Balinese farmer I Made Perasi understands the challenges of modernization well. He straddles two worlds as the owner of a car wash and the leader of a thriving but threatened rice cultivation system in the Pakerisan River’s Valley of Kings. His title is pekaseh, the elected head of a green and fruitful pocket of the watershed, which includes 110 families and their separate-but-cooperating rice paddy operations.
At the edge of one such paddy, Perasi dismounts his Honda motorbike and walks along a narrow canal. He’s wearing a traditional head wrap and sarong topped by an apricot-colored polo shirt. Perasi waves at a family splashing in water that will later flow out to irrigate their rice, as well as the coconut trees and bird-filled shrubs that divide the paddies. This may be rice country, but that’s hardly the only thing that grows here.
Perasi stops at a spot overlooking fields of lime-colored, foot-tall organic brown rice. These fields, along with a millennium-old system of ditches, weirs and temples, make up his “subak.” The term refers to all the farmers who share irrigation water from a common source, be it a natural spring or the flow from a weir. Perasi’s duties here include settling disputes, worrying about the weather and making regular flower offerings to the water gods at nearby springs. Lately, they also include dipping into national and even global environmental politics.
