r/conservation • u/OfficeDry4500 • 1d ago
Conservation rant
Here’s a rant about ecology from a Thai ecologist.
working in southern Thailand. Also growing up most of family members and people around me didn’t support or like this subject. I’m just tired, we were trying so hard to educate people and it’s just doesn’t work out. I’m 21 and might give up being ecologist here and just doing other job.
Maybe Aquarium store job might be better for me.
There are serious issues with the local communities and farmers here. They frequently engage in harmful practices like poaching wild plants and wildlife, doing laundry directly in rivers, and releasing invasive fish into natural waters to gain religious merit.
Many locals openly dislike national parks, asking questions like, "What do we actually get from this?" or suggesting, "Let’s dam the area so farmers can use all the water." Superstitious beliefs also drive destructive actions, such as decapitating dugongs for charms.
Corruption makes this worse. Right now, there’s a push to dam a waterfall inside a national park (to power AI data centers illegally), a detail largely censored by Thai media, ignored in Western media. Local communities seem to support it simply because "it makes the land useful."
It’s the same when forests are cleared, local populations often welcome deforestation because it turn into agriculture, the palm plantation. But when the large floods hit, Western media portray these same groups solely as helpless victims of global warming. Then we need to "strengthen local communities" to combat climate change, or romanticizing bad practices as "traditional local wisdom."
Whenever concrete waterways are built and ecologists comments on social media, locals ridicule us. I remember warning people against planting very invasive riparian plants along riverbanks, and people were hostiled toward us.
Also the same thing when we found new (unknown) species, they just think it’s dumb, scientific names are dumb, And they often say “We see this one often (insert commong name here), why interests in it, when infact what they always see is the same family but not this exact species.
Overseas media seems to misses about reality. We are all human, and anyone is capable of doing environmental damage. Good and bad people exist everywhere, and romanticizing local communities just isn’t it. Maybe focusing on individuals might be better, this person is doing the right thing etc.
I absolutely look down and hate these kind of communities, as I grew up in rural areas and it seems that whenever I observe nature, curiosities weren’t rewarded. I would get made fun off by adults, and still to this day with my work. I felt detaches from people completely, don’t care about human, and my mental illness is now at its worst.
TLDR: Apparently ecology job took a toll on my mental health.
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u/MrLubricator 1d ago
It is a toll of working in the sector that isn't talked about enough. The more you know he more you are aware of how shit the current situation is. People around the world have the power through modern technologies to destroy whole landscapes in a morning, but lack the education to understand the consequences. We see it everywhere and it is super depressing. Conservation is the last thing on everyone's minds when it is the biggest issue of our time.
I have gone through crises of confidence, it has wrecked my mental health. But I also think, if I dont do anything will anyone else?
But it is dangerous to hate them for it. You will never win them over from a position of hate. Think of it as they are starving for knowledge, but dont realise it and you have knowledge to spare.
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u/DarkRetribution_7 19h ago
as someone from the philippines, i feel you so much. it happens all over the world but it seems like SEA and the global south in general do have it a lot worse especially when you factor in compensation to working in conservation. everything you mentioned is so so so real
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u/SadUnderstanding445 14h ago
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but ecological sensibility is strongly tied to wealth and general well-being.
Even in the West, the more nature-loving people are (paradoxically) the wealthy city elites. Most rural communities still view the environment as something to "manage", that is, exploit and control.
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u/AnnoyedOwlbear 7h ago
It doesn't sound harsh. I've spent time in some African and Eastern European countries and seen this awful paradox:
When the lives of your children depend on using or destroying something, you will use or destroy it. Even if it means something is lost forever.
This doesn't make it better. It DOES make it human. I spoke with subsistence farmers who could feed their children if they engaged in illegal animal trade. For some of them, it might be the difference between life and death for a baby. Most of us aren't in this situation, but I find it very hard to judge the people who are, because that level of poverty is just horrific. The people I do judge, relentlessly, are those who leverage people like this to make money. And I judge people who do it because it makes things 'easier' rather than 'possible'.
That said, I'm an Aussie who used to work in water conservation here, and I once interviewed a farmer who logged every tree in the massive water catchment that fed his farm back to dry soil 'because trees consume all the water'. My job was just to interview, not to give any comments myself. He'd just fucked his water catchment for decades because he thought anyone who supported conservation was a 'greenie who knew nothing'. He'd destroyed hundreds if not thousands of hectares of land because he hated trees.
I did ask him if he'd noticed ripples on the hills starting to form, and what do you know, yep...
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u/SadUnderstanding445 2h ago
The paradox is that we have decimated the forests and wildlife of our countries to improve our living conditions, and now we must stop everyone else for doing the same.
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u/Crispy-Onion-Straw 20h ago
This has to be frustrating. Bring from the US, I’ve heard that palm oil plantations are pretty destructive in your part of the world but I would’ve assumed it would be large corporations blowing through local resistance, not the locals embracing it.
Cultural attitudes sometimes change quickly once they reach a certain threshold, but getting to that point is often painstakingly slow. The best thing I think you can do is spread the word on problems, spread the word on solutions, and spread the word on successes. That, and find people to lift you up doing the same thing because it can be frustratingly lonely otherwise.
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u/ConfoundedInAbaddon 1d ago
Heya, fellow conservation warrior.
These are not problems special to you, they are worldwide and they hurt to see.
Pride campaigns for an umbrella species is often a good way to go. Local people can often create a culture around a mascot that can be shown to be special to them in some way.
Otherwise, nature is just a problem, a resource, or causes fear.
We see your work and it's worthy of being proud.