Malaysia, ES / Environmental Science and Technology 1997/1999

My fascination with wetlands began a good number of years ago, even before I arrived at the railway station in Delft one cold night in 1997. Yet in retrospect IHE was to play a crucial part not only in nurturing this fascination, but also in shaping the outlook I would have and my own conception of what my role would be, however small, in helping to determine the future of wetlands and those whose livelihoods depend on them.

Despite changing tack along the way, I still find myself today responding to the basic calling to participate in a larger quest, if one might call it that, for the elusive goal of sustainable development.

What motivates me to keep doing this, what have I learnt – especially with regards to local knowledge and capacity – and how has IHE helped me in all this? These are the questions I address in this story – a story that, I would like to believe, is merely beginning to unfold. Having spent one of the most formative years of my life at IHE, I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute my story to this Symposium on the proud occasion of IHE’s 50th anniversary, not least for the pause it has given me to think, reflect and ultimately rediscover the meaning of my Delft experience.

My story begins with Paya Indah Wetlands, a former tin mine in Malaysia, which together with its adjacent peat swamp forest, was converted into a rehabilitated wetland park.

This was to be the place not only where I would conduct my MSc research – examining the relationship of phytoplankton communities to water quality – but also where I would begin my career in park and water resource management.

I learnt a great deal about working with multiple stakeholders at different scales through dealing with issues as diverse as groundwater abstraction, peat fires, and even environmental education.

Nevertheless, the more I understood the immensity of the problems we were faced with, the more I came to realize the limitations of my institutional role and likely career path. It was, to put it mildly, frustrating to see so much energy, talent, and money being spent on certain matters of immediate consequence while, on the other hand larger-scale and longer-term changes were being wrought for better or for worse through the making and implementation of policy – a process on which our immediate efforts appeared to have little, if any, bearing whatsoever.

Real people’s lives were being affected by these changes at the local level, and I felt powerless in my role to do anything about it. Environmental problems were ultimately human problems insofar as they were about the relationship between human beings and nature.

And given my immediate context of Malaysia at the time, I had a very real sense of how this relationship was changing as a result of the pressure on society to develop economically – a phenomenon that was all too symptomatic of many other parts of the world. Ever the idealist, I decided then that if I were to make an impact on conserving the environment, it would have to be through the perspective of its relationship to human development.

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