Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
e360.yale.eduI'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time.
However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful.
Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing.
Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?
Thanks for sharing your first-hand account of diving in Thailand. I think they should aggressively pursue coral planting. They are several projects in Indonesia that have demonstrated excellent results. I volunteered for a day doing coral planting in Bali, Indonesia. As part of the dive, they take you to different parts of the coral reef as it recovers, showing you how it changes year after year. You can see the change with your own eyes.
I agree though we had very mid results here in the Gulf of Thailand while the Andaman Sea side has had more luck. The issue with Gulf of Thailand is that it's just so shallow with avg depth of only 50m and too calm making new coral growth very hard with existing techniques. There's some new promising research on alternative methods of raising coral larva in labs, but I'm not up to speed with that yet and it seems quite complex.
Have any areas in GoT shown recovery from blasting and/or bleaching without human intervention? I have fond memories of Koh Tao circa 2009...
Koh Tao is definitely not doing great compared to 2009 though there is some bounce back lately. I just moved from there to Koh Chang which despite poor visibility still has a lot of absolutely stunning untouched corals though unlike Koh Tao it takes an hour-long boat ride to get out there. Koh Phangan recently made news on massive natural recovery, so there's a lot of hope in the Gulf of Thailand still!
Mossy earth has been doing a (i think quite successful) restoration of an coral area damaged by bomb fishing in indonesia. Here is a 2 year recap of the program and the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0bkMhhMHOw
Hat tip. I'm pretty sure their sites are in Nusa Penida which is a short ferry ride from Bali, Indonesia. I did my dive (repair work) in Padangbai[1][2].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Livingseas+Coral+Restorati...
Thailand doesn't have the conditions required for corals to thrive. The best, most beautiful coral come from Indonesia.
Is it just a matter of incentives by the government in indonesia? Like is it that bomb fishing in indonesia is incentivized because of, for example, profit margins in fishing vs say tourism?
I know you mentioned Indonesia never got the yellow card it should have and that certainly creates less incentives for them to straighten their act. But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?
> But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?
all blast fishing is a failure of governance so I'd say yes but the fishing cultures here in SEA are so different from anywhere else in the world so it's very hard to govern without strong central body. Lots of cultural, religious, poverty and spiritual stuff mixed into all of that which really complicates things.
IMO Thailand has a much stronger centralized government and just better geography to make enforcement easier. It's mostly mainland with coastlines while Indonesia is mostly islands which are notoriously difficult to govern. So to answer your question, it's probably just that incentives in Thailand go much further due to all of these variables.
While it's hard to regulate fishing when your country is made up of endless islands, it's quite easy to regulate dynamite. So no, I don't think the number of islands is an excuse.
In Fiji, for example, no fisherman could get dynamite if they wanted it. The only way to get that is if you run a (very heavily regulated) mine, or a quarry, and you'd have to account for every blast.
The fishermen don't use regular dynamite. They make their own with easily available agricultural and mining chemicals, which are impossible to ban on the island without other worse effects.
If you think islanders are not adept at contraband, you should read more, or better, history books.
Does it have to be dynamite or are other, improvised explosives possible?
Ammonia nitrate (fertilizer) + diesel + a blasting cap is what was used in the Oklahoma City bombing iirc.
The article mentioned fertilizer - that’s not straightforward to control and precisely account for.
Its a cultural- my family first, the rest of the world distant second. Seems to get you desert wherever that culture goes.
Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
It is not less difficult to save the orangutans while people are being killed too.
Care to explain for those of us unaware?
The island of New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It hosts roughly 7% of all global species, with 60% of them being endemic. Peopled by Melanesians, it's one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, with over 1000 languages.
The east of the island became independent (from Australia) in 1975 and is now Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, the western half was handed over to Indonesian control following the end of Dutch rule, a status formalized through the controversial, UN-backed 1969 "Act of Free Choice" in which a tiny, handpicked group of local leaders voted under military duress to integrate with Indonesia.
Indonesia has been conducting a decades-long genocide of the people of West Papua. It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn. Slaughter the Papuan people, replace them with Javanese, then bulldoze their forests to grow palm oil.
For more, read the abstract (or the entire paper) here: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/for...
There's a timeline of the history of the "conflict" here: https://www.papuapartners.org/west-papua
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/west-papuan-separatis...
