Nomadic Matt published the rarest thing in travel writing, a post telling you to skip Ko Lipe: a visit "will only make things worse." He is right about the island. But a boycott mourns a place without touching who took it.
The reefs are bleaching from sea-surface heat, not from who books a bungalow, so staying home does nothing for them. The real dispossession is a land story. The Urak Lawoi, the sea people who settled the island more than a century ago, were displaced twice: first when Thailand drew a marine park around them, then when investors took the beach through inflated deeds and fraud. By 2022 about 125 families, half the community, had lost legal title. Stay away and the deed still holds. The useful instruction is not "do not go." It is: ask who owns the beach, and whether they were standing on it first.
