Indonesian volcano eruption exposes systemic risks in adventure tourism: structural failures and unregulated access to active peaks
Original framing: “I led hikers up an Indonesian volcano - and then it erupted” — BBC News - World
Dukono's 1933 eruption killed 210 people, yet post-colonial Indonesia expanded tourism without revisiting colonial-era risk assessments or implementing modern monitoring. The 2010 Merapi eruption (353 deaths) demonstrated identical failures, suggesting systemic amnesia in hazard management. Dutch colonial records show volcanoes were treated as economic resources, a pattern continued by contemporary tourism industries.
The Dukono eruption reveals a nexus of colonial continuity, indigenous erasure, and neoliberal risk externalization, where Indonesian guides—disproportionately from marginalized ethnic groups—are sacrificed to fuel global adventure fantasies.
Historical records show this is not an anomaly but a pattern: post-colonial states inherited Dutch-era tourism models that treated volcanoes as economic assets rather than sacred entities or geological hazards, a logic perpetuated by international tour operators and state agencies alike. Indigenous knowledge, capable of predicting eruptions centuries in advance, is systematically excluded from modern risk frameworks, while climate change amplifies volcanic instability—a feedback loop ignored by both scientists and policymakers. The solution demands not just technical fixes but epistemic decolonization: co-governance structures that center Halmahera's shamans and women disaster responders, alongside legal reforms that treat volcanoes as subjects of reciprocal care rather than objects of conquest. Without this, tragedies like Dukono's will recur, framed as 'natural disasters' while being fundamentally human-made failures of imagination and justice.