Once upon a time, there was a group of fishing villages in the district of Pontian, a sleepy part of the state of Johor. The villagers, as you might have suspected, were fishermen who had settled in the area for many generations, some Malay, some Chinese, and although, as is the case in this world of ours, there was a degree of poverty, most of them made a good living plying their traditional trade.

They had to work very hard, but by and large they were content. They were fit and healthy, they passed on the skills of their trade to their sons, who in turn grew up to be fishermen too. They were proud of their communities and they made sure that their neighbours were looked after when in need, and in turn their neighbours looked after them.

The area where they lived was beautiful indeed, even though it was a swamp. Specifically, a mangrove forest. Now mangrove forests aren’t pretty in the way that say, a coral reef or a sandy beach (which Malaysia had in plenty ) are but they were beautiful in the way that God intended and Nature designed, in the sense that they were an extremely diverse bio-habitat that provided a rich environment for animal and plant species.

And, although the fishermen didn’t realise it at the time, it was the source of their livelihood, because the mangrove forest was the nursery for all the fishes that they caught. So things went on for a long time. The sun rose and fell, the moon followed in its arc, the monsoons came and went. Life was slow, some of the younger people felt that it was even a bit boring. Then the first of the changes occurred.

A group of men arrived in Pontian town. They said that they were the representatives of a power company. They told the townspeople that they were going to build a power station. They set about wooing the influential townspeople, telling them about the wonderful coal-fired power station they were going to build, and about how it was going to benefit everybody because there would be no more power shortages.

The townspeople were in any case a bit tired by then of the recurring blackouts that were a fact of life in rural Malaysia so they happily gave their blessing. The building of the said power station would involve the destruction of a considerable part of the mangrove forest but the representatives glossed over that part.There were other changes as well.

A bit down the Johor Straits from the villages, at the mouth of the Sungai Pulai Estuary, a port was built, ostensibly to ‘increase the prosperity of the region’ with the usual specious promises of increased wealth, more jobs, etc. It didn’t matter that really, most people were already employed and had food on the table and roofs over their heads. Anyway, to build the port, even more mangrove forest was cut down.

Around about this time the fishermen noticed that something was starting to happen, and not for the better. Their fish catches were going down, and subsequently it was getting harder and harder for them to make a living. At first, they didn’t understand it. After all, nothing had changed about their fishing practices.

They were inshore fishermen and over the few hundred of years that they and their ancestors had lived there, they had developed sustainable fishing methods and there had never been any problems with a depleted fish supply before. By the by some of the more savvy amongst them wondered if there was a link between the destruction of the mangroves and the loss of fishes.

Gradually, there was more and more noise made about the destruction of the mangroves. Lo and behold, the Johor government announced that it was going to declare the region around Tanjung Piai and Pulau Kukup as national parks and there was to be a programme of reforestation in Tanjung Piai itself.

In spite of these measures however, the villagers noticed in perplexity that their fish catches were still decreasing. Meanwhile, other then in the aforesaid national parks, deforestation continued apace. Until one day, the powers-that-be announced that there was to be built a petrochemical refinery right in the heart of the mangrove forest. This would involve the destruction of 913 hectares of mangrove which bizarrely had been de-gazetted from their status as a forest reserve.

In another inexplicable turn of events, one of the said group of villagers were told that their land would be bought over by the coalition in charge of the petrochemical refinery. They were also told that they had no choice except to accept compensation to the measly tune of RM10,000 per family, which would have kept them fed and clothed for oh, a couple of months.

The villagers finally started getting organised and a local NGO was formed to fight for the rights of the fisher folk and to reforest as much of the deforested areas as possible. There were peaceful protests outside the power stations, petitions were sent to the menteri besar and the Port of Tanjung Pelepas. A march went on in Kuala Lumpur to the Parliament itself.

The NGO started an education programme amongst the ‘kampung’ children to educate them about the immense value of the mangrove forest. Angry protests were sent to the MP for the Pontian district, about the opposition of the villagers both to the construction of the petrochemical refinery itself and to the deforestation of the mangroves.

So far, they have been completely ignored, both by the port authority overseeing the construction of the refinery and by the government. Even when it came out that one of the companies bankrolling the refinery was Vitol, which had been implicated in some really unpleasant business in Serbia .

They are now feeling demoralised and despondent and feel as though they have been betrayed.

What does this have to do with me, you ask. A lot. Read the news, watch the weather, look at the floods. Climate change is here. Peak oil, where the world oil reserves reach a peak and then start to run out, is here too. If you don’t believe this, ask yourself why oil is still so expensive in spite of the recession?

Do you think that the US are frantically trying to look for alternate sources of energy just because of climate change? In a decade or so, the petrochemical refinery will most likely be a white elephant, whereas the skills of the fisher folk and the mangrove forest will be vital in keeping their neighbours alive.

Local resilience has started to become a concept that is being propagated by more and more grassroots NGOs the world over. But you can’t have local resilience without a working local eco-system.