Clearing, wasting, and regreening: An environmental history of bare hills in central Vietnam

Abstract

A recent trend of regreening formerly bare hills in central Vietnam is often described in the media as a form of recovery from 1960s wartime destruction. However, this modern framework of wartime wasting and regreening obscures a longer history of bare hills. Colonial explorers noted eroded slopes in 1877, and imperial land surveyors described stretches of idle, fallow land decades earlier. This article describes a longer history of a wasteland not only to challenge a presentist framing of environmental decline but also to recognize the historic roles people played in producing these spaces, often in response or resistance to state policies. Colonial engagements with land clearing and customary uses of open lands gave shape to colonial visions of wasteland and later spurred colonial environmentalist critiques, even calls for a new form of green colonialism via exotic tree plantations. Writing the history of such a wasteland is one way to decenter imperial, colonial, and nationalist teleologies that tend to emphasize the environmental footprints of state actions but not the reverse. This history of bare hills draws from a mix of historical sources to show how people produced this wasteland and why, at times, they maintained it despite state efforts at reclamation.