It's ignored because Indonesia annexed West Papua when it was a Soviet client. When it annexed East Timor later, it had switched to being a US client. So this second annexation received a great deal of bad press - including, critically, the Australian far left, whose campaign led to Australia pressuring Indonesia to let it intervene militarily in 1999.
>It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn.
Is it not rather down to identity? If the victims had paler skin and a different religion, we'd never stop hearing about it. But unfortunately for Papuans their complexion is too dark for international media to care and the perperators are with "You-Know-Who".
No I don't know who "You-Know-Who" is, speak plainly.
Well, I wouldn't call it a genocide, its not a civil war neither, maybe sometimes violent separatist movement would be the best description? There are videos of attacks from both sides, also one can still see in 2026 tribal warfare where they use their traditional spears, but ie in urban setting.
Situation you describe is not unique for former colonies all around the world, how breakup of former empires was generally handled is the peak of colonial incompetence and worse, and most of Africa and Middle east are a huge mess due to that.
Its one thing when one draws a nice square around Wyoming for example, another when such straight line makes you suddenly part of country led by your rival tribe, with different religion, priorities and often outright hate towards you (and usually long history of violent conflicts to build upon).
> Situation you describe is not unique for former colonies all around the world
This isn't a former colony. West Papua is colonised still, by the country of Indonesia.
It's not a separatist movement, but an independence struggle. Of course there are attacks from both sides. You aren't suggesting that West Papuans should lie down and be ethnically cleansed without fighting back are you?
And the Javanese of Indonesia aren't just a different tribe, they've a completely different race from completely different lands.
> It's not a separatist movement, but an independence struggle.
What's the difference?
> And the Javanese of Indonesia aren't just a different tribe, they've a completely different race from completely different lands.
Why would that matter? Would it be okay if they were the same race? How do you define race?
A separatist movement is generally one where a group wants to secede and become their own country. See Alberta in Canada.
An independence struggle is where a people are trying to remove an occupying force, their colonizer.
Very similar, but not quite.
> Why would that matter? Would it be okay if they were the same race? How do you define race?
It matters when the colonizers are racial supremacists who look down on your culture, traditions, and way of life. And as a result of their POV, they confiscate your lands (because they don't accept your unwritten land ownership "titles"), wipe out your men, and replace you with their own people.
> How do you define race?
Head over to reddit where your trolling will be welcomed.
So according to you, American Revolutionary War was a separatist movement but not an independence struggle? > Head over to reddit where your trolling will be welcomed.
Race is a term with a rather vague meaning, if I remember genetics correctly both groups here belongs to the East Asian branch of Humanity although to distant branch, which made me question what the different races are here, understanding you definition of race would have been helpful to understand why you used it instead of ethnic groups.
No trolling here, your weird definition of an independence struggle was definitely a good reason to ask you to define your terms.
> So according to you, American Revolutionary War was a separatist movement but not an independence struggle?
It was both, but yes, more a separatist movement. It was British colonisers separating from their government, not a colonised people overthrowing their colonisers.
Javanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Javanese_people#/media...
Papuans (NSFW): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_New_Guine...
Remember a few years ago when the Chinese dive group were killed by bomb fishermen in Indo?
I'm not surprised that even decades later they have not recovered. It is like old growth forests on the land, once you clear them it can take centuries to recover.
Global international pressure seems to be the only solution to nautiucal problems in particular
Thais will quite commonly bomb fish their neighbour's dam as often as they feel like it. I'm not convinced that they're also not doing it in the ocean, too. It may be happening away from the main diving sites.
heyyyyy are you still on Koh Tao or did you guys move?
Sometimes you learn of an unintended consequence of seemingly good idea wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. I would not put fishing with "plastic bottles filled with explosives" into that category.
"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams."
That doesn't sound right.
I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?
The quote you're referring to came from the study's lead author, a Brit. Presumably he was referring to soccer (which everyone else calls "football"). Furthermore, a soccer field and an American football field are reasonably close in area, so it gets the point across in any case.
However, I will now refer to explosives exclusively in units of Bald Eagles when referring to their mass, and "star spangles" when referring to their energy output.
Don't Brits usually call it a football pitch?
Football field and pitch are fairly interchangeable in the UK.
Brits actually originally called it soccer. They changed to football at some point a while back. Maybe he's doing a super-throwback?
By analogy with another type of football, i.e. rugby football which was nicknamed rugger in the old days. Soccer was always a nickname, and association football the formal name.
