A Tale from Candi Dasa, Bali

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

^{Credit: Rising Tide North America}

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far – quickly.”

– Al Gore

“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”

– JFK (taking liberties with Dante – h/t to Marcus Graly)

Twelve thousand climate delegates descended on one of my favorite places in the world last week, the Indonesian island of Bali, a place that actually measures up to a good portion of its reputation as Paradise. In my opinion, anyway. Some of the delegates didn’t apparently see things that way, and grudgingly shed their business attire for batik shirts when they discovered their complaints about the lack of enough air conditioning in the pricey tourist and conference region known as Nusa Dua were not going to change the situation. How can anybody properly discuss climate change with sweat pouring down his back like the gushing moulins of Greenland’s melting ice?

If air conditioning is part of the must-have for any place you call Paradise, then you understand the predicament of those delegates. In the United States, if you want air conditioning installed in your home or office, you just need to find a heating and cooling company and they will do the rest. Simple as that. But Bali doesn’t have the electrical capacity to handle the load of “enough air conditioning” for tourists, much less the population at large. Indeed, all of Indonesia – population 235 million – has 35,000 megawatts of installed electrical power. The United States, with 300 million people – has nearly 1,100,000 installed megawatts.

Bali powers its air conditioning and everything else with electricity delivered via undersea cable from next-door Java. The plant that generates this power burns coal. Less than a year ago, the Ministry of Finance in Jakarta approved a plan to lift the country’s electrical capacity by nearly a third – 10,000 installed megawatts – by 2010. Including at least six more coal burners, three of which are now under construction.

Since 2000, in the United States, 185 coal-burning electricity-generating plants have been proposed. Ten are operating, more than 30 are under construction, and nearly 100 more are somewhere in the development stream.

Worldwide, since the turn of the century, some 850 coal-fueled electrical plants have been proposed in the developed and developing world. Plants that, besides creating other troubles, add to the burgeoning atmospheric greenhouse gases that the dripping delegates in Nusa Dua are in town to discuss how to control. While their work is only preliminary – merely setting the stage for negotiations that will run through 2009  – ultimately the nations they represent will have to decide whether they want to cut through the conundrums and the bullshit and take action.

Because, contrary to Al Gore’s remark, in this matter of global warming, nobody can go quickly alone – we are all, rich and poor, developed and developing, riding on what the early environmental movement so rightly labeled, spaceship earth. It all comes down to what we are willing to do. How much future GDP, how much consumption, how much comfort we’re willing to surrender to deal with what is the greatest human-caused crisis since our ancestors first meandered out of Africa 100 millennia ago.

For those of us sitting in the developed world sipping cooled or warmed drinks in a heated room, running our computers and firing up the horseless carriage whenever we choose, a big question underlying what is being discussed in Bali is whether we’re willing to give up some portion of our prosperity so that the kids of the maid at the spa in Nusa Dua can have air conditioning and a computer and convenient transportation. For Balinese – and Chadians, Amazonians, and rural Chinese – the question is what portion will they yield of their dreams of being megaconsumers, just like the Americans, Europeans and Japanese they see on their televisions.

Big questions for us 6.5 billion rank-and-file human beings is how much we’re willing to accept that 9 billion humans are soon going to be living on spaceship earth unless attitudes change, and how much are we willing to invest in changing those attitudes? Big questions for the human ruling class is how much it is willing to back off from its millennia-old privileges and move boldly but humbly to do something benefiting everyone.

Big questions for Americans is whether we’re willing to surrender some sovereignty to a treaty almost everyone else has ratified that commits us to take action. And how much we’re willing to help negotiate a just and visionary new treaty that requires of us to take far tougher action. Are we willing to be a good faith player and a good role model in trying to solve or ameliorate this global problem, or continue to be an obstacle?

Some people think none of these questions really matter. Their key question is how to stop what they view as intransigently stupid opposition to what they see as the main global warming solution – a 10,000-fold expansion of projects such as the floating nuclear power station proposed for anchoring off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

That’s hardly the whole list of questions. There are also other big ones, peripheral to, but concomitant with how we approach to global warming.

