Send them some subsidies from those large American coffers then, and they won't need to
paimapi · 2026-08-25 14:57:09 UTC
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]
>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.
>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.
Poacher5 · 2026-08-25 15:00:32 UTC
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.
mushi_shi · 2026-08-25 15:02:05 UTC
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.
zmgsabst · 2026-08-25 16:17:09 UTC
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”.
paimapi · 2026-08-25 15:09:43 UTC
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
joshuaissac · 2026-08-25 15:08:40 UTC
> 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.
parineum · 2026-08-25 15:20:17 UTC
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.
pingou · 2026-08-25 14:44:42 UTC
"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.
deadbunny · 2026-08-25 14:47:37 UTC
I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?
cannonpr · 2026-08-25 15:01:20 UTC
You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…
chinathrow · 2026-08-25 15:06:24 UTC
I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.
franciscop · 2026-08-25 15:07:14 UTC
I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour
AlwaysRock · 2026-08-25 15:17:50 UTC
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."
throwaway2037 · 2026-08-25 15:53:21 UTC
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.
kulahan · 2026-08-25 22:54:28 UTC
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.
ryandrake · 2026-08-25 15:25:21 UTC
I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?
throwaway2037 · 2026-08-25 15:42:38 UTC
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).
ctenb · 2026-08-26 06:48:23 UTC
Soccer has no fixed pitch size, only upper and lower bounds on the width and height where the size must fall into
BoxOfRain · 2026-08-25 16:01:16 UTC
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.
shevy-java · 2026-08-25 17:21:39 UTC
The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
lenerdenator · 2026-08-25 18:21:24 UTC
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.
BoxOfRain · 2026-08-25 18:56:44 UTC
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.
bamboozled · 2026-08-25 20:46:32 UTC
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.
bigstrat2003 · 2026-08-25 23:42:33 UTC
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.
bamboozled · 2026-08-26 12:14:30 UTC
I cycle a lot and you get a very good feel for what 20kms feels like guess, so maybe you’re right.
kakacik · 2026-08-26 09:01:36 UTC
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.
AngryData · 2026-08-25 21:17:06 UTC
Even NASA uses AUs and degrees which are both not metric.
red-iron-pine · 2026-08-25 16:51:45 UTC
four to five Big Mac's worth.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
thoughtbefore · 2026-08-25 22:07:20 UTC
Which supersize, with shrinkflation applied or illegal in NY?
superbatfish · 2026-08-25 17:48:38 UTC
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.
toast0 · 2026-08-25 21:34:29 UTC
Don't Brits usually call it a football pitch?
kulahan · 2026-08-25 22:37:01 UTC
Brits actually originally called it soccer. They changed to football at some point a while back. Maybe he's doing a super-throwback?
nephihaha · 2026-08-26 07:46:53 UTC
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.
merely-unlikely · 2026-08-27 17:19:10 UTC
The term "football" was used in medieval England to refer to sports played on foot as opposed to on horseback. There was a class element too as football games (of which there were many types) were played by the common man while equestrian sports were the realm of the elites. There were even laws passed regulating how much "football" could be played so it wouldn't distract from other peasant responsibilities.
IneffablePigeon · 2026-08-26 07:29:23 UTC
Football field and pitch are fairly interchangeable in the UK.
Gravityloss · 2026-08-26 12:00:12 UTC
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".
wlaw15 · 2026-08-25 14:45:16 UTC
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.
I bet many of the people here moaning and whinging eat fish themselves!
kubb · 2026-08-25 15:00:06 UTC
I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%
heyitsmedotjayb · 2026-08-25 15:04:07 UTC
No fishers, no food.
everdrive · 2026-08-25 15:08:47 UTC
No bombs, no fishers.
aqfamnzc · 2026-08-25 16:01:00 UTC
Damn, watertight logic
kubb · 2026-08-25 15:09:57 UTC
Incoherent, broken logic.
spindump8930 · 2026-08-25 15:19:52 UTC
> 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.
micromacrofoot · 2026-08-25 15:42:46 UTC
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"
nephihaha · 2026-08-26 07:40:11 UTC
I'm not a veggie, but I do think bomb fishing is a horrific idea. Let alone commercially.
boringg · 2026-08-25 15:09:36 UTC
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.
dmkolobov · 2026-08-25 15:18:44 UTC
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.
mc32 · 2026-08-25 15:23:52 UTC
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.
dghlsakjg · 2026-08-25 16:53:00 UTC
It’s been commercial in SE Asia for decades. Personally seen it in Thailand and Indo 20+ years ago.
alwa · 2026-08-25 17:17:39 UTC
Mine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too:
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.
red-iron-pine · 2026-08-25 16:50:03 UTC
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.
dghlsakjg · 2026-08-25 16:52:24 UTC
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.
orbital-decay · 2026-08-25 17:02:02 UTC
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.
boringg · 2026-08-25 17:29:15 UTC
Prevalence and availability is changing. Old technique better distribution on how to.
orbital-decay · 2026-08-25 17:51:29 UTC
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.
