From Resistance to Ruin: Vietnam and the War on the Living World

After the Bombs, the Bulldozers

Before We Go Further

I’ve been writing about Vietnamese resistance—about courage in the face of empire, about uprisings, defiance, survival. About peasants who stood against colonial rifles and villages that outlived bombing raids. About the fire that won’t go out.

But sometimes, resistance stories aren’t enough.

Sometimes we have to stop and ask: What are we fighting for? Not just politically. Not just historically. But biologically. Ecologically. Spiritually.

Because while we were fighting back, the land was being lost.

So I’ve paused to write this. To look honestly at what’s been happening to Vietnam’s forests, rivers, coasts, and skies. To say what the reports bury in footnotes and what development planners refuse to name. To count the species that are gone. To mourn the coral reefs, the mangroves, the wetlands, the sacred groves now replaced with concrete and cash crops. To say out loud what the neoliberal state and capitalist markets—whether dressed in red flags or free trade—won’t admit:

This is collapse.

And someone needs to name the killers.

So this isn’t a detour from resistance.

This is resistance.

Because there can be no liberation on a dead planet. And there is no revolution worth winning if it requires the annihilation of the living world.

The Sacred and the Broken

Once, the delta breathed.

The Mekong River fanned its tendrils through mangrove forests so thick and alive they could stop storms. Coral reefs flared beneath turquoise waters like the dreams of gods. Spoonbills traced quiet arcs across estuaries still wrapped in morning mist. Dugongs fed in silence in the sea-grass beds that once anchored Vietnam’s coastlines. Peat swamps, deep and ancient, held secrets in their spongy dark. Birds migrated in patterns older than cities.

And now?

Now the dugongs are gone—gone like a prayer never answered. Mangroves? Razed for shrimp ponds to feed distant markets. Coral? Dead, bleached, broken by dynamite and acid seas. The birds don’t come back to Dong Thap. They don’t come back because there’s nothing left. Their food's gone. Their habitat's gone. Their sky has been traded for a spreadsheet.

Vietnam, one of the world’s most biodiverse places, now counts its losses in digits and despair. One thousand two hundred eleven species proposed for the Red Book—an ecological obituary. Forests replanted with industrial clones, biodiversity replaced with monoculture. River deltas poisoned with the runoff of ambition. Seas dredged, trawled, and dumped on.

This isn’t just environmental decline. It’s desecration.

The land is being punished for being alive.

And we are supposed to call this development.

History as Wound

Vietnam’s forests have burned before. Not once, but many times. First under French boots—rubber barons and colonial governors turning sacred groves into plantations. The French came with saws, rifles, and extractive logic, mapping the land only to gut it. The forests fell, not by accident, but by decree. That’s how empire works: you kill the land, and then you bill the people.

Then came the Americans.

They called it defoliation—a sterile word for chemical warfare. Agent Orange didn't just strip trees; it melted them. Rivers clogged with toxic sediment, forests ghosted by dioxins, soil cursed for generations. They poisoned the earth so no one could hide in it. This wasn’t just an attack on resistance—it was an attack on life itself.

And after the bombs fell silent? The bulldozers kept moving.

The victorious Party, armed with Leninist central planning and Maoist revolutionary zeal, took a broken ecology and buried it in five-year plans. In the name of collectivism, they dammed rivers, converted wetlands, and erased traditional lifeways that had once held ecosystems in balance. Then, under Doi Moi, they sold the same lands to foreign investors, called it "liberation," and handed the chainsaws to capitalists in red ties.

Don’t be fooled by the red flags or the green logos.

Whether it’s under colonialism, communism, or capitalism, the outcome is the same: conversion of the living world into commodity. The forests become pulp. The rivers become waste streams. The people become labor.

This is not development. This is conquest with spreadsheets.

And the land remembers every cut.

Section of Vietnam 1984

Same section 2022

Check out Google Earth Timelapse of Vietnam. It’s astonishing.

The System, Named and Indicted

Let’s speak plainly.

What’s killing Vietnam’s ecosystems is not poor planning. It’s not a lack of awareness or weak enforcement. It’s civilization itself—a machine that devours land, water, and life to keep its own gears turning. Whether cloaked in the robes of socialism or dressed in the suits of free-market capitalism, this system runs on the same logic: convert the living into dead things called “products,” sell them, and repeat.

Vietnam has become a textbook case. Since the 1986 Doi Moi reforms, it has hurtled into the arms of global capitalism, opening its rivers, forests, and coastlines to the highest bidders. The NEA report reads like an autopsy: mangroves bulldozed for shrimp exports; seagrass beds lost to resort development; coral reefs dying under tourist footprints and chemical flows; industrial aquaculture pouring untreated waste into coastal zones. It’s mass extinction with quarterly targets.

The State plays both jailer and salesman: criminalizing dissent while cutting deals with billionaires who plant durians where old-growth trees once stood. They call this prosperity. But when you trace the money, you find poisoned estuaries and shattered food webs.

Fish are disappearing. Birds are fleeing. The forests that remain are plantation clones—biological deserts designed for export, not life.

