BOOK INTRODUCTION

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This anecdote offers a glimpse of what I’ve found to be so enthralling about my experience in Southeast Asia, and what I hope to convey in this book. Observing how environmental issues are handled turns out to be a novel way to learn about a region and its people. At the same time, examining how a region that’s growing as quickly as Southeast Asia responds to its environmental crises can help us understand the issues facing all of us. In some cases, they play out in surprisingly different ways than in the West. In others, the differences are largely superficial, and the fundamental issues turn out to be surprisingly similar.

Either way, coming to grips with the environmental challenges facing developing countries is vital to the future of our planet. The events of the previous decade–culminating with the protests over free trade at the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle--demonstrated with alarming clarity that in this age of globalization our economic and environmental destinies are intertwined. Asia is home to 60 percent of the Earth’s population. Considering its rich biodiversity, its ever-increasing demand for natural resources, and its vast potential to emit greenhouse gases, the future of the world’s environment will depend on how it develops. So it’s critical to understand how people in Asia and developing countries elsewhere view environmental issues, and how their environmental movements are evolving. Some Westerners may not even be aware that Asia has active green groups, but in the long run local environmental movements are likely to have a greater impact on national policies than foreign pressure.

As a journalist who was born and raised in the US but who covered environmental issues for a Thai newspaper and learned to speak the native language, I was in a unique position to see on a daily basis how the people and institutions of Southeast Asia deal with environmental issues–to explore their concerns and motivations, their strengths and weaknesses--and compare them to our own in the West. Beginning in 1990, I worked for nearly a decade at The Nation, a daily newspaper based in Bangkok and owned by one of Thailand’s leading media conglomerates. Although published in English, most of its readers are Thai, and it’s a newspaper of record for the country, having received numerous international press freedom awards thanks in part to its bold coverage of Thailand’s democracy uprising in 1992.

After serving as the newspaper’s science and technology editor for a couple of years, I ended up as The Nation’s environment editor, and put together a team of Thai reporters to form an environment desk. We set about covering a wide variety of issues related to natural resources around the Southeast Asian region. Our brief was writ large. We not only reported on current events, but also tried to examine the social changes and political factors that lay behind them, and our award-winning investigative stories broke new ground in the region by uncovering some serious domestic and international scandals. To cite one example of the impact we had, following an expose in 1993 about a Japanese aid package to Cambodia that included 40 tons of out-dated pesticides, Japan’s then-prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa held up my article at a press conference and vowed to halt the shipment of pesticides.

Starting in mid-1998, I worked as a scriptwriter, reporter and part-time host of a television program called Rayngan Si-khiow (“Green Report”)–a weekly feature program about the environment that aired nationally on Thai TV. It was a fascinating experience, and a worthwhile one, but also frustrating times, as we did suffer from censorship. So a year later, I decided to take a break from my career and return to the US to pursue a masters of international affairs degree at Columbia University, where I put this book together.

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