Word: vietnam
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Every year, even at the peak of Vietnam's dry season, when the Red River is at its lowest, Hanoi's skilled captains manage to negotiate their flat-bottomed boats through its shallow waters. But this year, with a drought gripping the entire country and water levels at record lows, the river is eerily quiet. What is normally a bustling waterway is becoming a winding river of sand, and farmers who depend upon the river for irrigation are watching the expanding sandbars as nervously as the boat captains. "If there is no water in the coming days," says 59-year...
...Across Vietnam, high temperatures and parched rivers are setting off alarm bells as the nation grapples with what's shaping up to be its worst drought in more than 100 years. At 0.68 meters high, the Red River is at its lowest level since records started being kept in 1902. With virtually no rainfall since September, timber fires are burning in the north and tinder-dry conditions threaten forests in the south. Soaring temperatures in the central part of Vietnam have unleashed a plague of rice-eating insects, damaging thousands of hectares of paddies. "It's the beginning of everything...
...tens of millions of people who depend on the river basin for farming, fishing and transportation. The biggest problem, however, is not the water. It's the salt. During the dry season, when channels and tributaries run dry, seawater can creep more than 18 miles (30 km) inland. Vietnam has installed a series of sluice gates to hold back high tides as well as control annual monsoon flooding. This has allowed farmers to switch between growing rice in the wet season and raising shrimp in the brackish waters in the dry. The result has been more-effective land...
...China, where tiger-hunting was legal until 1977, is not the only country with a poor record of conservation. Tigers are also found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam - but only just. A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers in the wild in Asia. Now their numbers are at an "all time low" of 3,200, estimates the WWF, which in January warned the animals could be extinct in the wild by 2022 - the next Year of the Tiger - unless new efforts are made to save them...
Romero expanded this premise into parable of a government experiment gone horribly wrong in wartime. He posited that a plane containing a deadly virus crashed in a lake near a small town; the military then takes drastic actions to contain it. Made during the Vietnam war, and just after the revelations of a My Lai massacre, the original Crazies had an unmissable Vietnam analogy: the military must destroy this village to save the country. The local folks could almost be seen as Vietnamese civilians, politicized by attacks on their village and fighting back by any means necessary. There's also...