The proposal for a dam at Mae Wong stil seems to have some life in it.
I received this email this morning with a request for signatures against the dam...
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Dear Friend,
I’m writing to ask you, please, to sign this petition to stop construction of an incredibly damaging dam in west-central Thailand that will eviscerate the Mae Wong National Park, home to tigers, elephants and other increasingly rare species. Tiger cubs were recently caught on camera at the heart of the park, rare evidence of a healthy, breeding population.
http://www.change.org/
This park is especially important for these species because it encompasses tropical lowland deciduous forest and savannah grassland, both highly threatened habitats in Thailand, within an arc of protective hills. This lowland basin is laced by a network of creeks that feed into the Mae Wong stream that politicians and businessmen would like to dam to reduce the threat of flooding, ignoring the fact – pointed out be several authorities on the subject - that recent floods have been most severe in areas already covered by large dams but where watershed forests have diminished in part as a result of those dams.
Mae Wong NP is a real success story for Thai conservation. Declared a national park in 1987 after a logging concessionaire had felled the pick of its timber, it was in poor condition in 1990 (and largely devoid of large mammals) when I co-authored Thailand’s nomination to UNESCO with my late colleague Seub Nakhasathien for the adjacent wildlife sanctuaries of Thung Yui-Huai Kha Khaeng to become the country’s first natural world heritage site. In that nomination, we noted that as soon as the conservation status of Mae Wong improves, IUCN would be justified in proposing that it be incorporated into the world heritage site. In the meantime, we noted that Mae Wong was part of the world heritage site’s well-protected and well-managed northern buffer zone.
But now that Mae Wong’s ecosystem has recovered, within weeks of Thailand’s conservation community celebrating rare photos of a female tiger and two cubs, the government declared that it plans to build a dam that would damage the ecosystem once again. There are at least four good reasons to vote against this wretched dam:
I leave you with a quote from Voltaire that seems apt in the circumstances – even if he did not entertain the possibility that women may also have a role to play! "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do".
Thanks very much for your support.
My bestest, as ever.
Belinda Stewart-Cox
I received this email this morning with a request for signatures against the dam...
++++
Dear Friend,
I’m writing to ask you, please, to sign this petition to stop construction of an incredibly damaging dam in west-central Thailand that will eviscerate the Mae Wong National Park, home to tigers, elephants and other increasingly rare species. Tiger cubs were recently caught on camera at the heart of the park, rare evidence of a healthy, breeding population.
http://www.change.org/
This park is especially important for these species because it encompasses tropical lowland deciduous forest and savannah grassland, both highly threatened habitats in Thailand, within an arc of protective hills. This lowland basin is laced by a network of creeks that feed into the Mae Wong stream that politicians and businessmen would like to dam to reduce the threat of flooding, ignoring the fact – pointed out be several authorities on the subject - that recent floods have been most severe in areas already covered by large dams but where watershed forests have diminished in part as a result of those dams.
Mae Wong NP is a real success story for Thai conservation. Declared a national park in 1987 after a logging concessionaire had felled the pick of its timber, it was in poor condition in 1990 (and largely devoid of large mammals) when I co-authored Thailand’s nomination to UNESCO with my late colleague Seub Nakhasathien for the adjacent wildlife sanctuaries of Thung Yui-Huai Kha Khaeng to become the country’s first natural world heritage site. In that nomination, we noted that as soon as the conservation status of Mae Wong improves, IUCN would be justified in proposing that it be incorporated into the world heritage site. In the meantime, we noted that Mae Wong was part of the world heritage site’s well-protected and well-managed northern buffer zone.
But now that Mae Wong’s ecosystem has recovered, within weeks of Thailand’s conservation community celebrating rare photos of a female tiger and two cubs, the government declared that it plans to build a dam that would damage the ecosystem once again. There are at least four good reasons to vote against this wretched dam:
- 1. The dam would eviscerate the national park,
inundating the whole of its core area which constitutes most, if not
all, the low-lying land in the park. Mae Wong NP is ringed by mountains,
giving it a distinctive horse-shoe shape. The proposed dam would be
built across the narrow end of the horse-shoe.
- 2. As always happens in Thailand when
reservoirs extend into wild areas, whether they have protected status or
not, this dam would facilitate encroachment and resource extraction
inside the national park, subjecting Mae Wong’s breeding tigers and
other valuable species to the depredations of hunters and poachers.
3. The dam would badly undermine the conservation integrity and connectivity of the world heritage site by destroying the critical role of Mae Wong as the northern buffer zone. It would act like an aggressive cancer that invades from outside, spreading its life-threatening impacts into the world heritage site.
- 4. This dam calls into question the Thai
government’s commitment to conservation (including tiger conservation)
and its willingness to recognize and respect the importance of world
heritage sites and the global tiger initiative. If the government can so
flagrantly disregard the impact of this dam on Mae Wong NP, it will
also ignore the impact of other development proposals elsewhere in this
and other world heritage sites.
I leave you with a quote from Voltaire that seems apt in the circumstances – even if he did not entertain the possibility that women may also have a role to play! "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do".
Thanks very much for your support.
My bestest, as ever.
Belinda Stewart-Cox
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