A Land Shaped by Water and Fire
South Kalimantan, the often-overlooked province of Indonesia, is a microcosm of the world’s most pressing crises: climate change, deforestation, and cultural erosion. Nestled on the island of Borneo, this region’s history is written in the silt of its rivers and the ashes of its forests. For centuries, the Banjar people have thrived here, building a civilization around the Martapura and Barito rivers. But today, their survival is threatened by forces far beyond their control.
The Riverine Kingdoms of Banjar
Long before European colonizers arrived, South Kalimantan was home to the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Negara Dipa, followed by the Islamic Sultanate of Banjar. These kingdoms weren’t just political entities—they were hydrological engineers. The Banjar people mastered the art of living on water, constructing floating markets like the iconic Pasar Terapung in Banjarmasin. Their stilt houses and canal systems were early examples of climate adaptation, a skill now desperately needed as rising sea levels encroach on coastal communities.
Coal, Corruption, and Climate Catastrophe
The Black Gold Rush
South Kalimantan sits on one of the world’s largest coal reserves. Since the 2000s, mining companies—both local and foreign—have turned the province into a lunar landscape of open pits. The environmental cost is staggering: rivers run black with sediment, fish populations have collapsed, and the air in cities like Banjarbaru is thick with particulate matter.
What’s rarely discussed is how this mirrors the global hypocrisy of the energy transition. While Europe condemns coal, its power plants still import Kalimantan’s "dirty fuel." Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) relies on Indonesian coal to back up intermittent renewables. South Kalimantan’s miners aren’t villains—they’re pawns in a system where the Global South bears the ecological burden of the North’s consumption.
The Peatland Apocalypse
Beneath South Kalimantan’s forests lies a carbon time bomb: peatlands. When drained for palm oil plantations (a practice accelerated during the Suharto era), these wetlands release catastrophic amounts of CO₂. The 2015 haze crisis, which blanketed Southeast Asia in toxic smoke, originated partly here.
Yet there’s a cruel irony. Traditional Banjar farmers practiced sawah pasang surut (tidal rice farming), a peat-friendly agriculture method perfected over generations. Colonial and modern agribusiness replaced this with monocultures, turning a carbon sink into a carbon geyser.
Cultural Resilience in the Face of Erasure
The Silenced Language of Bakumpai
Among South Kalimantan’s lesser-known tragedies is the decline of the Bakumpai language, spoken by a Dayak subgroup along the Barito River. Linguists classify it as "definitely endangered"—a casualty of Indonesia’s monolingual education policies and the dominance of Banjarese.
This isn’t just about words fading. Bakumpai encodes ancestral knowledge of flood prediction, medicinal plants, and sustainable foraging. Its loss parallels the global extinction of indigenous languages at a rate of one every two weeks.
The Shadow of Transmigration
Java’s overpopulation problem became South Kalimantan’s cultural crisis through transmigrasi (transmigration). Since the Dutch colonial era, millions of Javanese have been relocated here, altering demographics and sparking tensions. The 2001 Sampit conflict—where Dayaks and Madurese clashed—revealed the fragility of forced coexistence.
Today, this history echoes in debates over "land reform." Agrarian conflicts pit indigenous Dayaks against palm oil conglomerates, many backed by Jakarta elites. It’s a familiar Global South story: land grabs disguised as development.
The New Battleground: Nickel and Green Colonialism
As the world pivots to electric vehicles, South Kalimantan faces a new threat: nickel mining. Indonesia holds nearly a quarter of global nickel reserves, much in Borneo. Tesla and Hyundai’s supply chains now snake into this province, promising "green jobs" while repeating coal’s extractive playbook.
The cruel joke? Nickel processing requires immense energy, often from—you guessed it—South Kalimantan’s coal. The "clean energy revolution" is fueling the very crisis it claims to solve.
Floating Towards an Uncertain Future
In Banjarmasin’s floating markets, vendors still trade kelakai (a wild fern) and ikan haruan (snakehead fish), just as their ancestors did. But the rivers are narrower now, choked by plastic and runoff. The stilt houses wobble as floods grow fiercer.
South Kalimantan doesn’t need saviors. It needs the world to recognize its story isn’t local—it’s the story of every frontline community caught between capitalism and climate collapse. The Banjar people’s fate will foreshadow ours. The question is whether we’ll listen before their history becomes our future.
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