Vietnam is a stunningly beautiful country but unfortunately a love of nature doesn't seem to have really taken hold there. At least not yet. Missing from all the gorgeous photos of Mekong Delta waterways and pristine beaches is all the trash you'll find strewn in heaps everywhere.
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.
I'm a Viet, born and raised. My country is blessed with incredible scenery, diverse and natural. The coast line is as long as the country itself ffs. Now I won't claim that I'm an avid traveler, but from my limited traveling experience (only been to Australia, Korea, Japan and Hongkong on vacation, nothing too fancy), I have never been to a place that I would rank higher in terms of beautiful, natural scenery.
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.
> 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.
Yet even in the Netherlands the cleanliness might be a recent thing. I lived in NL some years ago and remember it as the dog-shit-on-the-pavement capital of Western Europe. Only after I left, people tell me, things got stricter.
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'm certain they'll get there in time, as part of the development process. Indonesia has grown its economy ten fold in 20 years, a mind-boggling rate of improvement. Just as with China, as they rise they'll have far greater resources available for many other considerations such as preservation of nature and general beautification (which is obviously often expensive, close to a luxury depending on what stage of development you're at). That switch from scarcity to plentifulness, rapidly changes a lot of things in a society usually.
> resources available for many other considerations such as preservation of nature and general beautification (which is obviously often expensive, close to a luxury depending on what stage of development you're at)
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.
Western tourist also immediately notice it when they come to SE Asia. It's a pity that this is such a strong memory.
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?
Don't worry, we'll be back to that pretty soon as the cost of throwing anything away has skyrocketed. I recently (as in, two days ago) had to dispose of a bedroom's worth of carpet and padding. It wasn't much material, but it cost me $56.
Also, for all of you saying "wow our country is dirty" well pick up a fucking mop and get to work!
As a child growing up in 1970s USA, I remember the vast amount of trash along our roads, city streets, parks and beaches. It was fairly common to see people throw trash out of their car windows.
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.
I also remember Sweden being like this until early/mid 90s. The only real change AFAIK was peoples' attitudes, as a result of government campaigns.
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).
Where I live, the recent arrivals, let's call them "visitors" although cynically they are probably permanent residents now because our legislators treat them like they're more important than actual citizens. Anyhow, these newcomers seem to enjoy throwing trash out their car windows ALL THE TIME. I have witnessed it personally. Who the hell thinks it is okay to get fast food and then as soon as you're done eating in your car while driving, pitch it out the fucking window? It makes me fucking livid.
My wife and I (and sometimes my kids) spend several sunny afternoons each year picking up bags of trash gathered from the streets around our home. I don't enjoy this work, but if nobody else is going to do it, I will. I refuse to live in a 3rd World dump and I'll do what I can to keep it from looking like that.
But yeah, push us Americans a little harder. See what happens.
>>>> 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.
Yes, I should have included the rise of the environmental movement. And I came very close to including the crying American Indian ad, it was very impactful on me.
Yes, I was a kid in the 1970s and the anti-littering campaign was pervasive. I was too young to remember/notice the litter itself, but definitely remember the "Crying Indian" commercial, Woodsy Owl[1], and others. You always saw these in the Saturday morning cartoons, in particular.
Same in Germany. I remember piles of trash at almost every Autobahn stop and people burning piles of trash was normal. I think the willingness to keep the country clean is connected to prosperity. Only when the basic needs are met people care about the environment.
- 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.
How do you keep your meat and vegetables in a single bag? It's not impossible to reject bags in the local markets - I do that all the time. But on my travels around SEA but specially Vietnam, I feel tired and hopeless. I saw a lady from a toy shop throw a few batteries away to the curb without giving it a thought.
> Why do people just not think twice about throwing their waste in a ditch or a river or leave their picnic at the beach?
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.
Yes, it's a pity, I traveled to Quan Lan Island in 2010, my wife and I thought it would be unspoiled and off track. But the boat there was full of people throwing litter over board, I even saw a lady pull a diaper of a child and throw it overboard without even thinking. The beaches were littered with colorful plastic. (I have a picture on my Nextcloud but no idea how to share it and my wife is very prominent in so I won't but the picture still make me feel sad. Edit, uploaded but only downloadable for 7 days or 100 times apparently (and cropped my wife out): [0])
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.
