2. Resources

Last week’s 11th International River Symposium heard how sulphur-laden tailings that have fanned out across the Ok Tedi floodplain pose a threat to animals and plants well into the future.

Rhithroecology Ltd consultant Ian Campbell, whose work on the Mekong River was recently blogged on New Mandala, told the ABC on Friday that if the sediments dry out and are exposed to oxygen, the sulphur will oxidise and create sulfuric acid, which dissolves toxic metals and creates a long-term toxicity.

From his conference abstract:

A mine waste tailings treatment project is being implemented to reduce sulphur content, and thus potential for acidification, in the tailings discharged to the river. However, potentially acid forming sediment from the mine has already been deposited over large areas of the middle Fly River floodplain.

While under water these sediments pose a low environmental risk, but if they are exposed to air they will oxidise and release water low in pH and high in metals potentially killing wetland plants and animals. The mine waste treatment project will dump the sulphide materials from the tailings in pits a few hundred metres from the river upstream of the Ok Tedi Fly-River junction. This material will be safe until river erosion cuts through to the pit releasing a pulse of the material into the river. The government and the company hope that some third party will intervene and re-mine the material before a catastrophe occurs.

A Middle Fly scene in 1994.

Last week thirteen Vietnamese fishers were caught fishing just off the Philippines westernmost province, Palawan, which borders the South China Sea. Among various other sorts of fish, they had in their possession more than 100 turtles. I have a particular interest in this because they were caught in one of the islands I did fieldwork in, Linapacan Island in the Calamian Group. After a short chase by the military, the fishers were eventually taken into custody in the nearby town of El Nido. Given the government’s earlier spineless responses to the incursions of Chinese fishers into the World Heritage-listed Tubbataha Reef, it will be interesting to see what action (if any) is eventually pursued against these Vietnamese fishers.

Two internship opportunities have been advertised with the IDRC in climate change related areas. The first deals with local benefits from payments for environmental services (PES) and the second with climate change adaptation - see this link for details. The website mentions other internship opportunities in addition to these two.

Maybe a simple question with which I am currently dealing but for which I find contradictory answers in the literature…

To set the scene: 19 century Bali, the highly sophisticated irrigated rice terraces have long been established.

But were it the kings who invested into large dam structures to enable such systems and benefit from the usufruct or were it the farmers all by themselves, everynow and then paying some tribute to the(ir) lords?

And what about the trade in those days: Were it only the elites who engaged in such activities (after 200 years of successful slave trade), selling the little surplus that pawns made on royal land, or were it farming communities who actively participated not only in the local but regional and even inter-island trade to sell their produce from their own fertile lands?

Those who argue for the former it seems then are kind of saying that these communities serving the lord have no thinking of their own, they are mere pawns on a chessboard awaiting the orders from somewhere above to move. ‘Inward’ people as Geertz called it focusing on subsistence only. On the other hand, the latter argument of an almost acephalous organisations of farmers that manage it all by themselves purposfully cultivating goods for the market is somewhat unimaginable too.

So finally, it probably comes back(at least partially) to the question of equality or hierarchy? Both Geertz and Lansing have attempted to answer this (among many other issues) in their respective books Negara (Geertz 1980) and Perfect Order (Lansing 2006). I can’t make up my mind yet…

Trivia quiz: which ex-governor of a gas-rich province 300km to our north has, according to wags, two wives called Cashlyn and Chequelyn?

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