This isn't a uniquely American thing to be fair, in the UK it's not unusual to discuss area in terms of football pitches or for very large areas, Wales.
The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
To be fair, who actually has a mental model of what 20,779 square kilometres or 8,023 square miles (the area of Wales expressed as a number) actually looks like? Doesn't matter if you're using imperial or metric, it's not very intuitive beyond the human scale.
If you're trying to communicate 'this much rainforest disappeared' or 'look how large this landmass-sized Antarctic iceberg is' to a wide audience a well-known area is a reasonable way to do it. In Britain basically everyone knows roughly what the size of Wales is relative to the other countries of the UK, even if they don't know its exact size.
20,779 square kilometres you say? Thats trivial, its roughly strip of 20km that is 1000km long. Or 200x100km. If you can't imagine that, thats mostly problem of your practical imagination, I have the image of such area in my head immediately and can map it into various parts of regions around me rather easily.
I don't play football, nor soccer nor rugby nor baseball or similar sports, just like you most probably don't climb on rock. I am not pushing my metric of '2 spans of typical rope length for alpine tightrope 2-people setup ' or similar obscure metric, do I.
What is good about metric is that once you have a good feel for different lengths of mm, cm,meters and kilometres you don’t need to worry about things like “10 Super Bowl stadiums”. You can easily extrapolate what 27km2 means, it doesn’t have to “look like” anything.
That really isn't true. You in particular may be good at such extrapolation, but people as a rule are not. They need a concrete example to relate back to.
I cycle a lot and you get a very good feel for what 20kms feels like guess, so maybe you’re right.
Even NASA uses AUs and degrees which are both not metric.
The UK is arguably worse than the US in this regard. The US has mainly stayed with a system that sticks to one measurement across use cases. If I burn fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallons, I purchase it at the pump in gallons. If Tommy Atkins burns fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallon, he purchases it at the pump in liters; there's an extra step for conversion.
Ah, but minutes (or an hour) don't have any context to a person. "A bomb dropped every two thirds of the duration of a football game, excluding breaks". No, that sounds too mathy. Perhaps "three bombs per two games".
four to five Big Mac's worth.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
Which supersize, with shrinkflation applied or illegal in NY?
What a low value comment. In this case, a European football (soccer) field/pitch is reasonably close in size to an American football field. If the article had used square feet or acres, your comment might be more relevant. Google tells me that FIFA football pitch size is 105 meters long by 68 meters wide (7140 sq m). American football field size is 110 meters long by 53 meters wide (5830 sq m).
Soccer has no fixed pitch size, only upper and lower bounds on the width and height where the size must fall into
You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."
To be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.
Yeah, but the reefs aren't the goal. They're probably mostly not blowing up reef, but occasionally do it it - hence why so many bombs clears so little reef. If it was massively reducing reef coverage, you'd expect to see the method die off once too much reef is gone.
Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.
I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
Had experienced grenade fishing in person on the Vjosa in Albania. Was kayaking when a 20-30(-40?) meters high water column appeared about 300 meters in front of me, accompanied by a big bang. Not cool.
Same place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg
This has been going on for a long long time, and its not going to stop until you address the poverty that leads people to people to make extreme choices in order to survive.
The best way to stop bomb fishing is to give locals a reason to preserve the habitat, like what you see in places like Tulamben.
This is the repo if people are interesting in this work: https://github.com/ben-williams-ai/Bomb-Fishing
How did we get to loonie tunes levels of absurdity? I understand dragnet fishing is destructive, but who first decided that dynamite was a good fishing method?
There are videos of Jacques Cousteau bomb fishing back in the 50's, its nothing new.
Technically it is a good fishing method. It's quick, cheap, and effective. The damage that's done is mostly unseen by the people fishing.
We've done similar things probably since before we were even homo sapiens... or at least as long as we've had control of fire. Setting fire to large areas in order to drive a herd of mammoths of a cliff, for example. Convenient, and much safer than poking angry mammoths with sharpened sticks.
It is easy thus people will do it. Convenience is the single most potent drug we have ever invented.
Man kind - If we can, we will.
Or avoiding starving.
True, in avoiding starving today, we take short cuts unaware they are bring more starving to tomorrow.
Noone who can buy dynamite and a boat is starving.
...mankind invented convenience?
We need to stop our obsession with exploiting animals.
