Maybe it's just these awkward teenage years of development... everyone has just enough Baht now to buy a truck (Thaksin helped that!), buy a scooter, and move past the banana leaf to the luxuries of plastic.. it's in that sad 15 dollar a day range of income where countries like this and Mexico seem to loose their soul to bad habits and self indulgent and small minded living patterns: lots of meat, lots of plastic, lots of driving, lots of environmental abuse, lot's of extraction, and lots of media, but it's not just the small guys, doing their thing, that are a problem.. the big guys are either corrupt or not seeing the degradation that's really happening to the country in all the turmoil being rowed up over and over again by the two parties. I have been told that the Democrats are actually good at thoughtful debate and administration, but their years of neglect of the farmer have left them out of power now for like a decade, and the other side, the Red Shirts may be corrupt, but they did jam in a Metro system and light rail to the Airport that helped Bangkok come back to almost livable, so they seem to like big lucrative projects if it helps mother earth an iota, but the focus on the details of a ecologically harmonious lifestyle that used to mark these rice growing countries are going going gone, and have been headed that way for a while it seems..
Here is what I see occurring.
Start with the big picture... the Satellite Map:
When you look at Thailand, there is something I learned that Ecologists call the Shadow of Thailand.. you can see the borders of Thailand on a satellite photo because the Thai side is inevitably deforested compared to it's neighbors.. the official numbers claim something in the 30% range, but that's not close to the real deal... a source told me that the National Forestry Administration, which is backwards and corrupt according to him, counts tree plantains for things like rubber and palm oil as part of the percentage of ground cover... which might help when it comes to carbon and reflecting and absorbing the sun, but is by no means true forest and wild habitat.. the number likely stands somewhere in the teens...
Here is some data that takes this complex question for what it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Thailand.htm
Thailand has created a bunch of national parks, all very nice.. they kind of cow tow to the demands of Tourism, which is one of the largest industries in the Nation, but few of them feel like the cared for and studied ecosystems of Western National Parks. They feel like what a lot of them are... Tourist Attractions.
The last wild land in Thailand comes in two chunks, one big, the other smaller.. it's the western cluster of forests and parks, the Western Complex, that is the last true Wilderness in the Country. It supposedly has a population of about 500 wild tigers.. it's along the Myanmar border, and to some degree, it's for real.
Another Complex of three parks sits on in a set of hills North East of Bangkok. I was surprised to see it once on a flight in from Hong Kong, as the North East part of the Country, along the Mekong River, is the most deforested, and the poorest.. it is starting to get to that Flat, Hot, and Crowded stage that Thomas Friedman tries to make light of. This strip of three parks, The Prachinburi Complex I believe, sadly has a highway running right through it, but supposedly the western and eastern park are well managed and turning into nice forest land... the one in the middle, Thap Lan National Park, leaves something to be desired I was told. The North has it's parks, but they are inextricably linked with the hill tribes that live in them, and there is little primary forest left, just a lot of what was left from bouts of logging slowly starting the process of trying to wipe out signs of the impacts of man, which I once read can take up to 800 years to occur. I went through Lam Non Kok National Park recently, by boat. It's just one of many Thai National Parks, but by western standards,it seemed a park in name only... I saw nothing pristine about it, nice though it was, and although I saw no evidence of recent logging, there were very few old growth trees in my view, and mostly bamboo thicket. I saw wood gathering going on, and even grazing. It .. it seemed like it had been named a park, but it was really just a hill tribe area, and that logging had already occurred, if not by the English a century ago, by the Thai more recently, but perhaps not int he last ten years. This is anecdotal, but as I pass areas set aside as parks in Thailand, I rarely find myself gasping at what must be large beautiful tracts of forest. It feels more like there was nothing left to exploit, and it had a few waterfalls, so why not call it a park.
Doi Tung is one know Success story that describes honestly what might have been the point of departure for so many of these parks, a 160 square kilometer preserve along the Burmese border in Chiang Rai, that the King's mother worked to bring back from the brink of total deforestation brought on by years of opium growing and wood gathering. It was a noble program with many successes, truly, (not just saying this to avoid Leese Majestee Laws!) but there was a miscalculation to plant pines that were likely only indigenous to the top 2% of the land all over it, as the instrument of reforestation. Those of you who know pines know that, like a corrupt government, they don't allow much to grow around them due to acidification caused by the needles, so plans are now afoot to replace or remove the pines, but it has met with roadblocks because there is so much emotion associated with the pines which were a symbol of Doi Tung and northern Thailand's rebound... Luckily the pines have a hard time reproducing in these hotter lower slopes, so often times just fall down during the big winds that bring the monsoon, and slowly the undergrowth and more suited species are returning, and when the row is over, with help from some nobly determined managers who get what is going on finally.
