Water for life

It is only proper that "Water for Life" has been picked as the slogan for the annual commemoration of Earth Day in Indonesia. Water, of course, has been a familiar feature of the Indonesian landscape for as long as there have been people inhabiting the land. Every Indonesian school child knows that seas make up three-fourths of the country's national territory. Streams and rivers flow across fertile plains, and lakes dot the landscape in many regions of this archipelago.

This prevalence of water over land is probably the reason why there is no equivalent in the Indonesian language for the word "fatherland". Indonesians refer to their native country simply as their "land and water", or tanah air. Indeed, according to a recent Worldwatch Institute survey, Indonesia, together with only five other countries in the world -- Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia and Russia -- account for half of the world's total renewable freshwater supplies. In short, many Indonesians consider themselves fortunate to be living in a country thus blessed with water aplenty.

Unfortunately, however, human behavior over the past several decades has rendered the notion of water in abundance outdated, especially in the more densely populated areas of Indonesia. Overpopulation and overbuilding, overexploitation of resources, denudation of the country's forest cover, mismanagement and plain greed for monetary gain have drastically lowered groundwater levels in many areas. As a result, rainwater that decades ago would have seeped safely into the soil to replenish rivers, lakes, irrigation ditches and wells, now runs in devastating torrents off the surface of the land, triggering floods and landslides.

In many urban areas, clean water is no longer free and has become a luxury tradable commodity that most people among the poor can scarcely afford. Legal limitations on the tapping of groundwater for private use do exist in urban centers such as Jakarta, but appear to have little or no effect at all on the behavior of the well-to-do. The rich continue to drill deeper and deeper wells to access the ever deeper groundwater. And while the rich can afford to meet they daily needs for clean water and fill their swimming pools, the poor have to scrape together whatever money they can to buy clean water from street vendors.

The new bill on water use that was recently passed by the House of Representatives promises little in the way of ensuring a fairer distribution of that most vital support for life -- clean water. Many observers fear that the new law will fail to ensure that the free use of water will remain a basic right for Indonesia's farmers, who make up the backbone of the country's economy, while at the same time improving the efficiency of water use on farmland. Essentially, as they see it, the new law is bound to turn clean water into a tradable commodity that will benefit mainly business concerns.

In the meantime, the importance of properly managing the demand for clean water makes it possible for us to forget that maintaining a healthy ecosystem to support natural water resources is no less important -- indeed, probably even more important as it involves keeping the sources intact. It seems currently to be a scientifically accepted fact that a healthy ecosystem requires not only a minimum quantity and quality of water, but also a pattern of water flow that is close to its natural flow regime. Many such ecosystems have in the past decades been destroyed by human intervention in the form of dams, reservoirs and other engineering works.

Obviously, then, it will take a good deal of effort to ensure not only that clean water, which is a basic right of every human being, is distributed fairly and equitably, but also to that our life supporting water resources remain healthy and intact.