DarmokTanagra · 2026-08-26 09:01:20 UTC
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.
pranav_tech26 · 2026-08-25 15:27:33 UTC
Low-cost acoustic sensors paired with community reporting usually beat complex tech solutions when enforcing marine boundaries in remote areas.
shellfishgene · 2026-08-26 12:53:43 UTC
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.
pranav_tech26 · 2026-08-26 12:56:04 UTC
Spot on. Social dynamics eat tech for breakfast in tight-knit communities—incentives and education beat enforcement when people are protecting their own neighbors.
wraptile · 2026-08-25 15:39:19 UTC
I'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?
throwaway2037 · 2026-08-25 15:46:50 UTC
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.
wraptile · 2026-08-25 16:01:56 UTC
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.
bbondo · 2026-08-25 16:20:36 UTC
Have any areas in GoT shown recovery from blasting and/or bleaching without human intervention? I have fond memories of Koh Tao circa 2009...
wraptile · 2026-08-25 16:48:35 UTC
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!
randoomed · 2026-08-25 20:21:13 UTC
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
throwaway2037 · 2026-08-26 02:33:50 UTC
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].
Thailand doesn't have the conditions required for corals to thrive. The best, most beautiful coral come from Indonesia.
throwaway2037 · 2026-08-27 06:14:45 UTC
The coral in Andaman Sea (west side) is as good as Indonesia. Currently, most coral restoration projects are using table coral. Both places have plenty of it.
ghm2199 · 2026-08-25 16:18:02 UTC
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?
wraptile · 2026-08-25 16:38:26 UTC
> 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.
markdown · 2026-08-25 21:37:25 UTC
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.
lmz · 2026-08-25 21:55:31 UTC
Does it have to be dynamite or are other, improvised explosives possible?
floam · 2026-08-26 00:52:14 UTC
The article mentioned fertilizer - that’s not straightforward to control and precisely account for.
chasd00 · 2026-08-26 11:59:04 UTC
Ammonia nitrate (fertilizer) + diesel + a blasting cap is what was used in the Oklahoma City bombing iirc.
cm2012 · 2026-08-25 22:41:18 UTC
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.
huurtehoog · 2026-08-26 10:52:23 UTC
If you think islanders are not adept at contraband, you should read more, or better, history books.
markdown · 2026-08-25 21:40:10 UTC
Indonesia gets a free pass for an ongoing genocide, so it's not surprising nobody cares about them breaking coral.
SEJeff · 2026-08-25 22:35:39 UTC
Care to explain for those of us unaware?
markdown · 2026-08-26 00:22:00 UTC
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.
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.
trompetenaccoun · 2026-08-26 08:43:40 UTC
>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".
HappyPanacea · 2026-08-26 14:31:24 UTC
No I don't know who "You-Know-Who" is, speak plainly.
kakacik · 2026-08-26 08:43:47 UTC
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).
markdown · 2026-08-26 09:56:54 UTC
> 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.
HappyPanacea · 2026-08-26 15:47:14 UTC
> 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?
markdown · 2026-08-26 20:06:20 UTC
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.
Comments
[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.
They’re just getting off on being racist to the “savages who don’t know better”.
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
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.
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.
That doesn't sound right.
Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.
UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.
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.
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.
advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?
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.
The article agrees, assuming "here" is global north tech workers.
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 wouldn't be surprised if social media was spreading this technique as successful way to fish.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA&
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.
the coral is a tragedy of the commons things; it's a sweet deal for lazy fisherman.
Fishermen were doing this in Indonesia decades ago. Pretty well known technique.
>how to
Dynamite goes into the water, fish goes belly up, 90% of the catch is lost. It's not rocket science.
Visit Bali and you can find square km's of rubble that used to be reef off the shore of pretty much every beach.
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?
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Livingseas+Coral+Restorati...
[2] https://www.reefrestorationbali.com/
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?
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.
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 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...
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".
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).
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.
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?
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.