The physical footprint of tourism is impossible to miss — hotels, bungalows, restaurants, shops, entire new roads. The economic footprint runs just as deep, with far more money moving through the island than before. The trouble, as he sees it, is where that money settles: mostly with the owners at the top of the enterprise, rarely with the people producing the goods or doing the actual work. Real local benefit is thin, and the costs of generating even that much are considerable.
Social life has drifted toward materialism, local wisdom pushed to the margins. Where people once filled their days with agriculture, they're now occupied earning money by serving tourists — a shift with real consequences for how time itself gets used. Ceremony preparation, once simply made time for when needed, now happens outside ‘business hours’ if at all; increasingly, outside workers, often from Java, are brought in to handle preparations locals no longer have time for themselves.
Bali's pull extends beyond tourism — it's seen more broadly as a safe, attractive place to invest and live, drawing outsiders for reasons that go beyond the visitor economy alone. But the resulting growth is reshaping the island in ways he doesn't see as positive: the environment altered, natural resources depleted, and food imports rising even for materials used in ceremony, since local production hasn't kept pace with a growing resident population.
The traditional, philosophical Subak irrigation system is being replaced by a far more technical system, and the farmers have lost their independence.
Government price controls on rice, meant to stabilise costs, have pushed farmers toward imported Javanese rice varieties that can be harvested more often than traditional Balinese rice — but those varieties demand expensive, environmentally damaging pesticides, fertilisers, and entirely new, also-imported irrigation infrastructure. New roads cutting through rice fields have damaged irrigation systems further, taking land out of production altogether.
Medical care remains expensive with little quality improvement to show for it; education has grown in volume but not depth — students aren't taught to think critically or connect what they learn to daily life, leaving the system, in his words, detached from the reality students actually need to navigate. Public transport offers little real help either, despite World Bank loan conditions meant to fund infrastructure improvements that, in practice, never produced a real traffic management policy.
A separate World Bank initiative — land certification — made it far easier for people to sell land quickly, a shortcut to money that just as often becomes a shortcut back to poverty. That land rarely stays in Balinese hands; it moves instead to outside investors with plans for hotels and golf courses. A quarter of all land in Bali, by his estimate, is already tourism-dedicated, and the share keeps climbing as investors expand and the government keeps approving it.
If we do not limit the degree of tourism development, the island will be ruined, and all the people who helped ruin it will return to their place of origin and leave us with the irreparable damage.
Crime has climbed to levels he's never seen before — robbery, theft, drug dealing, prostitution, and deeply troubling cases of child exploitation, almost entirely introduced and carried out by people from outside Bali, in his account, though a small number of young Balinese have also been drawn in. He calls the disoriented among that generation the ‘floating generation’ — young people struggling to figure out what they actually want from life, experimenting widely, sometimes into territory that costs them, a drift he ties directly to weakening social cohesion within communities.
Relationships between people have grown more individualistic and materialistic even as the relationship between people and their faith, he says, has held steady. Ceremonial dress has become more uniform than it used to be — a shift he attributes to government influence and a Balinese tendency not to question directives from above. Women now compete with men for the same jobs in a way that didn't used to happen, in what was traditionally a male-shaped culture: women once handled ceremony and children, men worked and gambled in their spare time. That division has loosened considerably.
The relationship between parents and children has shifted too. A child used to be treated as an investment — someone who'd inherit both the family's skills and its business. Now, the younger generation shows little interest in continuing the family trade, drawn instead toward tourism money and a version of themselves that doesn't line up with the legacy they were meant to carry forward.
He wants a more transparent tax system — too much money moves through the sale of ‘culture’ with no visible return to the culture itself — and a real seat at the table in tourism development decisions, something his community is actively pushing for. Before Suharto, he recalls, Bali ran on genuine community-level democracy; centralised, military-influenced politics eroded that considerably, though he sees people slowly starting to reclaim a voice again.
Ideally, he says, Bali shouldn't need to depend on tourism at all — tourism should be the extra, not the foundation. “I keep on dreaming,” he says, “hoping one day these necessary improvements will be realized.”