Vietnam’s Empty Forests
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My guess is it will take another generation for people there to appreciate how blessed they are to live in such surroundings but by then it will unfortunately be too late. To some extent this is just the inevitable consequence of a small but populous country hurtling into modernity but there are also some important cultural attitudes that need to change.
However, the one thing that always caught me off guard from the few oversea trips that I've taken is that _everything is so clean over there_. That's literally the first thing that I always noticed when I get there and when I came back. Makes me feel sad, envious, and shameful.
My wife, who is originally from Indonesia, always notices the same thing in The Netherlands. The contrast couldn't be bigger. She also has these feelings of sadness and shame.
Oh gosh. The two eternal hazards of my childhood (that my parents would yell at me about) were dog shit and broken glass. I distinctly remember going to a school playground when I was about 6, and wanted to crawl through a plastic tunnel, but didn't when I saw a huge pile of shit in the middle.
Now, pooper scooper laws took care of the former, but people still get drunk off their ass and leave bottles everywhere.
I am not sure this is true, isn't it that potential for damage to the enviroment (beyond only simple trash) increases with the economic power of the nation and therefore preservation would have to track economic progress?
I would think that preservation efforts would have track economic progress, but the effects lag in time and therefore gets noticed too late and costly renaturation efforts need to happen.
As a Vietnamese local, why do you think the plastic pollution is so widespread here? Sure, everything is packed in plastics, but so is in Japan. Why do people just not think twice about throwing their waste in a ditch or a river or leave their picnic at the beach? Or is most of it coming from the sea? What could change the mentality?
In the West in the early 20th century we also had burning heaps of trash in abandoned or empty lots.
What changed? I have never studied this, but I know we implemented large scale clean up projects, passed new laws and made a cultural shift in attitudes.
Hell, in the 60s you could watch wonderfully informational movies as this on the one and only available TV station https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrcrX9Qaw2o. (skip to 1:15 for the recommended practise of waste removal near the ocean).
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CryingIndian
>>>> My guess is it will take another generation for people there to appreciate how blessed they are to live in such surroundings but by then it will unfortunately be too late.
This in the parent comment is strange. It wasn't too late everywhere else, and it obviously won't be too late in Vietnam either. A clean environment is a luxury you can afford when you're rich. Poor places are dirty, but it's not like they can't be cleaned.
- Convenience & economic: one kg of nylon bag costs around 2$, 20~40 times cheaper than biodegradable plastic, and nylon bag are taxed at more than 100%.
- Local market are full of farmers selling their fresh vegetables, poultry or pork. So when I go buy food for my dinner I come back with 3~5 bags, with each ingredients having their own bag. While a visit to supermarket often result in 1 bag for all of those.
- Average Vietnamese simply wasn't taught how precious nature is. Just 30 years ago we were riding on wood gas truck or cars modded to run on kerosene mixed with gasoline. There is a saying "Prosperity brings respect" (roughly translated) in Vietnam, and we are still poor and too busy to make more money.
- We simply don't have the facility for classifying trash and recycling/burning them.
I think there are two main reasons. First, many people don't have environmental awareness. They weren't taught. That's not to blame them, but it's just a fact. However the new generations are indeed educated on that subject. We were taught to not litter, to pick up the trash, etc. But this is where the second issue lies: when we don't follow the rules, nothing happens. No immediate consequences. Whereas in other developed countries, when people break the rules, they get fined, they get other people looking at them funny. That collective awareness helps enforce the simple rules.
I also got the feeling that small bays that were labelled as nice in our perhaps a bit dated travel guide were filled with large hotels between the time since they were labeled as such and when we arrived.
Overall though I found Vietnam very, very beautiful indeed and the people were very kind as well (outside the tourist industry at least).
I guess it's an education thing, as kid I constantly heard in school: Plastic stays around for 2500 years! Birds choke on your chewing gum! The hole in the ozone layer is our fault! TBH I felt pretty burdened, sad and responsible by/for it, but I guess it has its advantages.
