Water for life
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decades has rendered the notion of water in abundance outdated,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.