Eco-Logical (2009)

  AUG 15 — Hello . . . hello . . . er . . . hello. Is there anyone out there – does my small, almost inconsequential, voice echo in sundering emptiness like the (summan khawãlida) mute immortals. Am I left shouting hoarsely into a post soft machine (Kevin Ayers) bucket of abject nothingness – this dratted smog is getting so thick I can’t even see you. Ah, there you are, well what a forest blazing, aggravating peat sort of week that was, an almost diabolically smoky week – smoky week, you notice, not smoking week as a once be-masked Jim Carrey might have exclaimed. Hopefully, with air quality monitoring and canal digging in Pekan Baru the huge fires associated with Indonesian Riau, El Nino and burning peat will now no longer occur, and we will be able to see each other more clearly in future. It has been a week full of filters of all sorts, acclaimed, denied and rejected by previous Numero Uno ministers as being discordant to harmonious interactions with foreign trade, and a diabolical liberty too. An ecologically-challenging week, a green week alternating with a red hot week as tempers flare; a week soothed by the not-so-fragrant displays of myriads of colour in exhibitions of Joharian orchids and manicured bonsai trees. It has been a week concerned with swallows, and I do not mean mere gulps of human saliva, but tiny Aerodramus swiftlets seeking to build nests for their families, lay their eggs and enjoy all the home comforts of a dwelling of their own – streamyx connection, flat screen HDTV, satellite Animal Planet programmes. That is unless they are enticed into the ever-increasingly Mordor like halls of Klang and the so-called bird motels. Bearing more of an uncanny ideological resemblance to the more infamous Bates Motel – or indeed the legendary Hotel California from which you can check out any time, but you can never leave – entrepreneurs in Klang have remodelled shop-houses to farm swiftlet nests. These are for delicacies such as the infamous bird’s nest soup, which fetch astronomical sums in restaurants and to gourmets wishing to devour the solidified gelatinous swiftlet spit moulded nests, for dubious health gains. The unsuspecting birds are lured into the concrete Hitchcockian motels and encouraged to mate, build nests and all the things one might expect of a newly-married couple, then, when the nests are secured to the concrete wall by quick drying bird saliva, their avian occupants are tipped out and the nests ravaged for their glue-like saliva. A by-product of the nest gathering is often the incipient and gruesome murder of swiftlet chicks and the various health hazards and diseases caused by bird waste, which, a bright environmentalist might argue, rather offsets any superficial health benefits the nests might give. Oddly, in Butterworth – and keeping to our avian theme, a man was charged with stealing 90, or three trays, of eggs. I presume that they were chicken eggs, and not the more miniscule swiftlet eggs, and that the man walked very, very slowly to as not to drop his ovum load – hence his capture, otherwise Butterworth may have seen its largest omelette yet, and the bewildered thief standing, literally, with egg on his face. Across the bridge, or if you are a tad more adventurous the other side of the ferry, from Butterworth, in Georgetown, it’s all been a load of balls – mud balls that is. In fact, 1.2 million mud balls to be precise. The mud balls in question are not the curiously arty Japanese hikaru dorodango shiny mud balls, used as psychological therapy for stressed children, but these are bokashi (pronounced pickaashee) ‘effective microorganism’ (EM) mud balls thought to improve water quality. It seems that the ‘good’ bacteria in the ‘EM’ balls aids in combating the ‘bad’ bacteria which causes stinks, hence the lobbing in to the waters around Penang of copious amounts of spherical objects, somewhat resembling bait balls fishermen use, but the intended catch is clean water rather than fruits der mer. At least Penang still has water, murky though it may be. Kuching, in Sarawak, has begun water rationing as water supplies are extremely low – so we are informed. Their dry spell has sucked up all the water and rationing has started to ease a worsening situation especially in those coastal fishing villages where water was plentiful – bringing to mind the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner; Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where. Nor any drop to drink. Barges and tankers are being employed to assist in ferrying water to the worse drought stricken areas. In addition, in Padang Terap (near Alor Star, Kedah) the newly-installed water pipes just do not work. Some 800 residents are left without a reliable water supply, even though water pipes were fitted to their dwellings six years ago. The promised water tanks, engineered to hold enough water to service the villages involved, had never been built, and now the occupants find that water only flows once or twice in a month, hardly enough to wet your whistle let alone cleanse and rehydrate two whole villages. While down in Johor Baru aqueous matters have been decidedly fishy. The once thriving fish farms, sending fish worth their weight in gold to customers a far afield as China and Taiwan, have sunk. A rotten stench permeated the atmosphere and the ponds, which once had housed live fish, had turned into rotten fish soup. The river feeding the fish farms had turned brown a while ago, and, over the period of a week, the majority of fish being farmed had emulated Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue Parrott in being deceased, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their maker. It has therefore been a sad week, a week of ecological and biological disturbances, of smoke without the smoking, of birds without their nests, of want of water or the cleansing of water and of the well and truly inedible Johor laksa.