Managing Socio-Economic Problems of the Wetland Environment in South Kalimantan

¹ Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
² Center for Asian Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
³ Department of Agrotechnology, Faculty of Animal and Agriculture, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia

^* Corresponding author: wulan@live.undip.ac.id

Abstract

This study examines various problems occurring in wetland clearing and uses in South Kalimantan. In the beginning, the wetland clearing aimed to expand the food crop area in order to implement government policies to meet the food needs. However, it has changed into the capitalist media and transmigration purposes. This study uses a historical perspective composing from heuristic to historiography with an ecological approach. Based on the findings, the land clearing was integrated with the transmigration program which had been started since the 1960s. The argument that can be developed in this study is that wetland-use expansion causes two basic problems in environmental management, namely the large volume of standing water and the relatively high acidity level. This expansion referred to the settlement developed around the wetlands which increasingly could not be controlled by the government. However, ideally, the existing situation had to show that wetland clearing has shifted should balance social, environmental, and economic values, of which the implementation to regulate self-productivity that actually has been running for generations.