Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Wild elephants on the edge of existence
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 13/04/2014
» ‘Stop the truck and turn the lights off now!” shouted 57-year-old Somporn Mee-im to his colleague, Mai, driving the pickup.
Taking it to the streets
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 12/01/2014
» With the myriad street protests that have raged across the country in recent years, it is easy to forget that such an expression of public discontent is only a fairly recent phenomenon.
Paving a piece of paradise
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 27/10/2013
» Dech Khieonarong is one of many residents of Tak's Umphang district who cheered when the government announced it was reviving a plan to construct a new road from Khlong Lan to the remote town in the midst of a protected wilderness. Weary of traversing the 164km of arduous road with, by his count, more than 1,000 hairpin curves, he volunteered to head a committee of locals to push for the construction of the ''new'' Khlong Lan-Umphang road, a large part of which was actually constructed more than 40 years ago by the military as part of its efforts to suppress communist insurgents. The military managed to cut 115km of road through the deep forest inside Mae Wong National Park, 30km from Umphang in the 1970s. The military backed off on completing the road to Umphang because of objections that it would compromise the Western Forest Complex. Over the years the military road fell into disuse and is now overgrown and impassable in some places.
When a ranger falls in the forest
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 31/03/2013
» On the evening of March 14 in the deep forest of Pang Sida National Park, a ranger was shot dead in an encounter with a group transporting illegally logged Siamese rosewood. At the same time in Bangkok 300km away, international conservationists were wrapping up a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), which gave greater protection to the tree which is rapidly disappearing from Thai forests.
Two agencies diverged in a wood
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 26/08/2012
» Road 304 slices through Nakhon Ratchasima's Wang Nam Khieo district running north by northeast, forming the unofficial boundary between the Phu Luang national forest reserve to the west and Thap Lan National Park to the east. Charges of forest encroachment are rampant throughout the area, but the fates of those deemed guilty are vastly different depending on which side of the road they lie.