Reviews for A Land on Fire

—The Irrawaddy 'Earth and Fire' by Anthony Faraday April 10, 2004

Anyone who visits downtown Bangkok today can see for themselves the environmental consequences of Thailand's boom: unfinished skyscrapers, an almost constant haze of pollution and a litter-strewn river. But what James David Fahn tries to show in his book, A Land on Fire, is what is not so obvious. His book offers some insight into how the economic miracle crumbled, and how the country's natural resources were ravaged in the process.

A Land on Fire, By James David Fahn. Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai: 2004: 355 pages.
Fahn, who was the environment desk editor at the Bangkok-based English language Nation newspaper during a time of rapid change in Thailand, provides us with an ideal vantage point. As an intrepid journalist, he chased stories the public had a right to know, but that those in power were desperate to keep hidden.

In 1996, he wrote about the US oil giant Unocal's dumping of cyanide and mercury in the Gulf of Thailand. In 1998, he and others exposed how the producers of The Beach were destroying the island's wilderness in the Andaman Sea in order to re-create paradise for moviegoers.

Fahn's thesis may not be entirely new. It is certainly not the first time that we have heard about the repercussions on the earth's resources when the economy undergoes a boom. Yet, his approach is not that of an environmental scientist, nor of an environmental activist-it is a newsy account of the environmental cost of Thailand's boom, with just the right mix of characters, anecdotes and narrative.

A Land on Fire mixes drama with statistics, most of which are there to startle. For instance, Fahn writes that the average Bangkokian spends around 44 days a year on the road, jammed in a mish-mash of buses, motorcycles, taxis and Mercedes Benzs. Fahn informs his readers that just 40 years ago, 60 percent of Thailand was covered in forest-these days, it is barely 15 percent.

While Fahn is not quite an activist, there are few moments where he editorializes. He doesn't just tell it how it is, he tells us how he thinks it should be, with suggestions that are never too radical. At one point he says Thailand needs a stronger civil society, then at another he suggests people in the city ought to have access to more public space. These are just two ideas that capitalists and technocrats have been ignoring for years.

The first chapter, which reports on Bangkok's hasty development, is perhaps the finest. For years, Fahn lived in Bangkok and his obvious love of the place shines through in some of the anecdotes he recalls. The entire book is infused with his energy and his own personal investment in the issues he covers. Sometimes, A Land on Fire reads more like an autobiography. Indulgences aside, his book is colorful and interesting.

Despite what the tagline says, Fahn's book doesn't really examine "the environmental consequences of the Southeast Asian Boom." While Fahn ventures across the border to look at illegal logging in Burma and up the Mekong to investigate quarrels over precious water resources, his frame of reference is always Thailand and the book lacks any real regional scope.

In Chapter Four, "Guns, Trees and Refugees," Fahn recalls his adventures breaking a story in Thailand's Mae Hong Son Province, which borders Burma's Karenni State. The chapter, not short on drama, offers the reader a helpful background to the messy web of illegal logging along the Thai-Burma border. Fahn brings the chapter to a neat conclusion, with a reminder that the now Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who was complicit in the dealings, was named as Thailand's defense minister in 2001.

Fahn's fluency in Thai and background in science, as well as his zeal and sense of adventure, brought him to The Nation's environment desk. But as Fahn admits, it was his editors that drove him to seek stories with dare, back when The Nation had sharper teeth.

As is often the case with books that take a long time to get from the author to the bookshop, much of what Fahn relates is now dated. Most of the events took place while Fahn was reporting at The Nation in the 1990s, with no real updates since he left the paper. Most striking is the surprisingly little space devoted to Thaksin Shinawatra, Prime Minister of Thailand since the start of 2001. Also notable, are the references to Burma's military junta made under its old guise as the State Law and Order Restoration Council.

As a single text, the book struggles to stick to a common thread with each of the ten chapters having a different focus. In the final chapter, Fahn recounts the military coup of 1991. He draws on his own observations of the three days in May when the generals stormed Bangkok. While his insights make for a fascinating read, their connection to the environment is loose at best.

But Fahn includes a few diversions-a look at the fragile state of democracy in Thailand and the so-called global free trade-to remind us how integrated the issues of corruption, poverty and stifled democracy really are. The fact that the book is sometimes all over the place is also a reminder that the 1997 crash was precipitated by not just one problem, but a whole series of breakdowns.

Reading this book in 2004, you can't help but ask, what have we learned since then? Cynical onlookers from the streets of Bangkok, watching more and more cars spilling onto the roads and ambitious construction projects being erected, may respond by saying little. Thankfully, Fahn's outlook sounds a more positive note.

—Foreign Affairs Reviewed by Lucian W. Pye, Sept/Oct 2003

In sharp contrast to the usual blend of science and moralizing in books about the world's impending environmental catastrophe, Fahn has written a personal, firsthand account of the destruction of nature he has observed over years of living in Thailand and traveling around Southeast Asia. Starting with how the megacities, such as Bangkok, have been losing their last bits of green space, he takes the reader to the countryside where logging is destroying the forests, dam building has raced ahead without regard for the social and environmental costs, and farmers are left without their traditional sources for irrigation. And, of course, there is the unchecked pollution of newly booming industries. Fahn does tuck in the essential statistics, but his focus is on what he has observed, especially as a result of the boom years of rapid economic development. He notes that in the West environmentalism is a middle-class preoccupation, but in Asia it is the poor, and hence the politically weak, who are the most environmentally conscious. In spite of all the destruction he describes, Fahn does find some basis for optimism in the growing network of activists who have brought pressure to bear on politicians and have even moved the Thai king to action. It appears Southeast Asians are discovering that to be environmentally sensitive is to be modern.

—Global Environmental Politics Reviewed by Kai Lee:

A Land on Fire is an American journalist's account of the environmental ravages of economic development in Thailand during the go-go years leading up to the 1997 financial crisis.  In the late 1980s, James Fahn, just out of college, found himself developing a career as a journalist for the English-language newspaper The Nation published in Bangkok.  Fahn and his colleagues pioneered American-style investigative reporting at the paper.  This book recasts his coverage in the 1990s as a topical chronicle, with chapters on resource development as well as tourism.

Each chapter combines personal account, historical sketches, and case studies.  The chapters can be read separately, and they are rich in details: names of places and people in the news in the 1990s; stories of Fahn as a working reporter on the edge of corruption, civil disorder, and environmental destruction.  These perspectives would be useful to someone preparing to study Thailand or other countries in Southeast Asia.

A Land on Fire makes an obvious but important point: "whereas the green movement in the North tends to focus on the middle class, in the South not only is it centered more on the farmers and fishermen who rely on natural resources but it's also concerned more with who gets to use resources, not just with how they are used.  This mixture of social and green activism .is closest in spirit to the environmental justice movement in the United States." (p. 7)

Fahn is a scientifically informed environmentalist, and his portrayal of issues is conscientious.  He is alarmed by the drastic transition that he sees from rural poverty to urban squalor, and he conveys his dismay on nearly every page.  His seems to be a credible view from an idealistic American who is both earnest and open-hearted in his embrace of Thai society.

Fahn offers judgments based upon his considerable experience.  His reflections on corruption in the last chapter bring out both the strength and weakness of a journalist's approach.  There is, on the one side, righteous anger at the venality of government officials.  Fahn makes a compelling case that corruption is a significant factor in the environmental history of developing countries - one whose importance he judges as underestimated in academic writing..  On the other side, however, Fahn's opinions are grounded mainly on journalistic anecdotes and the conclusions of a (young) Asia hand, rather than on the systematic appraisal of a social scientist or historian.  His assertion that "development is marked not only by a rising level of wealth  .but also by a respect for public institutions and the rule of law" (p. 323) echoes the World Bank, even though Fahn is decidedly skeptical of that organization and other bulwarks of conventional economic development.

Economic development is not for sissies.  Natural resources are plundered.  Inequalities grow as agriculture, fishing, and other pre-industrial livelihoods are reshaped by global markets.  Urban populations surge as people move from farms and forests.  Urban dwellers, still dependent upon ecosystem services but often without an infrastructure that can deliver clean water, food, sanitation, and energy, struggle with challenges to public health and safety and  to their economic livelihood.  For both rural and urban people, nature matters: "Developing countries need to address their environmental problems not because the rich world tells them to, but for the benefit of their own people" (p. 8).

The roughly one-third of humanity now living in rich countries stand as both beacon and taunt to the other two-thirds.  It is possible to become rich, to enjoy economic prosperity and environmental quality at historically unprecedented levels in mass societies.  Whether that prosperity can be put on a basis that is sustainable for times longer than a few generations, and whether such sustainability can be achieved without further exacerbating the environmental and economic inequalities of today's world - these are questions that one fears to answer in these times of global climate change, eroding biodiversity, and the baffling mirage of sustainable development.

If there is hope, it may lie in the Asian tigers, the nations that have grown with startling speed in the past 25 years.  But in James Fahn's portrait of the Thai environment, hope for prosperity and sustainability is hard to see through the smoke of industrial development and the fog of corruption.  What Fahn provides is a portrait of some of Thailand's people as they race toward prosperity.  Education, a middle class, and courageous leaders have created an increasingly tenacious civil society.  But how and which natural treasures might survive the tsunami of change remain open questions for Thailand and the world that it has, for better or worse, already joined.

-Texas Observer Reviewed by LEE MIDDLETON from issue: 11/21/2003

One of the most appealing aspects of A Land on Fire is the author's lack of an agenda. Fahn refuses to fall in with either side of a raging ideological debate. Instead, he leaves the reader constructively perplexed, musing about the full spectrum of concerns facing the global environment, from solutions resulting in the hyper-cultivated American "wilderness" I experienced in Big Bend to the much more tangled thicket that represents the ecological future of the global South. As he points out in a personal note, "the urge to keep some sanctuaries as free as possible from human interference may not solely be an American dream. Rather, it is a post-industrial dream."

—The Economist HOW GREEN IS MY TIGER?, July 31, 2003
JAMES FAHN is too honest a reporter not to acknowledge that there is more to the destruction of Thailand's environment than greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians and selfish foreigners, though there is no shortage of these in "A Land on Fire".

