Wherever you go in Bali, someone is always industriously sweeping. The roadside is swept, the garden is swept, the lawn is swept. Tiny girls in neat school uniforms carry twig brooms to school with their books. An old Ibu painstakingly sweeps together every leaf from in front of her house, then sets the pile alight. It appears to be a harmless, even virtuous activity.
In reality, the Balinese are sweeping away and destroying precious topsoil and organic matter that should be nourishing their fields and gardens. Bali's torrential rains wash away tonnes of topsoil every year, and most of it is never replaced. Instead of building up the soil with compost, grass cuttings and other organic material, I have seen local gardeners actually uprooting the ground cover and scraping away all the soft earth they can remove to expose the clay subsoil beneath. "Clean," they declare with great satisfaction.
Yesterday I drove home to find Pak, the farmer from the next field, pulling up by the roots every single blade of grass that had managed to tenaciously survive in the near-desert of my parking area. He had a cleared about two thirds of the area with his hoe, carefully piling up the pathetic little plants along the edge. I stopped him and ran for my dictionary, then tried in my still-atrocious Indonesian to explain the concept of erosion. I pointed to the long, matted roots of the grass and indicated how they held the dirt together. I showed that when they were pulled up, the dust would blow away with the wind. He listened politely. I then pointed out that all this loose dust would now blow into my house and make it dirty. Now, that made sense. That he could understand. Nodding gravely, he shouldered his hoe, gathered the uprooted grass for his cow and departed, no doubt frustrated that I had prevented him from rendering my parking area really, really clean.
How did the concept of earth and grass being 'dirty' evolve? Was it the Dutch colonizers who introduced the busy broom? When did the skill of building up soils by natural means become lost? And at what point did it become fashionable to spend hard-earned rupiah on artificial fertilizers instead of using the great stuff that's processed free of charge through Bali's own cows and pigs?
My pembantu is deeply (though discreetly) offended by the sight of the grass cuttings I use to mulch my vegetable garden and flower beds. She thinks it looks messy. I've shown her how to recycle offerings by poking out the bottom and using the outside rim to frame seedlings; the raised edges hold a nice helping of compost. I have explained to her that all the waste from the kitchen and garden is to be recycled, composted or fed to the ducks; nothing is burnt. She humours me and puts the fallen leaves and old offerings on the compost pile, but her fingers are itching for the broom and the match.
One morning as I walked along Ubud Raya, I saw several groups of uniformed young people vigorously sweeping the last of the topsoil from the eroded slopes near the cremation grounds. Others were clipping the grass and weeds right to the ground, sweeping them into little green piles and trying to set fire to them. Where a few determined plants had survived in the clay moments before, there were now just stubs and smouldering greenery. What on earth were they trying to accomplish? All around them were the ubiquitous black and white striped plastic bags that seem to decorate every square metre of Indonesia. How much better to organize all that young energy to pick up the plastic waste littering the sides of the ravines and give it to the pemulung instead of waging a sad battle against their own struggling environment.
So many Balinese sweeping, sweeping. So little understanding of what all that bare dirt means in terms of future fertility.
It's hard to imagine how to start turning around a destructive practice that is so culturally entrenched. We could start by setting examples in our own homes and gardens. Fallen leaves can be picked up by hand or with a pointed stick. We can discourage our gardeners from pulling every piece of random greenery out of the ground, especially on slopes. Some ground covers, like legumes, actually add more nutrition to the soil than they take out, besides stabilizing the soil. We can start a simple compost pile -- it doesn't have to be anything fancy - where all those fallen leaves and fruit peelings can be buried. We can ban brooms and matches from our gardens. And we can explain as best we can that every handful of Bali's earth is a precious resource to be carefully guarded, not swept away.
GREENSPEAK covers enviromental issues and solutions in Bali and features business which are environmentally focused or integrate sound environmental practices. If you know of an initiative which might make a good story for GREENSPEAK, please contact Ibu Kat at katalyst@dps.centrin.net.id
