The system self-organized! In just ten years within the model the balanced system seen in Bali emerged on its own.

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. “Plant as often as possible” was a formula for disaster. The traditional synchronized planting is far more effective against the pests than pesticides. 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.ĭiscussion 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. 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). The universal problem in irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no incentive to be generous to downstream users. Meanwhile Lansing and his colleagues were teasing apart what made the old water temple system work so well. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever decreasing effect.

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. When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything went wrong. 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. The intensely productive terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the traditional Balinese rice growing practices. Hidden order in the Balinese 'religion of water'

I have lived one thousand years movie