Back in the Saddle Again

(A slightly different version was published in Bali Advertiser, Dec. 30, 2009)

“I shall return.” – Gen. Douglas MacArthur

If you don’t think that the world is in its death throes, then you haven’t been paying attention. That might seem an uncharacteristically absolutist statement for a skeptic to make, but I live in Jakarta now, and from here, everything looks like the apocalypse.

In the past few weeks, there have been these items in the news:

· Hong Kong imports 90 percent of its seafood. That is, a city by the sea imports nearly all of its seafood because its own waters are too polluted to support edible fish. Elsewhere in the world’s oceans, while other fish stocks are dwindling due to pollution and overfishing, jellyfish are swarming and moving northward as ocean waters warm. To top it off, Charles Moore, a sailor and researcher who discovered a garbage patch in the northern Pacific that is now twice the size of Texas, says he believes there are several other large oceanic garbage patches to be found.

· Forty percent of Jakarta is below sea level, and the city sinks at such a rate that 25 percent of it will be underwater by 2050, according to a climatologist and an urban development expert, the result of overbuilding, poor city planning, unsustainable water use and global warming. The climatologist from the Bandung Institute of Technology said parts of northern Jakarta would likely be permanently submerged by 2015, while the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport would be underwater by 2030. Even with my hate-hate relationship with this city, I can’t take this as an improvement on it, especially in light of the implications for other coastal cities around the world.

· Closer to home, Bali’s annual foreign tourist arrivals have crossed the 2 million mark this year -- the central statistics office reported that foreign visitors flying into Ngurah Rai airport in 2009 had totaled 1.98 million at the end of October – and tourism officials are likely to raise their targets for 2010. If you look at the strain the increases of the past few years are already placing on the existing infrastructure and local culture, then you know the island can’t handle it. Heck, not even the airport can handle such an inflow of visitors, although the numbers are sure to delight the immigration and customs officers who’ve never seen a tourist they weren’t prepared to separate from euros and dollars. But does anybody really think that officials, 5-star hotel operators, rapacious airport staff and transport drivers are sated and not already dreaming of 3 million suckers, er, tourists a year?

For those who weren’t around or don’t remember, I wrote the original Bali Skeptic column for the Bali Advertiser for two years, from mid-2005 to mid-2007, the overall theme being that all too often, we human people get ideas in our head that no amount of contradictory reality (real reality as opposed to TV reality) can remove. Thus, as the news above demonstrates, too many of us believe we can continue to live our throwaway lifestyles with no eternal damage to the environment, and that more and bigger is always better. And despite all evidence to the contrary, the hairy-shirted individuals who know the score is Humans 10, Earth 0 in late injury time, hope that someday men and women will finally get “it” in sufficient numbers that destruction and degradation of our world will stop and a healing will begin.

As the recent ineffectual climate-change conference in Copenhagen should demonstrate: No such luck. Not even in “magical” Bali, I’m afraid, which year after year gets voted among the top tourist destinations by international travel magazines and associations, as if visitors and travel writers can’t see the raw sewage threatening to spill over a containment pit onto the beach at the former Dreamland, can ignore the daily traffic jams in the center of Ubud and the trash in the rivers, and put out of mind that as more and more tourists are encouraged to come and tourism goals are set higher and higher, Bali as a tourist destination is quickly becoming the most overrated “island paradise” in the world.

So, though I made no Arnie-like or MacArthur-esque promises, here I am again, two years older, marginally wiser and still gainfully employed after having left Bali for Bangkok in the middle of 2007. Now I’m posted in Indonesia’s fair capital at another job, hoping that proximity to the mother island will pull me back to her long-suffering bosom. Let’s see how long we can keep the party going while the ship goes down.

Copyright © 2009 Lee Roy LeRoi