple priests were issuing irrigation instructions to the regional water
temples below, and perhaps the regional priests—operating as a kind of
spiritual-hydrological middle management—cascaded these instructions to
their subak-level underlings further downstream. In short, the critics argued,
it was entirely possible that proper inspection of the island would reveal a
humming command-and-control irrigation bureaucracy.
Yet Lansing’s extensive research into practices at the local and regional water
temples failed to find anything of the sort. While the temples facilitated
information sharing and irrigation scheduling, there was no evidence that the
priests ever told the farmers what to do. Meanwhile, his investigations of the
supreme water temple on Mount Batur dispensed with the notion of an
autocratic high priest or high temple bureaucracy orchestrating water flows
from atop the volcano. It turned out that the Jero Gde exerted no formal
authority over lower level temples, subaks, or individual farmers. Where the
Jero Gde did wield considerable ‘soft power’ was in bestowing approval on the
founding of new subaks, and in smoothing water-related disputes between
existing subaks. The high priest’s primary means of resolving arguments was
to appeal to the farmers’ sense of fairness, and their devotion to Dewi Danu.
And Dewi Danu wanted everyone to share nicely.
It was still entirely possible that the autonomous aspects of the subak system
were down to good design rather than spontaneous self-organisation. At some
point in the distant past, an enlightened king or master engineer might have
built the irrigation system and set it running according to a pre-ordained
master plan. This made sense on an intuitive level—anyone inspecting the
intricately-engineered irrigation works might be forgiven for rejecting the
idea that it could all just happen by itself.
Yet historical records suggest otherwise. Until the Dutch colonised the island
in the nineteenth century, and starting from about the same time as rice
agriculture began one thousand years prior, Bali was ruled by a number of
regional kings known as rajahs. Inscriptions and surviving written accounts
from residents and visitors indicate that the rajahs took a hands-off approach
to irrigation. While they readily encouraged expansion of rice cultivation on
the island, and hence their tax base, there was no evidence that the aristocracy
undertook any actual planning or construction. Everything was done by the
subaks, for the subaks. When the Dutch conquered the island, they too left
the subaks largely to their own devices for the same revenue-related reasons.
Despite having their own ancient democratic community-led water
management organisations back home in the Netherlands—the flood defence
co-operatives known as ‘water boards’—the Dutch colonisers never grasped
the networked, self-organising nature of the subaks under their nominal
control. And when the new nation of Indonesia absorbed the island after
World War 2, the Java-based central authorities maintained the same
approach—until, that is, they implemented the Green Revolution.
In the late 1990s Lansing was able to gather field evidence to support his selforganising subak hypothesis. Drawing on earlier work by a Balinese
archaeologist named Wayan Ardika, Lansing and an American archaeologist
named Vernon Scarborough undertook a small-scale investigation of one of
the earliest identified sites of inland agriculture on Bali—a depression based
around two natural springs high on the side of Mount Batur, at a place named
Sebatu. Ardika had found inscriptions and burial sites nearby indicating that
rice cultivation had started sometime within the first millennium CE. In
keeping with the subak pattern replicated across rural Bali today, the zone of
cultivation centred around an ancient water temple built directly over the
springs.
Careful mapping and analysis of soil cores in the area indicated that over the
course of some five hundred years, the ancient farmers gradually extended
the area of wet rice cultivation downstream by building an increasingly
intricate system of tunnels, aqueducts, and canals. The system eventually
reached several kilometres in length. The soil cores revealed that where newly
built channels opened onto hillsides earmarked for rice production,
irrigation flows carried volcanic sediments onto the slopes below. These
sediments flattened the land in a spreading arc around the outlet, providing a
level and nutrient-rich base for the new rice terraces. Wherever the
underlying contours of the land permitted such sediment deposition, the
cultivable area could be extended by small teams of farmers engaged in
continuous trial-and-error microengineering—a gradual, incremental
evolution.