It’s leading us to do insane things damaging our own health and the environment, nevermind how much suffering it’s causing the actual sentient beings we’re using.
This is not an obsession with hurting animals. It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen.
To incentivize them to stop you have to give them better options. In this case, teach a man to not fish with explosives and you’ll feed him for the rest of his life.
> It’s survival and earning a living for these Indonesian fishermen.
Why make excuses for greedy jackasses? Their ancestors didn't invent this 5,000 years ago and it's the "oNlY wAy they can survive." They fished without bombs once. Some guy realized this depraved method works, so now lazy people choose to do it so they can get money faster than the people fishing legitimately can. That's why it's illegal.
5000 years ago was pre-capitalist and if they had struggled getting food on the table and had explosives, they might very well have done the same.
In a world where all wealth accumulates at the top and leaves the bottom in precarious conditions, perversions like these are inevitable and could be resolved by treating human needs as priorities and make sure everyone has their needs met, which with todays productivity we could easily accomplish if we all worked together instead of against each other.
These people make a few dollars a week, stop pretending you know anything about their problems and what its like to watch your children go hungry.
We’re just speculating on the economics here so let’s agree to say making it illegal is not fixing the problem.
Except if you keep bombing the corals eventually there will be no fish for anyone, since the reefs are keys to the ecosystem being sustainable in the long term. If you kill the reefs there will be no fish and no fish in the future.
Exactly, that’s the last sentence in my original comment.
File this under the category "people are f-bomb-ing idiots".
I wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.
This is a very very old technique that predates social media by decades, if not centuries.
Visit Bali and you can find square km's of rubble that used to be reef off the shore of pretty much every beach.
My first encounter with the concept of bomb fishing was the Shapoklyak episode of the soviet cartoon Cheburashka, produced in the 70s. It's been around.
I've been in the water when people were bomb fishing, its terrifying.
There was a diving incident maybe 10 years ago where a group of Chinese divers were killed by bomb fishermen in Indonesia.
There are videos of Jacques Cousteau using dynamite to clear reefs of fish.
Mine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too:
Yeah it’s been around for a while but it’s been at the individual level not at the commercial scale which makes the practice way worse.
It’s been commercial in SE Asia for decades. Personally seen it in Thailand and Indo 20+ years ago.
Blast fishing has been practiced since at least early 20th century. Essentially everyone knows about it and understands how destructive it is, no social media required. Some people just don't care.
Prevalence and availability is changing. Old technique better distribution on how to.
The thought of the fishermen watching tiktok on how to poach is ludicrous. They're perfectly aware about this method and its high illegality. It might be new to some HN readers who aren't going to do this anyway, though.
>how to
Dynamite goes into the water, fish goes belly up, 90% of the catch is lost. It's not rocket science.
idiots? this is clever af. maximum fish for limited effort.
the coral is a tragedy of the commons things; it's a sweet deal for lazy fisherman.
It IS a successful way to fish if you care about feeding your kids tonight, and not in 10 years.
Fishermen were doing this in Indonesia decades ago. Pretty well known technique.
Honest question: How many boats are actually doing this? It might just be one or two, but they are on the water 300+ days per year, and "bombing" for 12 hours a day. I think just one or two boats could do a huge amount of damage. Also, it seems pretty easy to fix this problem: Offer a reasonably large financial reward for information that leads to the arrest/conviction of captains of bomber boats. Probably the workers on those boats are paid very low wages. If you offer the equivalent of one year of earnings for the tip, you can probably catch the captains very quickly. Even better: Pass a law to take possession of the boat from these captains/owners. Then the workers can buy/rent the boat with the reward money and get back to work.
Usually everyone in the fishing villages knows who does it. Often it's not the same people all the time: Individuals may need a larger amount of money than they can get from normal fishing, due to illness of a family member, or necessary repairs to a motorbike they rely on, etc. In a closely knit community you would not report your friend, especially knowing he did it out of desperation.
As far as I know these are not usually larger boats with captains and workers, more single famlilies who own small craft.
I read the article looking for any mention of how they classified the recorded events as bomb blasts versus impulses from seismic surveying for oil and gas. That region has been very active since at least 2015 with seismic surveys and in 2023, the period covered by the article there were several crews operating.
I know that seismic survey acquisition should be easily identifiable because those shots occur at precise intervals during the survey and continue all day long with no breaks unless there is an equipment failure or other reason to shut down. A 10 second interval would be one common example.