For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released two-and-a-half years ago noted that 60 percent of earth’s ecosystems are being used at a rate exceeding their capacity, and that the growing global population is going to make this worse. Here are some excerpts:

Ecosystems and Human Well-Being

There is established but incomplete evidence that changes being made in ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of nonlinear changes in ecosystems (including accelerating, abrupt, and potentially irreversible changes), with important consequences for human well-being. …

The degradation of ecosystem services is harming many of the world’s poorest people and is sometimes the principal factor causing poverty. …

The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for their services can be partially met under some scenarios that the MA considered, but these involve significant changes in policies, institutions, and practices that are not currently under way. …

Ecosystem degradation can rarely be reversed without actions that address the negative effects or enhance the positive effects of one or more of the five indirect drivers of change: population change (including growth and migration), change in economic activity (including economic growth, disparities in wealth, and trade patterns), sociopolitical factors (including factors ranging from the presence of conflict to public participation in decision-making), cultural factors, and technological change.

Ultimately, as the government heavyweights arrive in Nusa Dua, the truly key questions to ask – the answers to which form the crucible in which all the answers to all the other key questions must be tested – is whether our political leaders are serious about going far and going quickly on global warming. And whether we – Americans, Chinese, Balinese – are serious about making them get serious if they fall short.

With that in mind, let me recommend that one climate delegate from each of the 188 nations in attendance take an hour’s trip eastward from Nusa Dua along the coast to Candi Dasa. Pronounced chán-di-dassa, Balinese for “Ten Temples,” it’s that little dot on the eastern horn of crescent Amuk Bay about two-thirds of the way to Bali’s easternmost point at Amed.  

When the tide comes in at Candi Dasa, the concrete sea wall causes a rent in the water. At night the sea wall can look as black and solid as granite, and in the early misty morning light, pearly as a shell. By day, it is a blackened, rippling scar, an ugly reminder of what it replaced.

For divers and tourists eager to escaping the madding crowds, the white sand beach at Candi Dasa was a hidden paradise until the early 1980s, when developers saw the potential to turn the eastern part of Bali into a lucrative enterprise along the lines of the five-star hotel chains that claimed Nusa Dua a decade before. But Nusa Dua was planned with foreign investment hotel money, and the land was dry, not good for farming. Nusa Dua was the perfect shape and size for the kind of luxury resort where pampered guests prefer isolation from the native population, premium service and exotic, but familiar food. Nusa Dua was carefully planned for that crowd. Today, some Nusa Dua hotels even plant rice crops purely for the esthetic beauty of the green and golden stalks bending in the wind.  

Candi Dasa was a different story. It had always been a fishing village, with little farms, some rice, peanuts, and coconut groves. Surrounding it were older, smaller villages like Bug-Bug, some of them with cultural roots predating the Hindus. The fishermen subsisted nicely with what they took from the sea, and what they grew on the shore and in the nearby mountains. Then came the promise of M-O-N-E-Y. Candi Dasa would be the next Nusa Dua, everyone said. It was going to be big, and exclusive, and even Balinese people, not just foreign investors, could make a lot of cash.

Those that owned land next to the shore sold it for what they thought were incredible prices. New enterprises opened up that seemed to promise a good livelihood for even those who had no property to sell.

To build the hotels, the developers needed cement, and for that they needed lime. Best local lime source? The coral beds that made up the reef. Balinese who had never held jobs outside of family fishing or farming or handicrafts now could earn tens of thousands of rupiahs each day filling baskets with coral, which was free for the taking. One-cubic-foot basket could be traded for the equivalent of 12 cents.

In their narrow boats, lit with hurricane lamps, the villagers paddled or walked out as far as they could at low tide, sometimes at 2 a.m., to pick the coral.

In this way, by hand, basket by basket, and by the villagers themselves, the reef was destroyed, and with it the white sand beach. Unattenuated by the reef, the waves ate away at the shore, and what was once a 2-foot drop to the beach now became a 12-foot cliff.  

The new plan to save the shore was also what destroyed the big tourist development. Pillions and piers were built every 50 meters to hold back the sea. The wrecked reef, reconstituted as concrete octagons, holds back the sea once again. But the beach is gone and will, it is said, take 25-30 years of natural restoration before it extends as far as it did in 1985. Although there are a couple of luxurious four-star accommodations with their air-conditioned bungalows and infinity tools, the really big hotels never materialized.

The fishing isn’t as good as it used to be either. People who sold their land – much of it now unused and held by absentees – have long since spent the money and their previous livelihoods have disappeared. Only about two-thirds of the Balinese of Candi Dasa and its surrounds today have electricity.

In talking their talk and making their deals about the future of our entire planet, is it too much to hope, too naive to ask that the delegates keep the experience of Candi Dasa in mind?