EcoTipping Point Reverses Deforestation in Thailand
Gerald Marten and Amanda Suutari
Editorial Contributions: Jerry Burris, Andrew Mittelman
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NAKHON SAWAN, Thailand –To Thai authorities and the international advisors and lenders there to help them, it seemed like the best idea in the world.
It was the 1960’s and Thailand was ready to burst out of its third-world, agriculturally-based economy and become a modern, prosperous, industrialized nation. The government launched a Western growth model with export-led development as its centerpiece. The policy was to utilize forests and agricultural production as resources for foreign exchange revenue to generate investment in a growing manufacturing sector.
No less than half of the kingdom’s forests, fisheries and agricultural areas were reoriented towards overseas markets.
And if overall growth in gross domestic product is your yardstick, the approach was a raging success. Over three decades growth rates ran about 10 percent a year – one of the fastest in the world.
But for small-scale farmer Thanawm Chuwaingan and millions like him, the story was entirely different. This massive shift in economic policy took Thanawm to the wrong side of a tipping point. He faced what seemed an irreversible slide from abundance to want, from environmental health to environmental ruin, social upheaval and ruinous debt.
Happily, Thanawm’s story does not end there. Through an unusual, though not unique set of circumstances, the tip down a negative slide was stopped and then went the other way.
Thanawm and his fellow villagers became part of a positive tip – an EcoTipping Point – in which a combination of sensible environmental technology and robust social organization restored ecological health and a stronger, more sustainable society.
Achieving a positive tip is not easy. But where EcoTipping Points occur, they can catalyze positive change in situations that seem impossibly difficult.
So what precisely are EcoTipping Points, and how do they work? The experience of Thanawm and his fellow villagers tells the tale.
In 1954, Thanawm migrated from the impoverished Khorat Plateau of Northeast Thailand to Khao Din village in Nakhon Sawan province, about 225 kilometers north of Bangkok, to stake a claim on newly opened forest land.
Thanawm explains, “At that time, nobody had cars, so we made the journey in carts pulled by cattle.”
“It was easy to find food here. There were many edible plants and vegetables growing wild near our houses. The fish in the streams were easy to catch. We would start the fire and by the time the water had started to boil, we’d be back with fish to put in the pot.”
“There were also plenty of wild animals, like boars, deer, tigers and elephants. Life was simpler.”
With abundance at hand and a cooperative spirit in the village, life was good. But things started to change in the 60’s and 70’s. The government wanted the farmers to modernize and grow cash crops such as rice, maize, jute, and cassava for export. Forests were cut to sell the timber and expand the farmland. The government provided loans intended for inputs such as hybrid seed, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and farm equipment.
But the farmers, who never had so much money in their pockets before, also used the loans to buy radios, motorcycles and other modern merchandise. And after the initial flush of quick cash, crop prices began to decline because so many farmers were growing the same thing.
Then when droughts came and their crops started to fail, matters suddenly became worse. People began to go deeper into debt. In a relatively few years, Thanawm and his family went from near Eden-like abundance and comfort to a hardscrabble existence typified by hunger, poverty and social disintegration.
Desperate to make good on their debts, villagers cut the last remnants of forest to expand their fields, since what they had was no longer enough to make ends meet.
“By that time, there were virtually no trees left on the hillsides. It became hotter and drier,” Thanawm said.
The soil, which had been fertile for years, was eroded and became progressively harder with continued use of chemical fertilizers. Rainwater just ran off. Crop yields declined.
Droughts became more frequent. People started to have to look for work in the cities during the dry season in order to pay their debts. Families were split up.
“Unlike in the past when people really cared for one another, everyone was now worried about their own fields and their own family’s problems,” Thanawm said.
“Before, if anyone had a problem, others would be quick to offer their help. But now, our communities began to fall apart,” he said. “For the first time ever, we began to have psychological and social problems. There was little trust and less cooperation.”
Wide scale migration in search of urban jobs led to the disintegration of communities. Villages increasingly became populated by the young and elderly. Juvenile delinquency, previously unheard of, emerged as communities were rapidly torn from their traditional social norms.
