Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Too Much

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, June 30, 2010)

“Dear Lord, please send us another oil boom, and we promise that this time we won’t piss it away.” – Yet another Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker from the oil bust of the 1980s

The music didn’t stop until after 3 a.m. It never does. You’ve heard it, same as me, with that thumping bass that comes across the rice fields at night from some near or distant hamlet. Maybe it’s a youth bazaar, maybe some enterprising young man has set up a café in a nearby village to give poor Javanese girls a place of employment (out of the kindness of his heart, you understand).

The first night, Friday, I thought maybe a banjar was having an outdoor screening of the World Cup competition and had a band playing between the matches. But Saturday the music kept pounding right through the late game hours, on toward 4 o’clock.

The problem, of course, is that there aren’t any real enforceable zoning laws for noise or much of anything else. If you are on good terms with the local village pecalang constabulary, sometimes they can be of assistance; if the musical disturbance can be identified only as coming from “over there somewhere,” quiet, sleepless rage is the futile option.

Pity the couple that flies in for a quick romantic getaway from Perth or Singapore only to find that their idyllic bungalow is across the river from the desa where that weekend’s dance never stops.

Add this to the list of complaints that make frequent appearances in the letters section of the local English-language press, alongside gripes about roadside trash dumps, hours-long arrival queues, venal taxi drivers, the high price of alcohol and daily traffic jams. It would seem that even after 40 years of an economy committed to tourism that government officials on every level still struggle to manage the competing wants and needs of local villages and businesses and the expectations of the paying clientele.

The full consequences of this mismanagement aren’t just handfuls of upset tourists and malcontent resident expatriates, as pointed out in the mouthful of a booklet, “Rapid Assessment on Climate Change: Potential Threats and Impact on Bali’s Economy and Community, Livelihoods and the Role of the Tourism Industry” – which was reviewed by Toku Buku in the previous edition of Bali Advertiser (Google “Muriel Ydo climate change” for an online version).

Poor management of solid and household wastes, agricultural land and villa development, transportation infrastructure, energy use, and coastal areas and waterways, when not causing possibly unfixable problems on its own, is exacerbating environmental degradation caused by global climate change.

And in the midst of a tourism boom that has arrival numbers at unprecedented levels and growing in double digits, no one is seen on the horizon with the political will or the commercial courage to put on the brakes and stop the happy-days-are-here-again madness.

How else to explain that sick and queasy feeling I have in my stomach? It’s the same feeling I get when watching the home team in the midst of a late-in-the-game rally, but with the knowledge that ultimately my side will fall, victim of out-of-date coaching strategies and the unsteadiness of post-expiry-date veterans.

Think that I and other commentators (for one, Anak Agung Gde Agung, the social affairs minister under former president Abdurrahman Wahid, in the Jakarta Post on June 9) are deluded doomsayers?

Well, back in another life, when I was a financial journalist covering the oil markets for a living, the price of a barrel of crude oil shot up to US$150 in mid-2008, and market analysts said it was a new day, that the market was different this time, that this time we’d never see oil below US$100 a barrel again. Then they explained it with charts, double-speak and surging demand from China -- and before the end of the year oil was right back down at US$40 a barrel.

It’s just natural that busts follow booms, and that’s as true with commodity tourism as it is with oil futures.

So, somebody – officially or unofficially – had better start paying attention to the complaints of unhappy customers and the myriad warning signs being given off by the overtaxing of resources and the environment, because soon, what used to be thought of as an it-can-only-go-up market will become a nowhere-to-go-but-down market, and hotel, bungalow, restaurant and spa owners will be standing around looking at one another and wondering what happened, where did everybody go?

And right about then the full scale of the problems caused by Bali’s unsustainable development will become too obvious to ignore any longer, only there won’t be any money to put toward fixing the mess.

When that time comes, call me. I’ve got the bumper stickers already made.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi