Vietnamese sometimes claim this is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in
southeast Asia,
fifty-four recognized ethnic minorities.
Somebody once describe color-coded ethnicity
maps for Vietnam as being absolutely psychedelic, colors within colors.
Most of us think about Vietnam as a venue for
conflict between, humans in particular, but in fact it's world-renowned
for its high rates of diversity, and also
the large number of species that are found in Vietnam and nowhere else in the world.
For instance, a fifth of the world's primates that are highly
endangered are found in Vietnam and nowhere else.
There are lots and lots of reasons why Vietnam has high rates of
biological diversity and
some of those relate to the geography of the country. It's long and skinny and it
crosses many different kinds of
habitats and climates.
One factor that supports biological diversity, as well as culture diversity
is actually isolation.
So, when different populations, in particular species, become separated and
don't
interact with each other, there's no interbreeding between the populations over a long
period of time.
And that's one of the factors that's led to speciation across Vietnam and the
large number of species that we find there.
If one were to account for the the huge ethnic diversity in Vietnam, I suppose
the first factor would be the mountainous terrain, the fact that
people are living in relative isolation.
The mountains are places where people are not engaging in the same pressure to conform,
linguistically, culturally, ecologically.
They hold on to life practices that are somewhat
different from those of the majority down in the Deltas.
The fact that Vietnam fought
thirty years of war, of which the American experience was only the last interlude,
meant that
attempts to open up
highland areas were postponed,
connections with broader markets were postponed.
What you do see, now,
as markets have opened,
as the privatization of the economy,
increasing connections
and less isolation.
After the war, people started to spend more time going into the field and doing work
to understand the biodiversity of Vietnam, that would be both
Vietnamese scientists as well as scientists from other parts of the world,
and as they did so, they started to realize that there's a lot of Vietnam that we don't know about.
In Vietnam, with it's high human population, you have a lot of heavy impact on the environment.
You have many many different kinds of threats. There are threats from land conversion,
there are threats from pollution from factories from sewage, from lots of different types of
pollutants being dumped into wetlands systems.
There is a lot of concern about traditional handicrafts.
There are some villages that have made a very successful
transition because they're producing things that people need.
They're producing, for example, temple statutes for a huge revival in popular
religion.
Certain of their handicrafts are disappearing because there is less use
for them
or because people don't want to pay for the cost for a skilled work of hand
production
when you can buy the stuff that is machine made.
There has been a turn,
an awareness on some parts to rethink how
does indigenous knowledge protect the landscape.
We've learned so much from the people who lived, for instance, in the mountain regions and
and stewarded biodiversity for a long time.
How does the things that the grandfathers knew about plants and animals
interpreted through
what we might consider
religious issue? How helpful is that? And there has been a revaluing of local knowledge in Vietnam, as in many other places.
We've had an opportunity to learn how they live within their environment,
what they know
about the species
that are found there and the interactions among species,
and often areas of the world that have high biological diversity also have high
cultural diversity,
and so we work very hard to think about how can we
continue to support those levels of diversity.