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24 Just Below the Surface: Environmental Destruction and Loss of Livelihood on an Indonesian Atoll Gene Ammarell Early one morning in March 1992, I was sitting at my desk, getting ready for another day of fieldwork on the remote and generally peaceful Indonesian island of Balobaloang, one of dozens of coral islets scattered near and far along the coast of South Sulawesi. Lost in my thoughts, I was startled by the sound of a distant bomb going off. Running out of my house and down to the shore, my next-door neighbor, a military officer posted to the island, sensed that I was off to find the source of the sound. He waved to me and pointed in the direction of a fishing boat just beyond the edge of the reef flat. “They are bombing for fish,” he explained. “What?” I exclaimed. “They threw a bottle bomb from the boat.” He looked at me and then back out at the boat rocking back and forth in the distance. “The bomb goes off under water and stuns the fish. Then they swim and dive to gather the fish. They catch a lot all at once in this way.” Although I knew very little about blast fishing at that time, I understood that it was highly destructive to the aquatic environment. In fact, the fishermen had dropped the bomb in a place where I often snorkeled, captivated by the luxuriant variety of colorful and exotically shaped corals and tropical fishes. “Isn’t that illegal? Why don’t you stop them?” I wanted to ask the officer, but thought better of it. I was, after all, an American graduate student and guest of the Indonesian government and the local villagers. I was living on the island for a year and a half to study navigational knowledge and practice among the island’s ethnically Bugis seafarers, long renowned across Southeast Asia as deep-water navigators and interisland traders. I had been trained as an anthropology student to be a “dispassionate observer,” and I had been warned by my local host that I should stay out of politics or risk being asked to leave the country before my research was completed. In 1992, Just Below the Surface / 305 Indonesia was still ruled by President Suharto, a former army general who held dictatorial control of the military and country and who allowed little dissent. No, challenging an army officer would not be a good idea. After a few more minutes observing the blast-fishing boat, I took leave of my neighbor and went back to my house to finish preparing my list of questions for that day’s fieldwork. I had been on the island for nearly a year by then, and I did feel comfortable asking those villagers with whom I felt closest about the blast fishing . During that time, it became clear to me that many of them were concerned about the practice, but no one dared speak out about it. I learned that blast fishing was only rarely practiced by the villagers of Balobaloang, and that the blast fishers came from other islands. Just before leaving the island for my return to the United States, I took a telephoto picture of a boat whose crew was gathering up fish stunned by a bomb they had detonated. I gave this photo to a trusted friend who had grown up on the island and had moved to the capital city of Makassar, where he was employed as a civil servant. He said he would show it to people and not reveal its source, but, as far as I know, nothing ever came of this. After completing my doctorate and assuming a teaching position at Ohio University, I returned to Balobaloang in 1997 and again in 2000 to record the life histories of several retired senior Bugis navigators. On those occasions , I stayed in the home of Pak Razak, the captain who had first brought me to Balobaloang aboard his then new 40-ton lambo.1 One morning in 2000, we were standing on the front deck of his house and were startled by the sound of a bomb being detonated beyond the reef flat opposite his house. Without being asked, he offered that this was, indeed, blast fishing and that its occurrences were increasing at a troubling rate, destroying the fishery near the island, and forcing village fishers to travel great distances to find enough fish to feed their families and sell to neighbors. Further...

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