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 ;)
How big is social media there? The #trashtag trend is really awesome, and would be good to get going. It's using people's desire for attention to do some clean up.
Social media, mainly facebook, is absolutely huge over here. I have seen a few popular local #trashtag pictures circling around. We generally catch up with internet trends pretty quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if it made national TV. It's awesome but unfortunately I don't think it would help much in the long run.
As an American-born Vietnamese person, I'll provide context for other Western readers:
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.
You can find that in pretty much any underdeveloped area in the world. Not sure what exactly is the socio-psychological explanation for that, but poor societies usually just don't have interest/time/energy to take care about nature or even their surroundings when they have to work hard to survive.
The police and governments are often corrupt or non functional so effectively enforcing anything like litter laws is almost a nonsensical concept. A lot of these places can barely enforce laws of any kind.
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.
This is definitely an important part of it but corruption, misplaced faith in folk medicines, and a desire to show off new wealth also play a big role.
> and we did destroy all the habitats in the process.
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……..
In the case of Europe that would actually lower biodiversity. The land has been cultivated for so long, and mostly with low intensity, that nature has adapted pretty well.
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.
I travel a lot (work and pleasure) and you see this almost at least in every poorer Asian country; Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka. So much plastic, everywhere. I cannot understand people can live with it. I mean if it's around the corner, maybe you can but people just let it lie in front of their doors. In NL people sweep 3 leaves in the compost heap that is in front of their doors; plastic or other crap is unheard of.
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.
You most likely only start to care about your surroundings when you exceed a certain income treshold. Below that, you’re just too occupied with bare survival.
I agree and find that logical, but I saw many villas with expensive western cars in front that had heaps of plastics in front and in the garden. Those people seem to not be struggling with survival but just don't care?
I've noticed rich people in poor countries are very aware of what is not becoming of them. They were probably waiting for some poor person to come work for a few dollars a day to come do the jobs beneath them.
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".
It may be the fact that, even if you tidy up your yard, as soon as you step out of the premise, you're in garbage land - if you value beauty, you will be depressed anyway. Plus, no doubt it's partially cultural i.e. a lot of these well-off people grew up poor, so it's in their values to not care about the beauty too much (they were raised by their poor parents to focus on survival, and that's what they did for their whole life until they became well off). Their children may be different though, esp. if they go to an university in a cleaner city.
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.
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.
This is just using being "poor" to make excuses for bad behaviors. It's such a common occurrence in the West that people don't even think whether it is valid or not. It doesn't take copious amounts of money to not litter. It's an attitude. When I visited Vietnam my local friends kept their homes spotless, but when we were in hotels they would literally drop trash on the floor of the room even though there was a waste basket less than a meter away.Poor people don't need to litter to survive and prosper. Good waste management/sanitation habits improves lives in plenty of ways and it doesn't require wealth do to it.. It's attitudinal, not a matter of survival.
You have to be able to afford to buy trash bags if you want to keep your trash from being in "a pile" and then what do you do with all these bags of trash? If your whole community is too poor to afford a garbage truck then who is coming 'round to pick up the garbage? Of course poor people in underserved communities could just haul their own trash to the "local pile", but who has time to do that when you're working to get food on the table?
Your post to me is quite strange because it describes a problem that has a certain floor on poverty, but then claims those being spoken about live below that floor. If you have plastic bottles, cans, and etc. you are not so poor as to be unable to manage your waste. The hyper impoverished people you describe, subsistence farmers, have compost, not non-biodegradable and unburnable waste.
I've never been to Vietnam and I wasn't attempting to describe any specific people. I was just addressing the idea that being poor is not a condition that might raise the bar for disposing of one's trash "properly" (or, for that matter, doing almost anything else). Where I live I spend $52 a month to have my trash picked up (and it just went up to $54). I can totally imagine a person or family who can afford to buy some things made of plastic (pretty much one of the cheapest materials in the world) but who would still be strained by an extra $50 obligation. Or people who can afford plastic but still live in a community that cannot afford to offer this service. I've seen photos of people living in mud and straw huts without windows or running water wearing Nikes so I suspect access to industrialized waste might be more accessible than you think.