And here’s the kicker: the very people who once lived with the land—the farmers, the fishers, the forest dwellers—are now the first to be displaced, policed, or bought off. The NEA even admits it: “a trade-off between increased production outputs and ecosystem degradation.” A trade-off? That’s the language of a murderer asking how much of the body we can still sell.

The Vietnamese state may wave red flags, but its economic policies are neoliberal through and through: deregulation, foreign investment, privatization, and mass production. It’s the IMF with an accent. It’s the World Bank with rice paddies. It’s industrialism wrapped in a revolutionary narrative. And all of it is killing the land.

There’s no reforming this. You don’t reform a cancer. You stop it.

And that means naming the real enemy: the entire industrial economy. The one that tells us forests are worth more dead than alive. The one that sees water as a pipeline, not a sacred flow. The one that measures life in dollars and calls it growth.

The system is the killer.

And every mangrove cut, every coral shattered, every bird that never returns—they’re all witnesses.

Population as Pressure – Growth Without Roots

You cannot talk about the collapse of ecosystems without talking about the swelling of the human footprint.

Vietnam’s population has more than doubled since 1975, now topping 100 million people. It’s population was only 6 million at the beginning of the 19th Century. Today, that’s 100 million mouths to feed, bodies to house, jobs to provide, and dreams to chase—most of them forcibly shaped by a system that equates "a better life" with consumption and convenience. But when everyone wants a car, a two-story home, and air conditioning, the Earth has to die to deliver it.

The NEA puts it gently—“demographic changes have increased the need for resources”—but the reality is brutal. More people means more land conversion, more forest cleared, more rivers dammed, more wetlands filled. Every hectare of mangrove turned into shrimp pond is another concession to the impossible demand for globalized food, housing, and economic security in a finite world.

This isn’t about blaming people for existing. It’s about understanding how the system weaponizes population growth to justify ecological destruction. Imagine a world where 100 million people:

• lived in localized, subsistence-based communities, not sprawling megacities.

• practiced traditional agroecology rather than chemical monoculture.

• organized around bioregional limits, not GDP targets.

• respected land as a living being, not a resource to be monetized.

In that world, 100 million might actually be less destructive than 6 million under an industrial regime.

But under capitalism and industrialism? More people mean more extraction. Full stop.

Vietnam’s urban expansion, detailed in the NEA’s future scenarios, shows it plainly: population density drives land-use change. And that change isn’t toward forests or food sovereignty—it’s toward highways, cement, tourism zones, and industrial parks.

The problem is that every one of them is now expected to participate in a global economic system that requires turning land into product, rivers into drains, forests into cash.

Under this system, population becomes a multiplier of death.

We must break this equation.

That means reshaping how we live, how we relate to each other, and how we define "the good life." Not in terms of GDP or consumption, but in terms of biological belonging.

The Earth can support people—but not a civilization that treats it as expendable.

The more we grow without changing that story, the less of the world remains.

Death of the Waters, Death of the Forests

This is what collapse looks like—not as a sudden apocalypse, but as a long, choking silence.

Let’s walk the Mekong Delta. Once, this was a cradle of life, its estuarine waters cradling fish nurseries, migratory birds, and rice fields that breathed with the tides. Now? Over 10,000 square kilometers of forest have been destroyed in recent decades. Monoculture farms and shrimp ponds lie where mangroves once stood. The shrimp are exported. The poisons remain.

And the rivers? Strangled by dams and choked with runoff. The NEA tells us that rivers, streams, and estuarine ecosystems are degraded and their biodiversity reduced. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s fish dead in the shallows. It’s algae blooms turning water to rot. It’s communities poisoned slowly, daily.

Seagrass beds—nurseries for marine life—are vanishing. Coral reefs, once riotous with color and life, have seen a 50% drop in live coral coverage from 1994 to 2012. Some zones are down to single digits. Beneath the surface, the reefs are bones now. The fish are gone, and with them, the economies of coastal people who lived with the sea, not against it.

Peat swamps, ancient carbon sinks, are drying and thinning—victims of conversion and climate stress. These aren’t just "ecosystem losses"; they are biospheric amputations. Remove enough limbs, and the body dies.

In the forests, it’s the same story. Officially, Vietnam boasts over 14 million hectares of forest. But look closer: most of it is plantation. Rubber. Acacia. Eucalyptus. Fast-growing, profit-driven, ecologically sterile. The real forests—the old-growth, the biodiverse, the sacred—are nearly gone.

And the species?

1,211 species proposed for listing in Vietnam’s Red Book, up from 882 just a decade prior. Conservation? More like a countdown.

Rare birds like the Spoonbill (Platalea minor) are disappearing from sanctuaries like Xuan Thuy. In Phu Quoc, the dugong hasn’t been seen in years. What we’re watching isn’t just local extinction—it’s silence expanding outward. First the mammals. Then the fish. Then the insects. And then... nothing.

The NEA—buried beneath the cautious language of state science—admits the truth: ecosystems with the most biodiversity and services are the most degraded. In short: the richest parts of the country’s living systems are being sacrificed the fastest.

The forests are dying. The rivers are toxic. The coasts are bleeding. This is what an economy looks like when it feeds on the body of the Earth.

