Hi everyone!

This post will be slightly different from previous posts – while previous posts were centred around getting concepts and ideas across, this will be about a short documentary called “Mountain of Tourist Landfill Threatening Bali’s Paradise” that was filmed in 2014 by an Australian news channel.

We came across while researching on soil pollution for this blog, and for us, we felt that the pictorial illustrations in the short documentary truly brought across the sense of urgency and the gravity of the whole situation regarding pollution from rubbish, and tourism in general.

The documentary opens with how the “green mountains” envisioned by the people of Bali have been turned into an “attraction” off the tourist trail called Mount Rubbish from all the garbage from tourists, and screens footage of waste being found everywhere in Bali, even under the houses of people.

The narrator then points out that all of the rubbish leaches into the soil, resulting in the pollution of the groundwater that Bali’s inhabitants draw on for drinking water – a perfect example of how pollutants that first pollute the land can be mobilised and eventually end up in an aquatic sink, poisoning the water it finds itself in.

Other issues are covered by the documentary as well, in which the rapid development of tourism infrastructure like shops and hotels is raised as a problem for the Balinese people (whereby hotel construction can be linked to what we covered on heavy metal pollution); additionally, land reclamation plans are protested against due to the levels of secrecy and the potential effects on marine life (linking to aquatic pollution once more).

As a whole, then, the 15 minutes of the documentary are well spent introducing and allowing one to visualise all sorts of problems that the tourism industry can have on both the people and the environment of a place – a problem that has been characterised as stemming from the insatiable appetites of tourist operators and developers, which is something that has to be stopped.

As the former tourism minister of Indonesia was quoted as saying in the documentary, “Don’t be greedy.”

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You can find the documentary here.