Petro-Ambiguity: Environment, Energy, Culture

This post was commissioned by, and first published on, The Turning Turtle with the title ‘Reclaiming Water in the Bruneian Imaginary’. Head there for the same essay enhanced with images!

Just a dip into Bruneian folklore will tell you how deep the connection between locals, land, and sea once was. If you’ve heard the legend of Jong Batu and Nakhoda Manis, you’ll know that rock, sea, and familial ties conspire to uphold one another, revealing profound human–nature interconnectedness.

In the days before oil, earth and water weren’t just resources – they were storied matter, shaping the days, lives, and relationships of the Bruneian people. This entanglement manifests itself in the Bruneian Malay language, especially in the rich proverbs that reflect a past way of life attuned to nature’s innate wisdom.

Proverbs are history, fossilized stories, or knowledge that dictates happenings related to daily life and culture. – Yabit Alas (2017).

One example is “Seperti aur dengan tebing,” loosely translated as “Like the bamboo and the riverbank.” In English, a comparable saying might be “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” The proverb beautifully evokes the mutually reinforcing relationship between bamboo and the riverbank: the bamboo shielding the soil from erosion, and the bank supporting the bamboo’s growth. The language reflects a society that understood that nature holds profound wisdom for nurturing sustainable social and environmental relations.

This deep connection isn’t so surprising once we recall that before the oil-and-gas industry took over, Brunei’s economy was mostly based on agriculture, fishing and forestry. Local stories set in the past are populated with fishermen, farmers, craftsmen and merchants who work daily with the land and sea, recognizing them as partners who would provide and needed care and consideration in return.

What stands out most to me about this period is the presence of water – water as the sea that fishermen ventured into, as rain that nourished crops on farmland, as rivers and channels that carried people and goods, and as home for coastal and riverine communities. Water was not simply a backdrop to life, but its very medium: a source of livelihood, movement, and meaning.

Water comes up even more markedly once we recall that Brunei was at one point a powerful maritime empire whose boundaries stretched beyond Borneo to include the Sulu archipelago. Its legendary water village, Kampong Ayer, was a bustling trade hub, described by explorer Antonio Pigafetta (who was part of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition) as the “Venice of the East” in 1521.

Of course, the human-water connection went deeper than function. In Muslim Burmat’s Puncak Pertama (1988), which follows the protagonist’s journey from being a fisherman to being an oil worker, he confesses that, “their old life at sea felt so far away and unconnected to their current life. Now, they rarely touch the water except when they miss the sea.” Puncak Pertama shows that the transition from being agrarian and subsistence-based to oil-dependent wasn’t just economic. It eroded the tangible and embodied relations between locals and their environment.

Imagine that loss: from consistently being out in the field or the sea, deftly interpreting the waves, wind, and water, to being enclosed within the four walls of a bare and airless office.

Fast forward to today, when you ask Bruneians what they think of water, they’ll likely reply with something that sounds like, “Water? It’s out there.” This might be a common response across the Global North, where our interaction with water is controlled. Water is contained in bottles, comes out from taps, made hot or cold with the turn of a knob, its power transformed into hydroelectricity, and so on. It’s the by-product of technology, modernity and innovation. (And contrast this with experiences of water elsewhere and mostly faced by the Global Majority – flash floods, shifting coastlines, cities facing submersion, crop yields at risk of too much or too little water, and oceans increasingly devoid of life.)

I want to briefly reframe this through a petro-historical lens to trace the connections between the emergence of oil and the erasure of water in the Bruneian imaginary. The growth of the oil and gas industry created a demand for local labour, met swiftly by fishermen, farmers, and traders. Drawn by the promise of “easy” money, they exchanged the slow, seasonal rhythms of fishing and farming for the immediacy of wage work.

Their move inland was also encouraged by the British Resident at the time, who insisted that Brunei “will not, and cannot, ever really advance until the capital is on dry land” (Pg. Khairul Rijal 96). I’ve written previously of how language and dominant knowledge systems can devalue one way of thinking and living for another, and here we have a historical glimpse of that happening – a developmentalist, perhaps extractive, land-based way of seeing versus a more reciprocal, circular, water-y way of being.

And so, step by step, the people turned away from the water that had long sustained them. Villages once oriented toward rivers and coasts began to look inland, toward roads and land infrastructure. In this way, the offshoring of water in the Bruneian imaginary began to take effect.

But perhaps the tide is once again turning. In recent years, attention has begun to turn back toward the water. Growing local interest in Brunei’s coastal ecosystems coincides with the rising global conversation around blue carbon. Brunei-based researchers are now studying seagrass meadows, in addition to existing work on mangrove forests and peat swamps, seeing them not only as vital habitats but as powerful carbon sinks. Local geographers have also called for renewed investment in the historic water village, Kampong Ayer, as part of heritage conservation and to restore its economic vitality.

Caution must still be exercised, however. Adopting global approaches in local contexts risk re-enacting colonial and extractive practices that treat nature as mere resources – the same practices that have gotten us to this dire stage of the climate crisis in the first place. This is why community-led, site-specific, and interdisciplinary approaches are crucial in this early phase. While these may still be nascent in Brunei (perhaps due to a postcolonial orientation that tends to privilege foreign expertise over local knowledge) promising endeavours can be seen in local youth-led movements and research initiatives that center water more intentionally. I see hope in this generation who are forging paths away from the traditional private and public sector career routes that both sustain, and have been upheld by, oil revenue.

If the past century marked a turning away from the water, the years ahead will hopefully tell a different story. The renewed attention on seas, rivers, and coastlines suggests a growing will to reconnect with the very ecosystems that once defined Brunei’s identity. In listening again to the tides, perhaps Brunei can chart a more sustainable course – one that honours both its history and its horizon.

Note: I have to acknowledge here that it is frustratingly difficult to find much information on Brunei’s pre-oil economic history online. It’s a lacuna that reflects the near-exclusive focus on the nation’s oil-dependent status. (And yes, I realise I’m part of this problem, having spent the past five or so years researching and writing about Brunei’s petroculture.) This dominance of the oil narrative makes it hard to imagine Brunei beyond petroleum – it drives home the urgent need to recover and reimagine stories of Brunei that do not begin and end with oil.