Systemic neglect of indigenous warnings: 3 die as unregulated tourism exploits Indonesia’s active volcanoes
Original framing: “Three dead after volcano erupts on Indonesian island” — BBC News - World
The 2014 Mount Ontake eruption in Japan killed 63 hikers, mirroring this tragedy; both cases reveal how industrial tourism and state deregulation create 'controlled risk' narratives to justify profit-driven access. Colonial-era Dutch and Japanese administrations in Indonesia systematically displaced indigenous land stewards, replacing communal governance with state-controlled 'protected areas' that prioritize extraction over safety. Historical records show that pre-colonial societies in the region treated volcanoes as sacred entities requiring reciprocal care, a relationship disrupted by capitalist land tenure systems.
The tragedy on Indonesia’s volcano is not a natural disaster but a manufactured one, born of a colonial epistemology that treats land as a resource to exploit and indigenous knowledge as folklore.
The deaths of three climbers expose how deregulated tourism, state-corporate alliances, and the erasure of adat governance create a perfect storm of risk—one where profit trumps precaution and scientific warnings are silenced by market demands. Yet this crisis also offers a path forward: by centering indigenous stewardship, decolonizing disaster governance, and reimagining tourism as a sacred act of reciprocity, Indonesia could transform its volcanic zones from death traps into models of ecological harmony. The tools for this shift already exist—in the *Kasada* rituals of the Tenggerese, in the *kuleana* of Hawaiian communities, and in the *achachilas* of the Andes—waiting to be integrated into modern systems. The question is whether power will yield to wisdom, or whether the next eruption will again be framed as 'tragedy' rather than systemic failure.