Lansing and his colleagues concluded that what drove the process, at least in
part, was Bali’s precipitous volcanic topography. The multiple ridges that
splay out from the island’s peaks force water to flow downhill in numerous
small rivers and streams. When the first farmers arrived in each steep-sided
new valley, they had to tailor their rice cultivation and irrigation methods to
these hyper-local hydrological conditions. Each group started out semiisolated by the terrain, encouraging local development by local farmers. As
these small irrigation cooperatives grew in both number and extent, they
began to link up and apply their hard-learned cooperative methods to their
dealings with each other. In this stepwise way the processes scaled up, and a
comprehensive island-spanning system of emergent water management
settled into its later form. Inscriptions show they adopted the ‘subak’ moniker
from around the 11th century.
It remains unclear exactly how and when
Dewi Danu and her priests stepped into the
frame. But it is easy to speculate how the
rituals, traditions, and guidance provided
by the temples might reinforce the
collaborative approach the system requires.
Lansing’s later research indicates that there
is something intrinsically fragile about how
subaks function. As in all democracies,
large and small, much about the successful
operation of a subak depends on the
political skills, personality, and integrity of
its elected leader. Poor governance could
place the smooth functioning of the
subak—and ultimately farmers’ rice
A statue of Dewi Danu
harvests and livelihoods—under threat.
Still, if some subaks worked less well than
others, or even became “failed subaks” for a time, the communities’ collective
traditions usually asserted themselves sooner or later and cooperation was
restored. And as long as only a few subaks struggled in this way at any one
time within any one watershed, the irrigation network as a whole remained
resilient.
•
•
•
From the late 1980s, Lansing and his team were gratified to see social and
environmental stresses in rural Bali start to ease, as water temples resumed
their role in coordinating irrigation. Cropping patterns again synchronised
and de-synchronised from one growing season to the next according to
environmental conditions and cues from neighbouring subaks, rather than
diktats from central government or development agencies. Pesticide
requirements in water temple-controlled subaks fell almost immediately—
within a single growing cycle—with no loss of rice yields. Meanwhile,
downstream farmers’ complaints about fluctuations in water supply dried up.
Yet the picture is not entirely rosy. Use of artificial fertilisers continues to be
widespread on Bali. The Indonesian oil and gas industry facilitates cheap
fertiliser production, and many rice farmers see no reason not to try to boost
their yields; particularly when high yield rice varieties remain dominant in
most rice growing regions. Meanwhile, urbanisation and tourism-related
development constitute a continued dual threat to the subak system, as they
diminish the already constrained land area available on the island for rice
cultivation, and tempt farmers away from subak life with the promise of
better paid jobs in the towns and coastal resorts.
But an important lesson was learned. Ultimately Bali’s Green Revolution
provided the sturdiest strand of evidence for the emergent, self-organising
nature of the island’s rice growing landscape. The effect of Bali’s Massive
Guidance program on the subak system was, Lansing realised, essentially the
same as running the hill-climbing version of the computer model simulation
in reverse. It turned out the Indonesian authorities were pre-emptively
conducting their own extremely effective real-world verification of the
Lansing-Kremer model of Balinese rice cultivation—albeit inadvertently, and
at considerable cost to the Balinese people.
•
•
•
After the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace concluded his brief trip to
Bali in 1856, he continued his travels through the Malay Archipelago. Two
years later, he became unwell with malaria and was confined to a hut on the
remote island of Ternate, east of Sulawesi. In the midst of a fever dream, he
came to a realisation: species develop and change over the millenia because
only the fittest individuals survive to pass on advantageous characteristics to
their offspring. As soon as his fever broke, he outlined his idea in a letter and
sent it to a fellow naturalist in England whom he greatly admired—a man
named Charles Robert Darwin. Darwin had been struck by the same idea 20
years previously, but up to this point had only shared his speculations with
his closest friends. Wallace’s letter gave Darwin a much-needed push, and in
the summer of 1858 the two naturalists jointly published a composite paper of
their writings entitled “On the tendency of Species
to form Varieties.” Despite this underwhelming
title, the paper contained all the key elements of
what became the groundbreaking—and initially
highly controversial—Theory of Evolution by Natural
Selection. Today, both men are credited as codiscoverers of evolution, but after Darwin fleshed
out the theory in his landmark On the Origin of
Species the following year, Wallace’s role faded into
the background of history.
Like species undergoing natural selection,
complex adaptive systems iterate and adapt to
changes in their surroundings. They adapt to their
environment—and they shape their environment,
too. Perhaps, in some intuitive way, Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace ca. 1895 (Wikipedia)
recognised the subtle signatures of such processes
when he gazed at Bali’s rice terraces during his short stay on the island. Even
then, his mind must have been arranging and rearranging the lines of
evidence that would coalesce into the momentous theory he and Darwin
presented to the world two years later. Yet his musings on Bali’s exceptionally
productive rice paddies remained nothing more. He never formulated a clear
expression, never mind an explanation, of what was so special about the
island’s landscape.
Today, complexity theory lacks the widespread recognition and application
of its close evolutionary cousin, despite inheriting many of the same
principles. Lansing and Kremer are confident that complex dynamics similar
to those of Bali’s subak system will, in time, be revealed in other agricultural
systems across the world—and, in all likelihood, in other types of social
systems, too. In his own work, Lansing has uncovered similar ‘islands of
order’ in the distribution of genetically distinct populations speaking
different languages. And in 2017, he was one of a team of researchers
proposing the use of satellite technology to screen for the presence of
complex adaptive systems in landscapes around the world. When the team
used satellite images to measure the overall areas of rice fields at each stage of
cultivation, they found that the resulting spread of sizes follows a non-linear
pattern known as a power law distribution. While power laws are hardly unique
to complex adaptive systems, they function as an indicator of ‘connectedness’
within a frequency distribution—and so might signal the presence of such
dynamics. To date, however, scientists have not conclusively identified subaklike adaptive dynamics in any other agricultural system. Meanwhile,
researchers continue to explore the relevance of complexity theory to other
fields of human endeavour, such as economics, healthcare, and politics.
The Balinese subak system’s unique status was recognised internationally in
2012, when the United Nations agency UNESCO placed it on their World
Heritage List— an accolade awarded only to sites or landscapes of
‘outstanding universal value’. UNESCO’s listing describes the subak system as
a manifestation of the centuries-old Balinese Tri Hita Karana philosophy,
which identifies three components of human wellbeing: harmony of spirit,
harmony of the human world, and harmony of the environment. This
philosophy neatly lines up with the principal elements of the adaptive, selfregulating network Lansing and his team spent decades investigating: the
facilitatory role of the water temples, the democratic human traditions of the
subaks themselves, and the ecosystem dynamics of the landscape as a whole.
In this way the World Heritage listing acknowledges that the Balinese people
were aware of the shape, if not the detail, of Lansing’s findings all along—even
if they initially lacked the capability to express them using differential
equations within a computer simulation.
This might explain the reaction of the Jero Gde to the question about
BaliMod’s usefulness—the priests readily acknowledged the relevance of the
Lansing-Kremer subak irrigation model, because they recognised its
consilience with their own understanding of the world. The Jero Gde’s reply
betrayed the water temple priests’ preoccupation with reminding their
farmer flock that “everything works together.” Indeed, the Jero Gde expressed
an as-yet scientifically unverified extension to this belief during an informal
meeting that took place some time after Lansing and Kremer first
demonstrated their model at the supreme water temple. Kremer had
expressed concern about their intrusion into the rituals and daily lives of the
priests and the farmers, thinking they might be considered disrespectful in
some way. “Jim,” the Jero Gde reassured him, “you don’t for a moment
imagine that your participation in this project was by chance alone?”
