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I spent the summer volunteer teaching in Yangon, Myanmar. This is one of a series of guest posts I wrote for the Carleton blog Shrinking Footprints.
I recently interviewed a former employee of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) who spent one year working in the forests of the Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve. His job was to do surveys on the tiger population.
“Basically there are no tigers left,” he reports, “Especially not in the reserve.”
Naturalist John Goodridge recently conducted an informal survey and came to the same conclusion. He said that although there were no tigers, the Hukaung valley remained an ideal habitat for them. There were hopes that the tigers might return.
Since then, the Wildlife Conservation Society has been trying to protect the reserve’s bountiful wildlife from poachers. Enforcement is difficult. The Forests Department arrests poachers every day, but it lacks the resources to prosecute them.
There are no easy answers in the Hukaung Valley, home to several political powers including the Naga Army and the Kachin Independence Army. In the past few years, gold mining has come to dominate the local economy.
The gold mining and the accompanying population increase have been devastating to the local environment. The water quality is terrible, and ever greater numbers of poachers are turning to the local forests for food. The national government is also giving land grants to sprawling tapioca plantations. The agricultural companies must smooth the landscape with bulldozers before farming is possible.
There’s a farcical nature to the efforts of the tiger reserve, even beyond the fact that there are no tigers. While the Forests Department fails to prosecute poachers it has in custody, the central government continues to grant mining and farming contracts which will exacerbate the problems. Outside the valley, there is little understanding of the challenges in the region. International funders demand that WCS conduct surveys to confirm what they already know.
A local environmental law student recently said to me that countries must reach a minimum level of development before they will even consider protecting the environment. In Myanmar, achieving that minimum level still seems like a distant dream.
Economic development has left monuments to prosperity all over China. High rises sweep over the dusty streets as a whole country struggles to reinvent itself.
But the growth is uneven. The changes have been so fast and so intense that whole cities have been left behind. The crowded streets of Beijing or Shanghai are balanced by the quiet rural streets and empty factories.
After rural housing is demolished but before the highrises go up, there is a moment where the land is only potential. This feeling of possibility is what I was looking for across Asia.
As we traveled through four countries, I was looking for the other side of development; the places that are abandoned in the quest for ever greater prosperity. These places are important because neglect is as much a statement of priorities as construction is. It says, “This is not worth saving.”
This is a piece I made about a farm I visited on the outskirts of Beijing.
A video I made from footage collected during my brief stay in Hanoi. For some reason, that night I was taking lots of movies so I had plenty of footage for this clip.
In the Spring of this year, I spend three months living out of a suitcase, traveling through Asia with a group of American college students. Our academic program was hectic, stopping in no one location for more than a few days. Wherever I went, I took had my camera in my pocket. Click on the photos to see the Flickr photoset.
Beijing
- Thailand
Myanmar
Vietnam
Shanxi Province, China
