Introduction to A Land on Fire

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The Fire of Knowledge

“How can people live in such filth?!” The woman sitting next to me, well-dressed and European, was staring out the bus window as we passed one of Bangkok’s many canal-side slums. Litter lay everywhere, under and around the decrepit shacks, lining the fetid stream like flotsam. She shook her head. Her disdain was palpable.

It’s a question many have asked, for it’s not just the slums where you see lots of litter, but also the streets and even, sadly, in Thailand’s national parks. In this case I was with a group of foreign visitors (or farang, as Thais call people of European and American descent) in town to attend a conference. Now let’s face it, stories about trash are not terribly sexy. The really hot topics on the environment beat, and in this book, are issues such as climate change, deforestation, the battle over national parks and toxic waste. You don’t become a journalist to expose the truth about litterbugs. But sometimes the mundane subjects that speak most profoundly about us, reflecting deep-rooted concerns intimately bound up with our values. So I told her my theory on littering, that it is linked more closely to poverty than nationality, but most of all it depends on the strength (or lack) of community feeling.

“If you venture into one of these shacks, I bet you’d find it spotless,” I suggested. “But they don’t own the land they’re living on and they probably don’t feel any responsibility for what’s not theirs, no sense of community, no respect for public land. So when it comes to tossing away their garbage, maybe they just decide if it’s out of their house, it’s out of mind.”

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