In short, the village was headed to something sadly familiar: An irreversible ecological and social slide. But then the people in Khao Din village made certain key changes which set their village and its environmental support system in a positive direction.
Here’s how they put in place a “lever” that caused conditions to tip from bad to good:
In 1986, a team from the aid group Save the Children was sent to Khao Din village by the Thai government because the district had become one of the nation’s poorest by that time. Rather than simply distributing aid from donors, which had been the pattern under the government’s modernization program, the Save the Children team awakened villagers’ awareness about the true source of their predicaments, and then helped them to devise their own solutions.
At first, the villagers were suspicious. Were these outsiders “communists” trying to organize for their own purposes? Trust grew slowly, through long and at times arduous discussions, during which the aid workers asked villagers questions that enabled them to retrace the steps to their plight.
This led to some startling realizations.
The most important was when villagers recognized that they were primarily responsible for bringing about their own problems, through the decisions they had made on how to use and manage their local resources.
This “awakening” created tremendous inspiration and confidence that they could, similarly, come up with their own solutions.
“The process was a milestone. It was amazing! People were lighting up like light bulbs!” said Andrew Mittelman, a Save the Children staff member responsible for designing the project with local representatives.
“Remembering what the land and local natural resources were like when they arrived,” he said, “they kept saying: ‘We never thought this could happen. We couldn’t imagine this place of abundance would become a desert.’ They were saying: ‘My God, what have we done?’”
This collective awareness was the first step in the EcoTipping Point process. It prompted the villagers to consider what they could do to change the situation, based on their new understanding of the problem and its causes.
The second step came when villagers and the project team formulated an ecologically viable strategy for their community. It began with the realization that it made no sense to “put all of their eggs in one basket,” as had been the case with the high-input monoculture cash crop systems
They designed farming systems in which trees and crops were interspersed on the same field, resembling in many ways the structure of the natural forest. They also decided to restore their damaged forests and defend them with local community protection and management.
This approach, known as “agroforestry,” was neither new to Save the Children nor to the local farmers. Their now largely abandoned traditional subsistence systems had incorporated many of the same elements.
And an integrated farm is nothing extraordinary. It usually involves a pond or canal as a year-around source of water for crop irrigation, along with fish and edible aquatic plants. There is a broad variety of food crops. In this case, it involved crops such as chilies, pumpkin, beans, and other vegetables, herbs like cilantro, lemon grass, galangal, basil and mint, and fruits such as mangos, jackfruit, lime, longan, bananas, and papayas.
Forest trees supply fruits, nuts, fuelwood, and building materials. Everything together provides a healthy diet and supplementary income.
This form of agroforestry drastically cut food costs, as well as agricultural input costs because “nature did much of the work.” It simultaneously restored some of the ecological stability to the land that forests had automatically maintained for millennia. Year-round food security increased dramatically, since even if one crop failed, others would succeed.
At first, although it was the poorest who were most in need, only those who could afford to take the risks of making what was actually a small investment were able to set aside some of their land and energy for agroforestry development and sustainable agriculture.
But what started on eight acres of demonstration plots grew year-by-year as the large group of villagers who had participated in the original “lightbulb” planning phase adopted similar approaches on their own farms.
It is more than 10 years since Save the Children finished its project in Khao Din, now a thriving community of 2,500 inhabitants.
Twenty-five villages in Nakhon Sawan province are following Khao Din’s example, pursuing a variety of locally designed forms of agroforestry and sustainable agriculture on land covering thousands of acres. Recreating natural ecological processes on the farms has reestablished recycling processes similar to those in natural ecosystems. Soil erosion and degradation due to overuse of chemicals have been reversed.
Natural forests, largely devastated by misuse, are regenerating over an even larger area. In turn, restored forests are repairing damaged watersheds. Streams, along with a variety of animals long thought to be extinct, have reemerged. An area which, not long ago, had resembled a desert landscape described locally as “phu khaaw hua ron” or bald mountains, is now a site for weekend waterfall outings and ecotourism. Additional income comes from mushrooms and edible forest vegetables.