Ordinary Thais themselves are also responsible, willingly selling their land to property developers in order to buy their coveted cars, or burning down their mangrove forests to sell the wood as charcoal and the space for tiger-prawn farms. Mr Fahn, a former reporter on THE NATION, Thailand's excellent English-language daily paper, is also honest enough to admit that, for most Thais, at least in broad economic terms, life is much better than it was 20 years ago. And he reminds us of the Kuznets curve, which predicts that a degree of environmental deterioration is normal for a country in the process of developing: money can later be found to clean up the mess.

What is missing from the book is a sense of how this is already beginning to happen, in Bangkok at least. Thanks to the construction of expressways, a new elevated mass-transit system and tougher controls on car emissions, Bangkok's streets today are far less congested, and its air strikingly less unpleasant, than ten years ago.

Much the same thing happened in Tokyo a few decades earlier, and in Europe and America before that. Thailand's forests, rivers, coasts and air, as Mr Fahn doughtily chronicles, have been victim to great brutality. Monstrous tourist seafronts have grown up along what were once secluded beaches, just as happened in much of southern Europe. But self-interest dictates that, in time, Thailand, too, will save itself from the worst of its pollution.

—Publishers Weekly, Feb 24, 2003
Fahn, a longtime environmental editor for the Nation, an English-language Bangkok daily newspaper, bases this study of the precarious state of Southeast Asia's environment on his own research. Focusing on Thailand, Fahn demonstrates how industrialization and the expanding economy turned Bangkok, Thailand's capital, into a congested, traffic-choked city, with dangerously polluted air. The sharp increase in tourism has resulted in overdevelopment of formerly pristine beaches, the destruction of coral reefs and a construction boom in golf courses that require enormous amounts of water (a scarce resource) and ground chemicals that leach into and pollute the surrounding water supply. In nuanced and nonjudgmental language, the author examines how unrestricted logging so decimated Thai forests that timber began to be illegally smuggled from Burma. While the writing is dense, Fahn clearly explains the complex environmental problems in Southeast Asia. Although regulations exist to protect Thailand's environment, government corruption has weakened their enforcement. With a large poor population, Thailand lacks a substantial middle class that, in developed countries, can successfully advocate for cleaner air and water. The author also points out that Asia as well as Africa and Latin America will suffer the most from a worldwide warming trend. According to Fahn, the best hope for the world's environment lies in global cooperation.

— Earth Island Journal, Autumn 2003, Volume 18, No. 3
" While Fahn writes with a journalist's attention to detail and sources,
he extends beyond unbiased detachment. With an evident love and
appreciation for not only the country but also the culture and people,
Fahn brings compelling insight into the difficulties of meshing Western
values with Eastern culture, and will make you question the very root of
human interaction with nature."

—Jan Pronk, Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands
“ A fascinating eye-witness story of unbalanced development. James Fahn tells us how political interests can violate sustainable economic growth and environmental care. But he also shows that democratisation can make a difference. It is a book about Thailand, with lessons for countries all around the world.”

—Wasant Techawongtham, President, Thai Society of Environmental Journalists
“[Fahn's] skills as a reporter and knowledge of the country clearly show in this tour de force of a book that is highly readable, enjoyable, and informative.”

—Denis D. Gray, Chief of Bureau (Bangkok), The Associated Press
“ As powerful an indictment of development at any cost as one is likely to read, and that's because Fahn was there - in the ravaged forests, beaches and cities of what was once a near Eden. There are very few examples of so much being lost in such a short time span, and Fahn had a front row seat during this tragic period. Let's hope it's widely read - and heeded - by decision-makers everywhere.”

—Victor Mallet, Financial Times correspondent and author of The Trouble with Tigers
“James Fahn - an intrepid, Thai-speaking investigator - cuts to the heart of south-east Asia's environmental tragedies. He vividly explains why there is mercury in your fishcakes, why corrupt real estate deals make the Thai holiday island of Phuket look like Carl Hiaasen's Florida, and how a truck-bomb terror attack was foiled by Bangkok's notorious traffic jams. But don't expect easy answers or environmentalist grandstanding: with a judicious mix of precision and empathy, Fahn lays out the terrifying facts and then analyses the ethical dilemmas behind them.”

—Steve Rayner, Professor of Science and Society, University of Oxford
“An accomplished storyteller, Fahn introduces us to a vivid cast of characters and weaves a simultaneously disturbing and inspiring narrative of the impacts of development on Thailand's urban and rural environments and of people's efforts to come to grips with them.”

—Chris Baker, author of Thailand's Boom and Bust
“ Thailand has one of the world's most beautiful and abundant environments. With scientific knowledge and personal passion, James Fahn traces how its forests, rivers, fish stocks, coral reefs, prime agricultural land, and urban atmosphere are being destroyed by development, dams, greed, gangsters, tourism, and politics. He describes how communities and activists are trying to prevent this, and why outsiders should be concerned. This is a serious, wide-ranging, well-informed, and very readable account of both tragedies and triumphs.”