The Rice Steps That Climb the Mountains

The story

Imagine standing on a mountainside on the island of Bali, in Indonesia, and looking down. The whole slope below you is a staircase. Not a staircase for feet, but a staircase for WATER and RICE: step after flat green step carved into the mountain, each one a shallow, gleaming pool with young rice plants standing in it, going down and down towards the valley like a giant's garden stairs.

People made this. Farmers, with simple tools and enormous patience, shaped these mountainsides step by step. And they did it to solve a real problem, because the way rice likes to grow does not match the way mountains are shaped.

Here is the problem. Rice is a thirsty crop, and young rice grows best standing in a calm, shallow pool of water. On flat land, that is easy: build a low wall of earth around your field, let water in, and there is your pool. But on a steep mountainside, water will not stand still for anyone. Rain rushes downhill, tearing soil away as it goes, and a sloping field cannot hold a pool at all.

So the farmers of Bali turned the slope into flatness, one strip at a time. Cut into the hill, pile and pack the earth, and you get a flat shelf. Below it, another shelf. Below that, another. Each shelf, called a terrace, holds its own calm pool. And the terraces work together in the cleverest way: water from rivers and springs high on the mountain is guided through a web of canals, tunnels and little channels to terrace after terrace, and in many places, a pool that has drunk enough spills gently on into the pool below. One mountain's water, shared by field after field after field.

And sharing is the real engineering, the part you cannot see in a photograph. If a farmer at the top took all the water, every field below would go dry. So for about a thousand years, the rice farmers of Bali have organised themselves into water-sharing groups, called subak, that decide together how the water is divided and when each family plants. Farmers meet, talk, and agree, so that a field at the bottom of the mountain is treated as fairly as a field at the top. The staircases of Bali are not just carved out of earth. They are carved out of cooperation.

It works so beautifully that these terraces have fed families for centuries without wearing the mountains out, and people now come from all over the world just to stand and look at them. Five special areas of this subak landscape have even been named a UNESCO world treasure, honoured for the sharing system as much as for the scenery.

So remember the rice steps of Bali. When people cooperate, truly and fairly, they can do something astonishing: they can take a steep, rushing, impossible mountainside, and turn it into a staircase of quiet green pools that helps feed whole communities.