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Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
171–180 of 201 posts
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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".
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
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).
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#174File 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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#177This 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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
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 generall…
> 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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
#180How 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?
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.