“There are more trees. Now, if someone is 10 meters inside the forest, you can’t see them,” exclaimed Thanawm. “And there’s less migration to Bangkok”. Particularly important for the local people, the socially disruptive trends caused by urban migration and unchecked materialism were brought under control.
“Most of all, in terms of change, was the change in people’s thinking,” Thanawm concluded. “We are learning together as a community, sharing knowledge with each other. People no longer think: ‘we are in trouble, and we can do nothing about it.’”
“We know now that with some careful thinking and a lot of shared effort, we can solve our problems, and fix what is broken. This has given our communities a tremendous boost. And it is also something that has really enabled us to influence others, whose own problems are very distressing to them, just as it was for us before.”
The experiences of the villagers from Nakhon Sawan can and have been replicated elsewhere. While exactly what happened there is not necessarily the answer for every place facing what appears to be an irreversible ecological slide, the fact is EcoTipping Points do exist as levers for positive change.
And the real positive news is that it is possible to create those levers.
“Even though we don’t have much money, I’m happy,” said Thanawm. “We have friends who come to visit and we have enough food for them. We don’t have to buy much of anything.”
Gerald Marten is an ecologist at the East-West Center in Honolulu and author of Human Ecology: Basic Concepts for Sustainable Development. Amanda Suutari is an environmental journalist based in Vancouver. To see more on this story and on other similar successes, go to www.ecotippingpoints.org.
Q. What is an EcoTipping Point?
A. Simply, it is a “lever” that reverses environmental decline which often is seen as irreversible once it begins. But once an EcoTipping Point is reached, it sets in motion a healthy cycle of restoration and sustainability.
Q. What makes an EcoTipping Point a success story?
A. We have found several common factors that make it work:
- Some form of environmental technology (in the broadest sense) combines with effective social organization to make the technology work.
- It catalyzes a cascade of effects through the ecosystem and social system
- The cascade has enough force to convert vicious cycles into “virtuous cycles” that lead toward sustainability.
- Outside stimulation is usually needed, often to create community awareness of the problem and an expanded perspective on possible actions.
- Strong local democratic leadership with long-term commitment is critical.
- The community is stimulated by powerful symbols that move the tip forward. Rapid success is one such symbol.
- EcoTipping Points happen when people find ways to “deal with social complexity,” which means breaking out from the surrounding craziness or set ways of thinking that prevent change.
- EcoTipping Points often transform “waste” (e.g., degraded land, sewage, marginalized people) into valued social or material capital.
- EcoTipping Points make use of social and ecological diversity and community memory as a resource.
- EcoTipping Points create resilience to resist negative tips.
- EcoTipping points scale up as people see success and try it themselves.
Q. This sounds wonderful. But does it have any application beyond individual groups of people rescuing their own landscapes and livelihoods?
A. Yes. Positive tips can have impacts well beyond the particular place where they occur. The reversal of tropical deforestation, for instance, can have a direct impact on global warming because forest restoration sequesters carbon, while deforestation releases massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Q. Is this something that only happens in remote regions of third-world countries?
A. No. They can exist in your own community. Look for opportunities to stop vicious cycles of environmental decline and “tip” things in a positive way.
Map of Thailand showing the location of Nakhon Sawan province.
Download the following images (originals) and captions: zip (6.8mb)
Thanawm Chuwaingan relaxes outside his home with other community leaders in Khao Din village.
Khao Din’s community forest, which provides numerous edible and medicinal products harvested according to community agreements.
The irrigation pond on Thanawm Chuwaingan’s farm. The pond contains fish for sale and household consumption and is surrounded by papaya and banana trees, which not only provide fruit but also prevent soil erosion.
Thanawm Chuwaingan at his farm. The agroforestry features a variety of trees and crops for food, medicine, and other uses.
The kitchen garden at Thanawm Chuwaingan’s home. It features a variety of trees and crops for food, medicine, and other uses. The large ceramic pots store rainwater.