Self Destruct
evawhite on May 18th, 2008
It is a button the world has already hit, each country bringing disaster among themselves. I have chosen to look upon this particular incident below purely because it is current news. I will over time look at other countries as well.
We have read about the recent tragedy which stuck South Asian Countries. The huge cyclone which struck Burma, Myanmar and surroundings. Subsequently the news also was Burma’s junta which is the military refusing foreign aid into the country. By which of course now we see Burma list among the top-read news listings for the wrong reasons.
Burma had mangrove forests along the coastlines. The mangroves are salt tolerant and are found along the coastlines, beside rivers and on the deltas. The mangrove forests have over time served as a buffer between rising tide and storms and the residential areas. The plant’s root systems have been shown to dissipate wave energy.
A study published in December 2005 states healthy mangrove forests helped save a substantial number of Sri Lankan villagers during the tsunami disaster of that year. It states that “while two people died in the settlement with dense mangrove and scrub forest, up to 6,000 people lost their lives in a nearby village without similar vegetation.”
In Bangladesh, another South Asian country, the country itself almost is all on a delta. A few decades ago the country has hit by a typhoon which killed almost three-hundred thousand people. They learnt since then and today the mangroves forests are a protected area.
The affected countries clearly haven’t realized that. A recent assessment found that 3.6 million hectares of mangrove forests worldwide are gone, Asia having lost 1.9 million of it. Burma among other countries witnessed large scale conversion of mangroves into shrimp and fish farms. Let’s hope they realize their natural barrier is their best insurance.
In all my years as a teenager and then as an adult, the name of Aung San Suu Kyi has cropped up from time to time in the news, a brave woman non violently battling the might of the Burmese military junta ceaselessly now for decades. It was when she won the Nobel Peace prize in the early 1990s that the whole world finally took notice of her struggle. Under house arrest for most of the last two decades, she has neither been allowed to leave her country even to be with her family nor has her family been permitted to come and visit her. As a result she was not allowed to visit her husband even when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and who later died without her being able to be by his side in his final moments.
