Steve Lansing: Bali’s Efficient Water Temples

September 13, 2012 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

Steve Lansing discusses the Byzantine system for the distribution of water from a volcanic lake in Bali to over two hundred farming villages. It’s worked since the 12th century, it’s egalitarian and it’s still sustainable. He says “It’s one of the few functioning, ancient democratic institutions that we know about. It’s kind of beautiful.”

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ABOUT Steve Lansing

“Steve Lansing is an external Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

His recent research is centered around long-term dynamics of coupled social-ecological systems. One of his current projects explores emergent properties of Balinese water temple networks and he’s currently assisting the Indonesian government to create a new UNESCO World Heritage site to help preserve the temple networks.

Steve is also conducting a comparative study of social structure, ecology, kinship, language change and the evolution of disease resistance in 69 villages on 14 Indonesian islands.

Recent books include ‘Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali’ (2006) and ‘Priests & Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali’ (2007). Documentary films he’s worked on include: ‘The Goddess and the Computer’ (1988), a segment of ‘The Sacred Balance’ (2003), ‘Perfect Order’ (2006) and ‘Voyagers on the Ring of Fire'(2011).

The VIDEO