It might have fallen off the front pages in the United States, but negotiators in Paris are hard at work cobbling together a global transference of wealth scheme in the form of a climate change agreement. The details of that accord, dubbed by so many as the last chance to save the planet Earth and the human species from certain destruction, are only now being released to the public. As is often the case with crises of this nature, the urgency with which it is being tackled is inversely proportional to the causes for alarm.
For the first time since researchers have been measuring such things, global carbon dioxide emissions are on pace to fall worldwide while economic growth still remains in positive territory. The source of this reduction is reportedly linked to decreased coal burning in China. Reducing Chinese emissions has become an imperative in the People’s Republic, as its capital is in the midst of an air pollution crisis of unprecedented scale. For Americans with long enough memories to recall the difficulties Los Angeles encountered in its decades-long struggle to address a persistent smog problem, they will take solace in knowing that China can permanently relieve the strain on Beijing-based lungs.
The relatively rapid improvement in air quality in Los Angeles has many causes, and no one political ideology can claim credit for this progress. Rapid private-sector technological advances in combination with stricter federal emissions standards and the 1977 Clean Air Act deserve much of the credit for the city’s turnaround. As recently as 2008, however, some were keen to assert that poor air quality was more or less a permanent feature of life in the City of Angels. The notion that technological advances and human endeavor could reverse the course that city was on better than draconian, economy-suppressing regulation alone was once anathema to climate alarmists.
What bizarrely appears to offend the sensibilities of ecological activists most in this story of the Earth healing itself was the notion that the planet is remarkably resilient, perhaps in no small part because it robs these activists of significance. There is no better example of the planet’s ability to bounce back from incredible abuse than the country of Vietnam.
The forces that went into combat against the North Vietnamese government in the 1960s and early 1970s also went to war with the country’s environment. While the human toll in this Indochinese nation was staggering, the effects on its environment were equally striking. U.S. forces admitted that 79 million liters of herbicides and defoliants were at one point deployed over one-seventh of South Vietnamese territory. Many millions of trees were bulldozed in order to rob the Viet Cong of cover. The destruction of the jungle canopies and mangroves had disastrous effects on the biodiversity that relied on those habitats. Observers soon learned that the effect of some of these herbicides kill the foliage entirely, leaving behind “desert-like” “blowing sand dunes” and “bare mudflats.” When Saigon fell to North Vietnamese soldiers, 7,700 square miles of the country, six percent of its total land area, was fully deforested.
From 1964 to 1973, millions of tons of explosives and napalm were dropped across the country. Dikes were bombed in order to flood rice paddies. An estimated 30 million bomb craters across the country destroyed topsoil, rendering the area around the craters infertile. For nearly two decades after the war, Western scientists were unable to take stock of the devastation in Vietnam, but a Vietnamese study from the mid-1980s estimated that only about 30 percent of the bird species that inhabited the defoliated areas before the war were still present. Estimates suggest that forest cover over the country declined by 50 percent between the end of World War II and 1980.
As Vietnam began to open again to the West and the country experienced an economic boom, some researchers predicted that the increased industrial activity and augmented human presence in parts of the country that were once sparsely inhabited would further compound the war’s environmental impact. Instead, the country has made a remarkable environmental comeback.
Vietnam’s pioneering bamboo groves paved the way for the return of thick canopied forests, with the aid of government-backed reforesting campaigns. Western scientists presumed that most of the country’s animal species were wiped out by both the Vietnam War and the war for independence that preceded it, but researchers are discovering that many animal species that were presumed wiped out had survived. What’s more, new species are still being discovered today. In 2014 alone, 139 new species were revealed by researchers in the Greater Mekong Region. 300 new species in this part of the world were discovered from 2012 to 2013. In 2014, a camera at a nature preserve captured on film a species of Roosevelt’s Muntjac deer thought to have been extinct for 85 years. The first new large mammal species discovered in many decades, the rare antelope Saola, was first found here in 1992. Today, some 850 species of bird have returned to the gradually filling treetops. To the extent that the nation’s woodlands are still threatened, it is by unsustainable logging practices – a scourge that Hanoi is attempting to combat.
Perhaps most apocryphal is the observation that some of the tons of explosives dropped on Vietnam have not had a lasting negative impact on local life. High yield bombs that fell in small lakes deepened lakebeds and created craters in rice paddies that left behind deep ponds which, once stocked with fish, provide local farmers with critically larger fishing yields. That may seem a small blessing to Westerners when compared to the cost, but it is seen as an irreplaceable boon for subsistence farmers and their families.
Of course, the ravages of war endured by the Vietnamese are by no means a benefit, and the people and environment of Vietnam would no doubt trade their present circumstances for those that prevailed prior to the wars of the 20th Century. In some places, the grim toll of war has scarred the country’s environment, perhaps permanently. Still, the country’s environmental comeback continues to surprise researchers and is a testament to the power of the planet’s ecological resilience. It’s testimony that some would rather not hear.