The damages from activities like this are terrible. Using explosives as a seismic sources was banned in the late 1970's I think due to harms done to marine mammals and organisms and the environment in general. Since then, airguns firing compressed air have been the dominant marine seismic source. Depending on the bandwidth of the bubble created and the volume of the airgun array they can also be extremely destructive to marine mammals like whales and porpoises so crews employ biologists as whale watchers in those areas where activity can be expected so that the effects on whales can be minimized.
It is still a serious issue in offshore exploration though.
Bomb fishing is something I would expect to hear about from some redneck coon-ass from Lousyana. I guess that people everywhere figured out how to stun fish to improve catch quantities and some use that as the primary method now. Maybe if deeper waters weren't fished out they could just go further offshore. Once you have foreign fleets dragging up everything in their paths then the only fish left are around the reefs.
I wonder if there’s a version of Maslow’s hierarchy that applies to countries/societies.
Kohlberg's theory of moral development comes to mind.
Same with Haiti- teach a man to fish, he eats every day, teach a gang-member to take all the fish and eat the allmende the country starves.
There was a short doco on this in a recent Australian show if anyone is interested
Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.
Yeah, usually everyone in the local communities knows who is dynamite fishing. Doesn't mean they will rat out their neighbor, but education on how it hurts everyone is probably more effective in the long term.
Spot on. Social dynamics eat tech for breakfast in tight-knit communities—incentives and education beat enforcement when people are protecting their own neighbors.
Reminded me of that GTA 3 mission. I thought it was hilariously outlandish. Turns out people actually do it!
Bomb fishing is bad. I am surprised that only 3 football field equivalent areas are destroyed per year in a country as vast as Indonesia.
I hate the idea but this article makes me optimistic that other proactive measures that are not mentioned might be restoring a lot more than this.
Read critically.
For context, a worth-a-read Wikipedia entry regarding the term:
It’s hard to believe this is real. Destroying a vibrant ecosystem for a one-time catch is so selfish and shortsighted it’s amazing to me that anyone would seriously consider doing it.
They're the same brand of morally-bankrupt pieces of shit who poach elephants all day long just to hack off the tusks to grind into some idiot's superstitious penis pills. Someday they'll all be gone and they'll just shrug and move onto the next appalling way of making a quick buck.
People don't poach elephants for penis pills. People poach elephants because poverty is prevalent and they are offered piles of money for tusks.
Expect more elephants to be slaughtered as a result of Elon Musks teardown of USAID.
> Destroying a vibrant ecosystem for a one-time catch is so selfish and shortsighted it’s amazing to me that anyone would seriously consider doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Examples_and_evide... has several examples of prior ‘art’, and I don’t think that list is complete. Herring almost became extinct in the Atlantic in the 1970s, for example.
And that’s only fishing. Other examples include the passenger pigeon, the American bison, and the dodo.
What's so hard to believe? Bomb fishing has been a common practice for decades. And poisoning fishing. And electrocuting fishing. Only first-world citizens would find these surprising in the slightest sense.
The difference between the first world and the rest of the world is that the first world has more sympathy for the non-existing, abstract humans from the distant future.
Dynamite fishing used to be prevalant in the US, based on how widely it is banned. It is explicitly banned in fishing regulations in every state I looked at. There have been jokes and redneck dynamite fishing for decades.
And zero sympathy for the current starving if them not starving would even slightly inconvenience them.
China is doing this with their ghost fleets in south american waters. Just terrible.
North American waters also. The waters off the coast of Cape Cod are being decimated by Chinese-funded vessels, based on what I've heard from local fishermen there at least.
You mean, everyone else is fishing nicely? Are you sure about that?
People will do literally anything if they are hungry enough.
True. However, often times the people benefiting from this are plenty fed.
It's more like "People will do anything for money"
Why to earn billions when you can earn millions?
Money is a claim on valuable things, so people will do anything to get more of valuable things. Some may say that's just an abstracted form of biological hunger.
are there other sources of food available?
The degree to which this lacks empathy for the struggle to survive that people have the world over is harder to believe. Sincerely, though, all fishing is pretty terrible, we (the rich west) have been overfishing and pillaging the oceans for decades. Even now in peak concern for the environment, we really don’t care nearly enough. If you personally want to avoid contributing to ravaging of the planet, switch to a low impact diet (e.g: only eat chicken, or go vegan).