The Myth of Sustainability

They call it sustainable development. They say it's green growth. They print glossy brochures and point to forest coverage statistics that rise—not because the forests are returning, but because plantations count as trees. That’s like saying a graveyard counts as a city.

Let’s be clear: there is nothing sustainable about Vietnam’s ecological trajectory. The NEA tries to paint a balanced picture—development pressures, legal reforms, policy gaps—but buried under bureaucratic language is the truth: the system is unraveling the biosphere, and they are selling the wreckage as progress.

Look at the mangroves: once storm-buffering, biodiversity-rich ecosystems now drained and replanted as shrimp farms to satisfy export quotas. Look at the forests: clear-cut and replanted with Acacia, a fast-growing cash crop that offers none of the ecological functions of a native forest. Look at the coral: collapsing under tourist pressure and sewage, while "eco-resorts" install plastic reefs to decorate the dead.

They call this balance. They call it “Payments for Ecosystem Services,” where communities are paid to protect what industry is still allowed to destroy. The same government that licenses bottom trawlers in marine protected areas hands out awards for conservation. The same system that enables illegal logging at scale celebrates "green growth" at international conferences.

And the international agencies—the UNDPs, the World Banks—cheer them on, hand in hand with corporate donors. They publish reports filled with euphemisms: “transitioning,” “co-benefits,” “nature-based solutions.” All of it designed to tell us that destruction can be managed, monetized, and made palatable.

But you can’t plantation your way to biodiversity.

You can’t dump toxins in rivers and call it sustainable aquaculture.

You can’t sacrifice seagrass beds for hotel complexes and claim climate resilience.

This isn’t green. It’s death painted green.

And every time we use the word “sustainable” without naming what we’re sustaining—a violent, extractive economy—we participate in the lie.

Vietnam’s forests are not coming back. Its coral reefs will not regenerate in sewage. Its rivers will not cleanse themselves through policy workshops.

This is not restoration. This is a funeral dressed in marketing language.

Resistance and Reckoning

There is no reforming a system designed to consume the world.

This must be our starting point. Not hope. Not compromise. Not “sustainable development goals.” But reckoning. The NEA hints at it—beneath every line of policy analysis, every chart of ecosystem decline, every threatened species list is a scream muffled by diplomacy. The scream says: We are losing everything. And we are doing it on purpose.

So the question becomes: What are we going to do about it?

Resistance is not optional. It is already happening—in whispers, in forest groves, in the hands of elders who remember how to live with land instead of from it. Ethnic minorities in the highlands still keep seed banks and forest knowledge alive. Fisherfolk on the coasts fight encroachment by industrial trawlers. Local groups try to patrol what’s left of mangrove edges, coral patches, sacred groves.

But their power is dwarfed by the machine—by billionaires building export empires, by Party officials balancing GDP spreadsheets, by global markets demanding cheap shrimp, cheap coffee, cheap labor. And we are told this is inevitable. We are told to accept this, adjust to this, make peace with this.

No.

What we need is not accommodation—it’s defiance. It’s communities tearing up shrimp farms and replanting mangroves. It’s farmers refusing monocultures and returning to polycultures guided by traditional knowledge. It’s direct action against the projects that trade forests for export revenue. It’s scientists breaking ranks and naming the system as the killer it is. It’s people refusing to believe that “green capitalism” will save the biosphere it continues to annihilate.

We are not consumers of a product called "nature." We are its children. And when something is killing your mother, you don’t negotiate. You fight.

Vietnam is not unique. But it is urgent.

If the forests fall here, they will fall everywhere. If the rivers die here, they will die everywhere. If the lie of sustainable plunder stands here, it will stand everywhere.

And if resistance grows here, it will grow everywhere too.

War Cry and Eulogy

Let us not end this with polite optimism.

Let us end it the way the Earth demands: with a war cry—and a eulogy.

This is for the dugongs who will never return to Phu Quoc. For the coral reefs in Nha Trang now bleached and broken. For the ancient peat swamps crushed under the weight of short-term profit. For the Spoonbill, the Crested Crane, and the thousands of species whose names we’ll never learn because they died unnamed.

This is for the rivers turned into latrines for chemical agriculture. For the forest spirits silenced under rubber plantations. For the sacred mangroves drowned in brine and shrimp waste.

This is for the wild world lost while the economists cheered.

And yet, there is still breath in the soil. Still seeds in the hands of mountain elders. Still birds who haven’t flown their final path. Still coral clinging to the last shards of reef. Still people who know, in their bones, that this world is sacred—and that any system that devours it must be stopped.

So we say this:

Enough of the lies of development.

Enough of growth at the cost of rivers and forests.

Enough of billionaires profiting off extinction.

Enough of “green” capitalism.

We will not wait for reforms.

We will not believe in sustainability if it means sustaining the machine that kills.

We will fight for the mangroves, for the coral, for the fish and forests and the people who still live with the land.

Not because we think we can win in the way the system defines victory.

But because the Earth is worth defending.

Even if all we save is one wetland, one reef, one child’s ability to hear birdsong in the morning air—

It will have been worth it.

Let the planners count their profits.

We will count what is sacred.

And we will not go quietly.