That’s a pretty strange statement to begin with at a time when everyone is talking about ‘New Year, New Me, New Start, a Fresh Beginning’ etc, etc. but can Bali actually make a new beginning? One that turns the corner to a bold new way of doing things?
The Spanish – American philosopher George Santayana thoughtfully declared: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
And here, as we start 2025, I would love to witness a great ‘sea change’ in the way Bali is developed and administered, but George sadly is probably right on target here in Bali, where memories of things that just do not work, are completely missing and we make the same mistakes over and over.
The biggest mistake – which pretty much leads to all the others – is to think that more visitors is the key to successful tourism. The arrival numbers are totalled and worshipped like the Holy Grail, and presented triumphantly: “A million more visitors than last year… hurray!” That means 100,000 more people every month, needing 2000 more buses or 25,000 cars, creating at least 1,000,000 kg of waste, and using 5,000,000 litres of clean water – every month.
For government statisticians that may mean success, but to the island it condemns us to failure: failure to alleviate the chronic traffic, failure to find a lasting solution to ever increasing waste, failure to secure enough power (and very little so far from renewable energy) failure to zone correctly to prevent the development of arable land, failure to replace the terrorising motorcycles with viable public transport. The list goes on, but somehow those charged with making the important decisions do seem to notice these failures at all, let alone find solutions to resolve them for the future — which are required to be implemented right now!
When you start with the mistaken premise that “more visitors is success” then everything spirals down from there: the desperation to build new hotels, new parks, new shopping malls, new shop-houses, etc to accommodate – no, let’s be honest – to make money from, the visitors, and that desperation leads to the granting of permits without clear holistic plans, and very quickly to the congestion we see every day now in virtually every part of southern Bali, from the airport to Canggu and Berawa, to the west and now increasingly on the Bukit and Uluwatu, and spreading north to Sanur and Ubud.
As I have said a thousand times in the last forty years: Bali has a clear ‘carrying capacity’ beyond which we should not go, beyond which life becomes diminished, as do the very assets for which Bali is famous, sorry, was famous. And we passed that limit at least ten years ago.
As it is very, very unlikely that we will see any brave new changes, I close with another quotation, this time from a man respected for his exceptional thinking, Albert Einstein:
‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
So, the question is: are we suffering from severe memory loss, or are we actually going insane?
May this year prove to be far better for Bali than I dare to hope for!
If you have any comments or wish to share your own thoughts with me, please do so by contacting speirs@phoenix.co.id.
Alistair G. Speirs
Alistair G Speirs, OBE, is the Publisher of NOW! Magazines. He has been in the publishing, advertising and PR business for the last 25 years. He started both NOW! Bali and NOW! Jakarta as each region’s preferred community magazine.
