Word: mekong
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vietnam war, America's image of the conflict was shaped by news footage of battlefields dominated by miasmal jungle and of an enemy who was often portrayed as merciless and inhuman. But the war doesn't look that way in the drawings, poems, letters and oral histories compiled in Mekong Diaries. Author Sherry Buchanan journeyed across Vietnam to gather previously unpublished material from 10 Vietnamese artists who resisted the U.S. The resulting volume is a moving alternative to common American narratives of the war and offers extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian...
...About 100 artists served in the Mekong Delta during the 11-year conflict, tasked with recording battles and creating images that could be used to inspire civilians in the war effort. Sixty-two died in action. Some were regular soldiers as well as artists; others performed no military duties but chose to go on reconnaissance missions and into combat to create their works. Recruits were trained in drawing, and professors from the Hanoi College of Fine Arts traveled the Ho Chi Minh Trail to set up art courses in the Mekong Delta before dispatching their students into battle with sketchbooks...
...eyeing other ecological disasters for their conflict potential. There is the loss of half the Aral Sea to Soviet-era irrigation, and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers (which feed rivers from which 500 million people draw water); and there are Chinese plans to dam the upper Mekong, halving water flow to 65 million Southeast Asians. In a 2003 report, the U.N. Environment Program said water shortages already affected 400 million people and predicted that number would multiply tenfold by 2050. At that time, more than a sixth of the world's population, 1.1 billion people, had erratic supplies...
Long before a government report confirmed it, villagers living along the banks of the Thi Vai river in the Mekong Delta knew full well that the waterway was dead. They had complained for years that industrial waste discharged into the Thi Vai had poisoned their wells, killed all the fish and was making them sick. Yet it wasn't until cargo companies refused to dock at the river's main port - saying that the toxic brew was eating through the ships' hulls - that Vietnam officials were willing to get tough on polluters...
...predictable result: pollution of the country's lands and waters on a shocking scale. According to Vietnam's state media, thousands of large - and small-scale industries - discharge at least 33,000 cubic meters of waste into the Mekong River system every day. Midwife Le Thi Thanh Thuy, who lives a kilometer from the Vedan plant, tells pregnant women living along the Thi Vai River not to drink the water. Even some well water burns people's skin and isn't used to wash clothes. "They are so poor, they don't have enough money to buy rice," says Thuy...