Perhaps part of the problem with
self-organising systems—and part
of the reason their dynamics are so
hard to identify—is that they fade
into the background when they
function normally, becoming nearinvisible to people living
contentedly within them. Until, that
is, something goes massively wrong.
Some form of ‘higher’ knowledge
of the system might indeed be
useful in anticipating and avoiding
Lansing, Jero Gde, and Kremer ca. 2011
such disasters. Priests and computer
programs alike may have a role in avoiding the kind of outcomes described in
that well-known Joni Mitchell song from 1970. After all, it’s much better to
know what you’ve got before it’s gone.
9 Comments
Sources
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Amazon: Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power
in the Engineered Landscape of Bali*
Amazon: Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali*
Aamzon: Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling
for the Social Sciences*
Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks
The fundamentals of complex adaptive systems.
The Malay Archipelago.
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Writing: Matt Castle
Editing: C.H. Hung and Alan Bellows
Narration: Jennifer Lee Noonan
Sound Design: Alan Bellows
Additional: Our thanks to Stephen Lansing and James Kremer
for their access to articles, images, and other resources, and
their willingness to answer endless questions.
Matt Castle is a writer and contributing editor for Damn
Interesting, and not quite an anagram of 'Clam Taste'.
Tension
of Circuits
Copyright © 28 March 2023 All Rights Reserved. Last updated
03 April 2023. If you wish to repurpose this copyrighted work,
you must obtain permission.
9 COMMENTS
I've always wanted to be the first in something.
Posted 28 March 2023 at 09:34 am
First?
Jared
Posted 28 March 2023 at 02:56 pm
Second. Amazing article, keep up the good work
JarvisLoop
Posted 28 March 2023 at 05:59 pm
Mr. Castle:
I am always in awe of those who can write extended yet interesting non-fiction.
Excellent work.
Mike
Posted 29 March 2023 at 05:46 am
Thanks, very interesting
Heavy D
Posted 01 April 2023 at 12:07 am
Another great article by the DI team; thank you for your dedication to
excellence!
Pardel Lux
Posted 02 April 2023 at 09:55 am
Interesting indeed. I wonder whether Mr. Lansing has heard of the Water
Tribunal of the plain of Valencia, in Spain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Tribunal_of_the_plain_of_Valencia
I think it is not as complex as the Bali example, but it may well fit into his
investigations of water sharing and managing. And who knows, perhaps it
shows even emergent properties too!
Matt Castle
Posted 03 April 2023 at 03:13 pm
Pardel, many thanks for that link – fascinating!
I don’t know if Stephen Lansing is aware of that particular institution but I’d
certainly never heard of it. Though there are numerous examples of resource
management institutions/systems, many water-related, dating back centuries,
and in many parts of the world. And on the face of it, many seem to be good
candidates for demonstrating emergent properties. The Dutch water boards
mentioned in this (and a previous) DI article are another example. Such
systems have been studied by numerous other researchers over the years –
including of course the late Elinor Ostrom, the economist/political scientist
who won a Nobel prize in 2009 for her research into common-pool resource
management systems – aka ‘the Commons’.
As you suggest, it seems demonstrating the emergence – the complexity – is
the hard bit: identifying the key parameters and functional relationships,
mathematising them, and showing the resulting model outputs to be consistent
with real world observations.
On the subject of stuff I omitted in the interests of avoiding article-bloat, the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization website has a great list of ‘heritage
agricultural systems’, many of which seem similarly good candidates. And in
Asia, they often seem to involve irrigated, terraced rice fields. See the Dong
Rice Fish Duck system for example:
https://www.fao.org/giahs/giahsaroundtheworld/designated-sites/asia-and-thepacific/dongs-rice-fish-duck-system/en/
Romar
Posted 20 April 2023 at 09:56 am
Thanks for a very interesting article. And any pest which attacks grains can
certainly be called a “cereal offender”
Morgan Jones
Posted 20 April 2023 at 06:18 pm
Great Article as always!
• END OF COMMENTS •
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