This brings us to the real nut.. the things that bug me in the major cities of Thailand, well, any urban area in Thailand feels like a major city because of how it encompasses you.. you might be 100 feet from a rice paddy, but that horrible modern Thai architecture makes you feel like you are in any slum anywhere, with only the peoples pleasant smiles to remind you you aren't in the Ghettos of Cali or Johannesburg. I once read somewhere from an old Thailand ex-pat hand that if you think you are the first to notice that Modern Thai Architecture Sucks, you aren't because it has sucked since sometime after WWII.. time immemorial.. it might only look so bad because of how beautiful old Thai architecture can be, but that takes us back to deforestation.. that teak doesn't grow on trees you know... well it does, but you usually have to cut them down to get it... but all that bad architecture for me seems like a karmic trade off for where your electricity comes from, not such an insane notion in a Buddhist country. The Thai Grid is somewhere around 90% fossil fueled... a lot of it is natural gas from the Andaman Sea, The Yetagun Gas fields, pumped through a pipeline graciously set up by Myanmar's old dictatorship... some of it I believe comes from newly explored areas in the Gulf of Thailand in joint exploration with Malaysia, but there is a lot of oil being pumped in too. There has been no leadership to change this that I know of... it's one of those big Bangkok corporate mysteries would be my guess. The King put in a bunch of hydroelectric dam's over the years, but they were more to aid irrigation.. the mountains of Thailand tend to rise up from flat valleys, most of the country is just one big river valley and alluvial plane, therefore anyplace you can build a big dam doesn't have a lot of fall.. it can't generate enough height to make a lot of electricity, so I believe it only accounts for like 10%, and I have seen no evidence of any other attempts to tap into other alternative sources for grid power.. seen a bunch of hot springs, but no Geothermal, seen a lot of sun, but no solar panels.
A year or two ago, maybe 2012, there was the first attempt to offer rebates for solar.. it supposedly was a bit botched bureaucratically, with people needing to get industrial zoning permits above a small kilowattage to install panels, but it happened, a nice first step. Thailand is one of those countries where things don't happen organically. In the Shan state of Burma, Solar Electricity and Solar Hot Water Units are everywhere, being trucked down from the Chinese Solar Capital of nearby Kunming. It's a Laisaiz Faire Success story, but in Thailand, everything rises and falls with Politics.. everything is secretly calculated... behind the smile, there is a self benefit calculator ticking away, and nothing is going to happen without government leadership.. no electric scooters, no alternative energies, no solar.. Thai people are pleasant and do what they are told until they are told to do something else.. it's not an innovative place.. the combination of emphasis on Royal tradition and the growing commercialism of the country make independent though and action less and less common. The idea of an autonomous move to greener energies just isn't int he cards here by character... they are all controlled from bankok, and waiting for subsidies..
As an example, I had a Thai buddy who was looking for a product to import. I told him why not buy Solar Hot Water units from China... he laughed and told me Thai people don't take hot showers.. I never countered "what about industrial uses, and hotels, and the north!?".. the business is still there I would guess, although people say import duties are high!
It's nice that the Thai by reputation get around on perhaps the most fuel efficient internal combustion vehicle there is, the scooter, and they have been converting to 4 stroke engines somewhat naturally as their wealth increases, but there is no market for electrics, I have yet to see one, and I am looking for them, and Car Ownership is rising, and not just cars... trucks, mostly Hilux's and the New Ford Rangers. It's the local pollution in these Thai cities that makes people nuts.. the point source from all these tailpipes, often idling in bad traffic. Thailand has implemented some reduction in their Diesel Sulfur, it might be down to 50ppm, but you can still smell it, and a lot of the old beaters, trucks, cars, buses and way old scooters, can produce clouds of black smoke as Thailand sure as heck has never had a cash for clunkers or emissions testing program... I am not necessarily for the latter.. the old vehicles give it some character, 'it's Thailand!', but it sucks to be behind them or on a street with them, and it makes even small Thai towns feel like smoggy cancer traps. I mentioned before that at a very awkward time environmentally, as the world really starts to process Global Climate Change, with coverage booming, and acceptance and action happening. the Pheu Thai Party led by the Shinawat Siblings, in power still despite never ending protests, there was a move some years back to finance car ownership in rural areas..it was a great populist move, pandering to his rural 'rice farmer' base in these most ignored and impoverished areas like the North East I was talking about, but it seemed a bit tone deaf in light of Global Warming.. it led to a backlash amongst the more conservative economic forces, and it might make for bedfellows with the Democrats and environmentalists.. a connection I might uniquely like...The Democrats are not likely to be environmental hero's though. They were in power for like 60 years before Thaksin took over, and didn't do jack outside of maybe soil conservation, which almost happens naturally with rice farming cultures.
