SEASS lecture: Dealing with Environmental Disaster in Urbanizing Indonesia: Ten Years of Lapindo Mudflow, and Still

Photo: Lutfi Amiruddin

Public SEASS lecture by Anton Novenanto, Department of Sociology, Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia

In the age of the Anthropocene, when human activities are believed to be one prominent factor in changing climate and the environment, many countries, including Indonesia, persist with conventional relief management in dealing with disasters. Indonesia has been a target for high-risk, large-scale development projects that are potent to initiate environmental hazards since the Dutch colonial era. Such projects have been growing rapidly as the government believes extractive industries are economically more promising than other sectors, despite the high level of risks they entail for the environment and the populations. The scale of disasters has been increasing for those projects meet Indonesia’s rapid urbanization and the government’s ignorance of environmental sustainability. This talk is a reflection of what has been happening in the past ten years of the Lapindo mudflow, what would and could happen next, and how to prepare people for it. It will discuss community-based research as a strategy for intellectuals to empower local people by involving multi-stakeholders in co-understanding multidimensional impacts of the mudflow. It is by doing a collaborative work of knowledge production we could have the opportunity to find practical ways and solutions to deal with disasters in urban contexts.

Anton Novenanto, M.A. is a faculty member of Department of Sociology, Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia. He holds a bachelor degree in sociology (S.Sos.) from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia, and a M.A. in anthropology from Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands. Since 2008, he has conducted a series of independent and collaborative studies into the Lapindo case, or the mudflow disaster in Porong, East Java, on which he has written academic and public papers. He is the editor ofMembingkai Lapindo [Framing Lapindo] (Kanisius & MediaLink, 2013). Currently, he is a Dr. phil. candidate in anthropology from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany. He has submitted a dissertation of human/nature relations within an environmental crisis; and, is preparing for oral defense in Winter 2016.