Bangkok: The Big Mango

I have only been here in Bangkok (Gurung-tehp) for two days and I leave tomorrow. But what I have seen here has made an impression. This city is intense. The air is thick with bus exhaust and heat, the jack fruit on the street is cheap, and cokes come in glass bottles. It's the kind of city where, unless you're being enticed into buying something, no one looks you in the eye (I guess like any city...). Everyone is enveloped in his or her own business, whether that be making soup on the side of the road or sleeping with a stray dog on the side of the road.
Today I went looking for a pair of converse shoes (and got 'em. 5 bucks.) and came across the craziest phenomenon. I found a section of downtown that was ridiculously developed. I'm talking cross walks, starbucks, air conditioned malls 5 stories high, lacoste, and sidewalk fountains. The area went on for blocks and blocks. Tourists (like me) were crawling everywhere. But as I kept walking, the nice sidewalks eventually ended and the tight, dirty streets began again. The change from 'developed' to 'underdeveloped' was literally across a street. If I tried, I could get people sitting at plastic tables eating soup under a bridge and Adidas Outlet in the same camera frame. The difference was so drastic, and by looking around a bit I could see posters for new planned apartments and shopping malls.
I call this a 'phenominon' because this happens often in quickly-industrializing places (like Bangkok). New markets based on tourism (good) bring new life to an economy (good). The economy expands, stuff is built, and the poor are pushed back. Granted the added wealth to a country is good and the jobs provided are also good, but at what cost? I bring up the difference between the developed and the underdeveloped not to illustrate the stark difference between the rich and the poor, but to illustrate the illusion these fancy buildings give us. Today, while strattling the street between the clean and the dirty, I couldn't help but notice how easy the clean half looked. Why don't they just redo the dirty part like they did the clean part? The illusion that building a bunch of new structures (to light, heat, and furnish) is easy and simple is dangerously misleading. All development like that comes at a cost. The reason why I am in Thailand this semester is to study how the industrial boom of Southeast Asia has raped the environment of its resources. Places like China and Thailand are 'developing' so fast that the countries' respective natural resources are being abused and ignored. Tomorrow I travel up to Chiang Mai (base), where I will begin taking trips around the rural portions of Thailand to learn more about these environmental atrocities. I don't know very much at this point and I realize my thoughts are naive and short-sighted, but I hope to better understand this place as the semester unfolds.
grace, peace, and love to you all.

Here is a bit from a book I am reading now.

"As countries undergo the initial stages of industrialization, environmental indicators- air quality, water quality, forest coverage- generally deteriorate. Then, a turning point is reached and many of these indicators gradually start to improve, although there are exceptions (carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, have continued to climb). Preindustrialization conditions may never be fully restored, but sometimes they can at least be approached.
This pattern is controversial with many environmentalists because of the prevailing assumption, particularly among leaders of industrializing countries, that societies inevitably follow this curve and it is therefore okay to put off attempts at cleaning up. Under this traditional development paradigm, the curve becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy- a result of the tendency to separate economic and environmental concerns, reflected most fundamentally in the way statistics are kept. GDP numbers account for the benefits of economic activity, but ignore environmental and public health costs. A car crash, for instance, generates lots of economic activity by sending people to hospitals and spurring them to buy new vehicles. Similarly, a polluting factory contributes its basic production to economic statistics, along with its clean-up activities and the medical spending required by victims of its pollution. But you wouldn't consider all that activity to be beneficial. As a result, the high GDP growth rates recorded by industrializing countries are misleading about the real progress being made in quality of life. "

A Land on Fire
James David Fahn