My last gripe is with the growing trash and consumerism problem.. being in Bangkok you feel like you are trapped in a shopping mall.. consumerism is coming on full bore and with no reservations.. there is no suspicion in Thai Culture to hedge against it.. it's a juggernaut... they are pushing Christmas in a Buddhist country, and it's working.. there is a Christmas tree in the entrance to my hotel right now... and the robotic behavior that goes with this is taking over.. still with a smile, but with some bad consequences for the environment. It's becoming impossible in nicer restaurants to just get a glass of water.. They all give you this blank look and tell you, with no irony whatsoever "We don't have that.." I know that they have water for food preparation back there, in a big white bottle with black lettering, but the wait staff of this generation are so clueless they truly just do what they are told and push the plastic bottled water.. sometimes the have glass bottles, which are reused and slightly better.. I have described in this blog that if you can have a shopping mall, you are sophisticated enough to have clean drinking water..it's not a development problem.. Thailand isn't the Congo, it's just a corruption and priorities problem.. if you can sell water, why give it away for free.. I have never seen a test of municipal water in Thailand to know it is bad, people just assume it is. Like eating white rice, it's considered the sophisticated thing to do. As a result, they waste the world resources..
A related problem is food packaging... places like Tesco and 7-11 are taking over, even though most food is still bought at local markets.. food packaging is treated like a banana leaf, and dumped willie nilly all over Thailand now, despite the fact that it's chemical makeup isn't nearly as benign as a banana leaf of old. Even in the small old school markets, plastic has replaced paper and traditional packaging. I am not saying it doesn't work better, but it ends up everywhere.. and usually they clean it at the end of the market, but Thailand has a burgeoning Trash Crisis, and some 20 years behind the times, again due to a lack of leadership, I have yet to see more than paltry evidence of recycling in the country, at least publicly.. what happens in the dumps might be another story, one I don't want to think about..
I mentioned air pollution in regards to fossil fuel emissions, but not in regards to old slash and burn.. if you get off the beaten tracks, you do learn that there is an old soul in Thailand farming away, and they still burn all their waste. People describe the thick air of April with a kind of chagrined reverence.. it's when they burn.. Doi Tung, that project in Northern Thailand, took this on years ago, but it was in regards to agriculture on the mountains.. not the elephant of Thai Agriculture, Rice Farming.. it was rumored to me that this year will be the first year it is illegal, 2014, and we shall see what happens. Even Al Gore said in "An Inconvenient Truth" that something like 1/3 of global carbon emissions come from old Slash and Burn. it's what, 10,000 years old as a practice, and somewhat understandable.. the people who slash and burn tend to have otherwise almost inconsequential carbon footprints, almost a cute issue to have to deal with, and all slash and burn was already on the earths surface, not adding carbon to the equation to some degree, but as it fits into the macro problem of global warming, it's huge, and why not develop more sophisticated practices.. if you can farm rice in the first place, you can compost properly.. we shall see what effect the laws have. A lot of the Slash and burn is intended to keep pests away, so if it comes down to kids with malaria vs burning.. burning will be the practice.
