Indonesian mother plants mangroves to save sinking coastal home

STORY: Rising sea levels have driven most families from this small village in Indonesia’s Central Java province to higher ground.

Yet 55-year old Pasijah and her family have decided to stay put, and they have no plans to leave.

For the past 20 years, Pasijah has planted mangroves to protect her beloved home against the advancing tides, even as they lap at her doorstep. When Pasijah moved to this home 35 years ago, the neighborhood was dry.

But over the years, as the waters rose, she watched houses and farms slip into the sea.

Pasijah realized that she needed to take matters into her own hands if she wanted to save her home.

Each day, Pasijah travels by boat into the middle of the sea to tend to the trees she plants.

She estimates that she has added hundreds of thousands of mangrove saplings over the years.

“The floodwaters come in waves, gradually, not all at once. I realized that after the waters began rising, I needed to plant mangrove trees so that they could spread and provide protection for the house, from the wind and the waves as well as providing nesting places for birds that have so far benefitted us.”

As an archipelago with about 50,000 miles of coastline, Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

However, climate change actually accounts for only up to 30% of land being lost to seawater flooding.

Environmentalist Ferry Prihandono of the BINTARI environmental and sustainability organization says the majority can be attributed to human activities, like development projects that involve drilling for ground water, which trigger land subsidence.

At least 10% of the mangrove forests along the North Java coasts, which includes the area where Pasijah lives, have been affected by massive government developments, according to Demak Regency Marine and Fisheries Services.

In response, Indonesia’s government said earlier this year it would build a nearly 450-mile giant sea wall to protect the coastline.

Still, that might be too late for Pasijah, who says she has been trying to warn the government about the environmental cost for years.

Yet despite the challenges of living in isolation and over a mile from the nearest shore, Pasijah and her family say they will stay as long as they can hold back the tides.

“I’m no longer concerned about how I feel about being isolated here since I decided to stay here, so we take all these hurdles with a pinch of salt. If we really want to go ashore, we go to the nearest land in Pandansari or to the market. Once again, I have the intention to stay here and my feelings for this house persist. If I complain too much, it makes me sick. I always pray that I’m healthy enough to care for the mangroves.”