Not to do poverty Olympics, but I once was poor, living on an island, and reliant on fish for a lot of meals. Don’t assume I can’t empathize.
Why so quick to make excuses for selfish and mind-bendingly stupid people? Why are you assigning guilt on the “rich west” for a local practice that is for local consumption? Not every indigenous practice is good. Some are the reason those communities can’t escape poverty. It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
I think some people belong to the very popular new religion that holds as dogma that anything bad done by someone in the developing world must be the fault of evil Westerners somehow.
> It’s not colonialism or oppression, their problem is stupidity.
bingo
>this lacks empathy for the struggle to survive
The article addresses that objection.
I think its hard to understand for people why some people bomb fish. It's mostly profound poverty.
The people want better for themselves, similar to people here. Since this is speaking about people in Sulawesi, they don't really have any money or work there. It's largely jungle, mining, farms.
I'll just give an example with some of the people i spend time with whenever I'm in Indonesia.
Eko lives in his village. He largely has no real job or work. He catches fish sometimes. Different ways. Sometimes with rod. Sometimes he shimmies an air tank with an air pipe underwater and spears them. He might get bends and die of the pains of it. I told him he shouldn't fish like that, but he still does it.
You see, Eko does crazy things because wants his two kids to live better than him. He wants them to live more like those folks in Jakarta, with air conditioning and sanitary toilets. Eko thinks his life isn't great, but he makes do with it. He largely does not have a vehicle besides a weak scooter, he brings his kids together with. His hut is poor, and he built it himself with concrete and bamboo. No electrical. He defecates into a hole toilet he learned to build from his friend. Sometimes he defecates into the river.
Eko's father died recently. The father likely died of poor treatment. The hospital is about 2 hours away in the main city. The hospital is poorly run. Its red lights make you feel ill; there is barely any materials or equipment.
Sometimes he thinks he needs to bomb something to get more fish. It doesn't ever get him enough money because he needs a lot more than he does get from it. Even if his wife works on her tobacco farm, there is very little at the end of the month. Maybe his kids will die too in that same hospital. Some of my friend's kids died in similar fashion last year. Maybe an earthquake will happen again, and all the stuff that they've been doing will just be burnt away.
Poverty. It's uh, quite bleak.
The article argues that attributing it solely to poverty is a mistake, and that because of several cost barriers it's more likely being done by middle-income fishers.
I can't believe this is still a thing.
yeah maybe lets not do bomb fishing
Ricidulous fishing in real life
Well - bombs sounds fancy. How about those huge trawlers that drag everything out? Does not sound as dangerous as bomb fishing. But destroys more than bomb fishing objectively.
Ecocide should be taken as seriously as homicide.
It’s wild that people are this dumb.
I’m sure if you told an indigenous tribe you were planning to do this they’d agree that it’s stupid, yet here we are.
Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]
[0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...
>Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...
>The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.
That's addressed in the article? The claim made is that this is more a way of middle-income market-trading fishermen increasing their catch and profit. Those at the bottom can't afford the necessary explosives.
Yeah, why go through all of the effort to blame this on colonialism? Maybe these people just suck and don't care/don't know any better. We can't make everything a problem of colonialism.
They feel superior to those “lesser” humans, when denying them equal intelligence, agency, and morality.
They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.
that's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market
you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening
> it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique'
From the article:
> While understudied, the incentives for the use of dangerous dynamite fishing are often falsely attributed solely to poverty and desperation.
> The cost barrier to buying boats, bombs, and detonators means it’s more likely a practice for middle-income fishers, according to experts.
How big of a boat do you think you need to scoop up some fish?
None of those things cost a lot of money and the return on investment for just affording a single bomb pays for itself almost immediately.
I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
> While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets — identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
No fishers, no food.
Incoherent, broken logic.
No bombs, no fishers.
Damn, watertight logic
What's the point of this post? if you're trying to shame people into vegetarianism it's not going to work, and I'm one myself.
There's basically one solution to bomb fishing: make it economically nonviable. You could ban it an punish the people doing it, which is often the immediate action taken and seems like the path being set up here...
but really any money spent on enforcement may be better spent on setting the bomb fishers up with the tools to make a living doing something else — ironically "teach a man to fish"
I'm not a veggie, but I do think bomb fishing is a horrific idea. Let alone commercially.