Speaking of farming.. fertilizer and worse, pesticides, seem to be squeezing in with abandon, and little knowledge of consequence and proper use. Someone told me an anecdote of watching strawberry farmers from the hills spray down their berries the morning of harvest so that no bugs would get on them on the ride to market.. there is little education that I can tell..it's just available in stores and it works.. I watched a gardener spraying inside a greenhouse in the gardens and Doi Tung with abandon, and it made me realize the story I had heard was more than true...it's just hap hazard well intentioned ag practices at work.. the majority of the farmers in these small plots just know what works for them.. there is no education system that I know of, and god knows how long people have been farming here.. like so many of these issues facing Thailand.. it's a matter of people taking solutions t face value because they work cheaply and effectively.. there is no concept of collateral consequences, except for a growing awareness of the air pollution problem, which leads to the now ubiquitous surgical masks that makes people in traffic look like Michael Jackson on a shopping trip.
Before I finish, it makes sense to peek under the Sea, and kind of under the hood of the two Thai Seas.. the Gulf of Thailand, and the Andaman. A bit of research shows that overfishing started in the mid 1960s and likely hasn't abated. Tourism has created some pressure to preserve coral reefs and the like, so there are sanctuaries, the number one most proven sea preservation tool, but I cannot speak to enforcement being through. I was on the South tip of Phuket once for a while, a few years ago, and I remember watching countless squid boats, famous for their big lights, floating about a mile or two offshore... I could just tell as I watched them day after day that they must be overfishing.. and Squid are one of those creatures that move into ecosystems when the top predators are depleted... they proliferate like pigeons in a city... it's my guess that these seas are in bad shape.. I saw some articles recently, from the last few years, warning of a Tuna population crash. The Thai fishing industry by the 1980's was one of the ten largest in the world, all with just regular investment money, no government incentives, and was hauling in 20kg per citizen when there were 50 million Thai.. there are 66 million now, and growth in Thai Human Population is actually not that fast, on par with western nations ( a perk of consumerism actually), but it's my guess that sustainable would be about half that, let alone fish for export...
The good side of Consumerism, in addition to keeping young women so busy in their 20's that they procreate less, can be that an environmental consciousness takes hold and impacts consumer spending as it has in Europe and increasingly in the US, but no dice.. I haven't seen one iota of evidence of such a move.. no Environmental Marketing. The Eco cleansing, Green-Washing at it's most in-genuine so popular in Europe, the US, and even parts of Latin America and China now.. it's just not a factor to care.. like I said, they are still kicking the tires of Christmas.
There is no skepticism...this is contemporary Thailand.. the kingdom of smiles now slowly suffering from a million deadly invasions that are neither Burmese nor Malaysian, but environmental. And not one lick of leadership, outside the Royal Family, whose efforts seem to be implemented in popular but isolated projects. People visit these places, and appreciate them, but it's hard to see the impact it has in other parts of the country. There seems to be neither student foment, farmer guilt, nor Noblis Oblige from the Upper Class to tackle these problems.. solutions can come from the outside or from good technocrats, but there is no demand, and a big world for them to impact where outside contributors don't have to start from scratch...why waste your time in Thailand when you can have an impact elsewhere? In Thailand you can get the impression pretty quickly whether your efforts are appreciated or not by the government.. Visa's beyond the standard one month tourist deal are not handed out lightly. You get the feeling often that your are here to have fun but don't meddle unless invited.
Other areas where there has been no leadership and no improvement:
Light Pollution Abatement... none
River and Streamline edge protection (I have seen places where because of logging, rivers spread out wide unabated... and other places where huge public works that look like the kinds you would ahve seen in the US 50 years ago are made to control flooding and turn rivers into ditches.
Endangered species protection just some talk.
On a deeper level there is something I have noticed about Thailand. They are not into Wild.. That satellite picture should tell you that they are domesticating everything they can.. subjugation of chaos is progress.. it's in the Thai Psyche it seems to reject disorder.. it's what distinguishes them from their Neighbors they look askance at... Lao, Burma, and Cambodia.. the kids who still have wild but can't get their act together.. Triple Canopy Jungle means Savagery, and the Thai personality is anything but.. from their fighters to their protesters, they are the anti-savages. Their impression of Malaysia is different, a bit more contested, but they associate thick jungles with an old Southeast Asia, insurgencies, opium, and silly old people, that the Leadership and hot shots of Bangkok are a bit embarrassed by.. they don't want to be Siam, they want to be Singapore with a better attitude.. it's a mega city nation.. Bangkok leads like Paris, and nostalgia for the provinces is just that.. the appreciate them for the food and for the honesty, but the heart of this Kingdom is urban, and doesn't want to be reminded of Lion's, Tigers, and Bears... It reminds them of what they were 50 years ago, and it feels undistinguished.
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