[0] https://send.firefox.com/download/c48c1add8b2d74a0/#qxQ-qoh-...
This is the first I've heard of this one. It sounds reasonable, but something tells me your school was using this as an excuse to keep kids from sticking their gum all over the place ;)
There is no real US substitute I can think of for experiencing living in Vietnam.
I grew up in NoVA, and would go on month-long summer trips to Vietnam with my family to visit relatives. My asian friends from China, India, and the Philippines would go on similar trips with their families too, so we would share stories and commiserate with each other. We joked with the Korean kids how they had it easy, and would tell the White kids how it's like the opposite of 'vacation'.
Living outside Hanoi with my relatives and seeing day-to-day life in Vietnam made me thankful for my Western lifestyle. I was used to the typical US suburban cushiness, and this was like bootcamp: no A/C, no American toilets (only squat ones), less reliable internet, widely varying food standards (having diarrhea in Florida-like weather is awful), and commonplace dirtiness and pollution (imagine NYC before the EPA but more widespread).
Even for me, there would be moments of culture shock seeing street food vendors selling field rats or shop owners dumping loose garbage into alleys. Things you would be shocked to see happen in the US without immediate reprimand and regulation are "just a part of life" in Vietnam. There is a huge cultural disconnect to hurdle between practices that are acceptable in Vietnam vs. the US.
Finally, there is the topic of education. For those asians who came from rural lifestyles not very long ago, education was not widely accessible or particularly advanced (e.g. college-level subject study), thus, many people did not grow up receiving the same learnings. This is where folk beliefs come in and fill the void (i.e. the "old wives tale" equivalent). It's information based on tertiary cause-effect understanding, or explanation derived from non-scientific study. For example, a handful of my older relatives believe that rains causes lice (as in lice spontaneously generate from rain), therefore, keeping your head dry in the rain prevents lice. This is something that could be easily discredited if there was effort put into convincing them otherwise or letting them discover it's not true.
It's really an incredible shame that ignorance, unawareness, and fallaciousness have lead to such a tragedy of animals and environments being destroyed. Vietnam needs more figures to go out into the public and address ass-backwards thinking like drinking bile or eating horns will cure ailments. It's certainly as dumb or dumber than anti-vax stories. Modern medicine is already a solution to many of these "folk cures", with greater efficacy and less harm, yet it's ignored in favor of some random concoction because that's the "traditional way". It makes as much sense as hanging herbs in my doorway to ward off the flu over getting a flu shot.
I think they have a difficult decision to make in terms of balancing raising the quality of life of the people through industrialization and tourism against preserving their natural heritage.
Here in the UK, it's easy to chastise Vietnam for not preserving their wildlife when we have nothing left to destroy. We already have a developed economy and we did destroy all the habitats in the process.
I don't think there is an easy answer for Vietnam and other places in a similar situation such as Borneo. I just hope the next generation have some natural beauty left in the world.
The deforestation of the UK is a lot older than I think many people realise. I used to have a really good link but can’t locate it now, https://treesforlife.org.uk/forest/deforestation/ is a less detailed timeline which looks to convey a similar story.
> The peak for Scotland's woodlands was about 5,000 years ago, when tree cover and diversity was at its greatest extent.
> "natural changes in climate, and around 4,500 years ago" and "The treeline became lower"
> By the time the Romans arrived, over half of our native forests had been lost
> By the 18th century, woodland cover reached its all time low
I’m not sure how I feel about lambasting other countries for deforestation after we’ve done ours. Perhaps we should offer to return ours to its natural state to set a good example……..
There are many plants and animals living in the hedges, stone walls/hills, grazed fields etc that wouldn't be there otherwise. (And even completely new bioms, like heath land [0].) The land cultivation left plenty of space and weeds for them.
But then, the same was true for the Amazon, which was not the untouched wild forest that the West considered it at all, with millions of people living there and changing the land before contact [1]. One theory is even that the forest is as big as it is due to this history [2].