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 get where you're coming from, but it wouldn't be $50/mo. These costs adjust with the cost of labor and land and so on. In the US the median household income is around $60,000/year. People pay ~$600/year for trash collection, or about 1% of the median income. In Vietnam, for example, the average annual income is in the area of $5,000/year (more in cities like Hanoi and HCMC, less in rural areas.) 1% of $5,000/year would be about $50/year, or $4-5/mo. People who are buying products that have the kind of waste byproducts that end up as litter will be able to afford paying an extra $5/month.
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.
It's not just Asia. Africa and Latin America are much the same. Curiously, Rwanda is a notable exception* - their authoritarian leader decided to spend a lot of manpower to keep everything clean, and I think there are also heavy fines for littering and dumping garbage.
* notable because usually the correlation is with income/culture, but Rwanda is not rich nor much different culturally from neighbouring trash-inundated countries.
Costa Rica is also a notable exception. People there are obsessed with keeping stuff clean and protecting wildlife, because I think they understand how much their livelihood depends on tourism. It’s a huge difference between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, even though culturally the countries are very similar otherwise.
They burn trash and toilet paper in the ditch beside the road in Guanacaste. To be fair, the roads aren't paved, and there are no gas stations or infrastructure. Yes, ecotourism is big in Costa Rica, but they aren't perfect either. Maybe only in the touristy areas....
I have to admit that I didn’t get to far out into the country but even “touristy” parts of other Central American countries are full of garbage — the beaches and everything.
Mankind must find a way to curb our population growth and our greed. We are, and have been blind. Not only are we destroying the natural world, we will ultimately destroy ourselves. Let us somehow find a way to limit our population growth and give those that are then born a first rate education so that they are capable of seeing and appreciating the big picture. Knowledge, objectivity - the realization that life on this planet is precious and rare and, irreplaceable.
We already are dramatically curbing our population growth. The rate of global population growth has plunged since ~1970. The rate will drop from a peak of about 2% per year in 1970 to 0.2% by ~2060. We've already roughly cut the growth rate in half in 40 some years. By the late 2030s, we should have the rate of growth returned to pre industrialization boom numbers (when the rate began to rapidly increase). It takes time to bring the numbers down, we'll be near population contraction by the time we're into the 2050s.
The metric that matters is resources consumed per person. If people's goals are to achieve consumption levels similar to upper middle class in USA or Europe, then it doesn't matter if the total population growth is slowing down, or even contracting, as resource consumption will still very much be exploding.
It's funny the way things have gone. Vietnam is supposed to be a communist country. The Vietnamese people are some of the greediest nationalities I have ever come across and the government officials and politicians are the greediest.
This is socialism for you. People are so poor they resort to illegal breadwinning. It happens in my native Brazil too, even if were are not overtly socialist (but heavily influenced).
OK, for example, they taught very bad things about Vietnam Cong Hoa party, but the fact is that: Vietnam Cong Hoa party doesn't harm anyone. Who was the bad guy here ?
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.
I have tried my best to educate people around me to care more about environment to no avail, because to them "it's another guy's problem if we litter on the street, so keep doing it". What the government is doing ain't helping either, people want to make more money, to buy a car, bigger house etc... why should they care about some random monkeys in a forest that they will never see in their life? It's really depressing, maybe I should find an NGO and join them to protect the wild life.
66 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadMy 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.
Also, for all of you saying "wow our country is dirty" well pick up a fucking mop and get to work!
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).
My wife and I (and sometimes my kids) spend several sunny afternoons each year picking up bags of trash gathered from the streets around our home. I don't enjoy this work, but if nobody else is going to do it, I will. I refuse to live in a 3rd World dump and I'll do what I can to keep it from looking like that.
But yeah, push us Americans a little harder. See what happens.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodsy_Owl
- 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_forest
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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.