Vietnam is currently at a crossroads...
Vietnam in the recent passed has reached a crossroads in its efforts to conserve biodiversity. Vietnam recently entered into the market economy and this has caused an enormous boom in development activities. The accelerating pace of development raises concerns for the cultural integrity of the minority populations in the country, particularly those in the rural areas and for the long term prospects for the country's natural resources.
Vietnam has lost 80 percent of its forest, partly due to the ravages of what the Vietnamese call the "American" war. This is a 1994 satellite image of an area just north of Saigon. These stripes here that you can see fairly clearly represent areas where military planes dropped chemical defoliants on the forest during the American war and 30 years later they're very apparent. They would actually be even more apparent accept for the fact that a lot of the area around here has been deforested in the last 20 years. You don't see the stripes as clearly as they were in the 1960's.
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