The relationship of nature and humans over cultures and times is quite interesting and relevant, I think.
In western culture, there is this historical dichotomy (dating back to at least the Greeks if not Mesopotamia), of humans being completely separate from nature, and their civilized, ordered but distructive, maybe even evil character, and the wild and noble wilderness, pristine and innocent, on the other side. (Consider also the views on indigenous populations during the age of colonialism.)
This is not a view held in all cultures, and this plays heavily into this kind of discussion under the surface.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath#Anthropogenic_heaths
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest#Human_activi...
I understand differences, but how can you live in these circumstances; it's not only the very poor, it's also in front or in gardens of villa's in those countries. No-one seems to care. It's a crying shame as all of these have amazing nature contrasted with utter disregard of that nature in many ways.
I've seen it with the wife's family (middle class South American). They are used to my strange ways now, but they were shocked when they saw me washing the car, doing the gardening, tidying the yard, "why are you doing that, you have money, just pay someone".
People don't just suddenly change their habits because they have more money. I'm in Taiwan and see rich people live with what seems like poor people habits all the time. Everyone is simply used to it and sees it as normal.
I think attitude changes are more likely a result of education and the opinions and behavior of your peers. Limited contact with other cultures and ideas keeps habits and concepts of normalcy where they are.
Hell, in the US 50 years ago it wasn’t that uncommon to find trash everywhere.
It may be related to wealth, but it has to be something else as well.
This does not even follow from the parent comment. I quote:
" it's not only the very poor, it's also in front or in gardens of villa's in those countries. "
I live in Panama, which might have higher per capita GDP than some of those countries, but it still has high income inequality. I have been to neighborhoods with small houses, no glass windows, and no painted walls, all markers of low income, given the somewhat americanized consumption habits of the middle class population. The worst you would see is that they burn their trash, because no one is coming to pick it. They have gardens will plants, both for food and decoration. People with higher income just buy more land, a grass mower, and irrigate their grass in the dry season. So, I see this behavior as a matter culture. Clearly in neither case are people "too occupied with bare survival" but neither has a cold-minded science-based idea of what it means to care for one's surroundings.
And I'm not saying even the poorest individual can't handle their own waste, I'm just positing that the effort required to do so is inversely correlated with income.
If anything I'd prefer if people were more careless with their trash in the "nice" places since this is where most of the people responsible for designing and producing this stuff tend to live and under our current arrangement these minds are somewhat insulated from the actual impact of producing long-lived objects of marginal utility.
I'll ask my friend what they pay for trash pickup. I'm sure there must be something because they didn't have huge piles of trash around their home.
* notable because usually the correlation is with income/culture, but Rwanda is not rich nor much different culturally from neighbouring trash-inundated countries.
But that is South Africa, not really a poor African nation.
Vietnamese people are taught in schools: We have everything naturally, our forests are gold, our beaches are silver. We're proud of it.
Results: Blindly and stupid education is a serious problem in Vietnam. Large percentages of past generation is lazy, not productive.
I don't even mention politics here. A hell.
Shortly, to be successful and rich in Vietnam, you don't need talent or hard-working. You just need relationship.
Who is Ho Chi Minh ? I don't even know if he was Chinese or Vietnamese.
Most of what was told in schools are lie.
Yes, it's a shocking truth: Most of things they taught us in schools are lie. To protect that communist party.
Polices are to protect that party. No bad voice is allowed here.
If you shout out bad things at the party, you'll be caught and get killed silently. Noone knows where you are.
Do you have actually examples rather than hyperboles?
The point here is that, as we grew up, we try to find out what the fact was, and it's not the same thing that they taught us.
I don't even care what's the actual truth is, i just care that, they taught us the untruthy things.
There is misinformation from every sides, but be careful with blanket statements like that, because they're almost always false. For example, look up the 10/59 Decree where they brought guillotines throughout the southern rural areas and executed people on the spot if they suspected them of being communists.