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?

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.

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.

Kohlberg's theory of moral development comes to mind.

I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?

You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…

I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?

> 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.

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).

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.

People will do literally anything if they are hungry enough.

China is doing this with their ghost fleets in south american waters. Just terrible.

You mean, everyone else is fishing nicely? Are you sure about that?

Same place, ~200 meters away from my tent: https://i.postimg.cc/5NN9w92m/IMG-20220802-173453-MP.jpg

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.

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.

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.

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.

Note that the selfishness of the farmer or fisherman may in certain light differ from the greed of the capitalist, if one’s family endurance depends on it.

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.

I bet almost nobody here eats bombfished fish. <0.1%

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"