David Biggs

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David Biggs | managing a rebel landscape: Conservation, Pioneers, and the Revolutionary Past in the U Minh Forest, Vietnam | Environmental History, 10.3 | The History Cooperative

managing a rebel landscape: CONSERVATION, PIONEERS, AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PAST IN THE U MINH FOREST, VIETNAM

DURING THE SPRING dry season of 2002, a series of fires in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam destroyed over 2,700 hectares of cajuput (Melaleuca cajuputi) forest in U Minh Thuong National Park. The burning forest was one of the last intact remnants of mixed cajuput and coastal mangrove forest that before 1900 covered over a million hectares and was one of the largest such ecosystems in the world. For two months during the blaze, several thousand army troops, volunteer police, and forest rangers worked around the clock to contain fires in the park and nearby forest plantations. Temperatures in the center of the fire reached several thousand degrees as the dried peat layer ignited, resulting in occasional fireballs roiling skyward. The firefighters' primary response to the fire involved pumping seawater from the coast to fill canals dug as firebreaks, thus causing further damage to the park's mostly freshwater ecosystems.¹ In total, over eight thousand hectares of land in the region burned in these fires, including many forest plantations. The fires reduced the protected core zone to approximately two thousand hectares, and it is doubtful that many highly endangered, endemic species of birds, reptiles, fish, and plants will survive.²	1
The fires captured national attention, not only because of their intensity but also because the area was home to one of the first southern bases for the Viet Minh (1941–1954) and later an important base of operations for the National Liberation Front (NLF) (1960–1975). Many top southern leaders in the Vietnamese Communist Party, including former Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet and Party Secretary Le Duan spent time in the forest, building a political and military infrastructure that after 1945 expanded a network of guerrilla bases, hospitals, schools, and weapons workshops to support the war effort. The forest was at times a scene of intense combat and apocalyptic levels of destruction, especially during the final four years of American combat operations (1968–1972) when American and South Vietnamese forces hit the forest bases with B-52 strikes, napalm, Agent Orange, and large-scale, amphibious offensives involving entire battalions backed up with helicopter support. After 1972, NLF and party cadres reconsolidated their control of the area and from U Minh slowly expanded a liberation government across the delta region to 1975. After 1975, U Minh served as a new center for resettlement of war veterans and large-scale campaigns to remediate areas affected by defoliants and bombing from the war. By 1990, thousands of new settlers had rapidly cleared much of the remaining forest, so that Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet nominated Upper U Minh as a forest reserve. Since 1990, the Vietnamese Forest Protection Department has worked with international conservation organizations and national agencies to develop new legal and administrative frameworks to conserve the remaining stands of the cajuput forest.³ Since 1990, one of the most difficult problems facing this new generation of conservationists is local people's widespread resistance to following the new forest ordinances.	2
While environmentalists and conservation groups have typically described this resistance in modern economic terms, this essay considers the ways that resistance to conservation efforts reaches back into a deeper revolutionary and colonial past. The recent fires may be seen not only as a failure in specific management technologies today but also as a failure to accommodate U Minh's past into relatively new and foreign models of forest conservation. It is important that sites such as this be approached not only as forests but also as intensely memorable places configured in the recent past by traumatic events. The forest was not just a convenient shelter for guerrillas from 1932 to 1975 but over this time it became a familiar lived-in landscape produced by successive generations of rebel communities, secret lines of communication, and physical modifications including bunkers and concrete structures.⁴	. . .

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