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  PlanetArk 17 Jul 07
Ecosystems of Vietnam's Long Coastline are in Peril
Story by Grant McCool

NHA TRANG, Vietnam - It was the destruction of coral reef and over-fishing that moved artist Nguyen Lieu to paint brightly coloured canvasses warning Vietnamese that their coastal environment is in peril.

"Nha Trang is the most beautiful bay recognised worldwide but exploitation there is chaotic," Lieu, 53, said at Galerie DEWI, where 15 of his oil paintings were exhibited in June and July.

His home town on the south-central coast has smooth sandy beaches, islands and mountains, but it also carries the burden of the ugly side of rapid development and fast-growing tourism.

It is a story being repeated up and down the impoverished country's 3,200 km (2,000 mile)-long coastline, despite awareness among officialdom and non-governmental groups to harmonise conservation and making a living from the sea.

Oil slicks, dead rivers and polluted air are part of an often-bleak environmental picture as Vietnam's 85 million people head toward industrialisation.

Lieu's art is unusual in communist-run Vietnam in that it displays a consciousness about a contemporary global issue.

Seen through his eyes, there is a dire need to preserve and protect coral reefs and marine life for future generations.

For good reason, environmentalists say. Research shows Vietnam is a "biodiversity hotspot" with ecosystems under threat. Less than 25 percent of coral reefs surveyed have living coral and 75 percent are at high or very high risk, eight times the southeast Asian average.

MOTHER PROCTECTOR

Lieu's impressionist works in the exhibit "Sea 80 Square" each feature a mother protector as an elongated, cloaked figure in a conical hat or a face in the ocean.

"I would like to send a message to viewers to understand that the sea is like the mother," said Lieu. "I used the image of a mother's face as the face of this sea, this bay."

Lieu varies his colours from blues to greens, to reds and browns and violet to depict each stage of the ocean's condition, whether it be clear and clean or dirty and damaged.

Visitors and residents of Nha Trang say they can find fish swimming close to the beach one day but the water unswimmable the next because of styrofoam, plastic bags and pieces of wood.

Diving clubs and businesses have spawned along the main palm tree-lined oceanfront boulevard alongside high-rise hotels and some unfinished grey concrete buildings.

"It was really up there compared with a lot of the places I've been. Beautiful," Tanya Anderson of Normal, Illinois, said on one boat after a dive to see the coral. "I saw a little bit of garbage and so it would be nice to clean up some of the garbage."

In one of Lieu's paintings, a smear of yellow and brown represents an oil slick threatening fish in the blue sea.

Oil spills have struck more than 20 provinces on the coast this year, including Nha Trang in Khanh Hoa province. According to Vietnamese media reports, more than 1,720 tonnes of oil have been scraped off the beaches and water.

MYSTERIOUS

The causes are mysterious, according to a series of investigations, which speculated oil came from a leaking oil rig, damaged tanker or oil and gas platforms in the South China Sea.

Environmental awareness and "sustainable development" are built into the government's socio-economic plans to lift people out of poverty, but constant construction and proliferation of tourist sites make it difficult to carry out.

A masterplan to collect and dispose of waste from islands, barges and cages raising aqua products is being worked out, said Truong Kinh, director of Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Area Authority.

"Now we are facing some challenges and difficulties such as fast urbanisation, the waste coming from industrial, agricultural sectors and daily living," Kinh said.

The government says earnings from sea and seaside business would account for 54 percent of GDP in 2020, increasing pressure on provinces to meet economic targets.

In the southern beach town of Phan Thiet in Binh Thuan province, resort owner Pascal Lefebvre said work was being done in schools to educate young people about how to dispose of waste and rubbish in environmentally-sound ways.

"Any developing country faces those problems. Officials understand the need to preserve the environment here, however it is often a matter of budget and who will finance the plans," Lefebvre said.

A Vietnamese non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development, works with local fishermen in Khanh Hoa province.

The centre's director Nguyen Thu Hue said it encourages fishermen to "take ownership of the water" so they can play an active part in their own business plans. "What we tell them is that if the environment is ignored, you will have nothing left to live on," she said.

In other parts of Vietnam, research shows that rivers are dying and air pollution is above internationally-accepted levels in the capital, Hanoi.

Surface water in Hanoi was unusable for agriculture or for domestic use, a report in April by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. The waterways of the biggest urban area, Ho Chi Minh City, are even worse and considered "dead" the report said.

It said most enterprises do not have or do not use wastewater treatment and domestic wastewater is out of control.

(Additional reporting by Nguyen Van Vinh)

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