Am I stupid or is it the local people around here.

I live in central Thailand near the Mae Wong national park and all over the place there are big signs in Thai and I can understand the pictures that basically say be careful not to set fire to the forest.

We have not really had rain here since December so the undergrowth is dry and so are the trees, but for the last 3 nights somebody has been burning the trees down on the hills.

It takes 20 years to grow a tree and on the hills the trees are basically what holds the soil together, provides homes for birds and animals and acts as a carbon dioxide converter.

For 3 years now that I have lived here somebody sets fire to the the trees and 20 minutes later the tree is gone forever and nobody in authority seems to do anything about it. I can appreciate that you can't get a fire truck up a mountain as there are no tracks even but nobody seems to care.

Does this happen anywhere else up country.

Last night the fire was over a km away and I could hear the trees cracking and burning.

I get the same thing near my place. I can see the hills of Khao Kho -Petchabun province - from my place and for months on end I have seen fires every night.

I have asked around and the general concensus is that they know it is wrong but what can you do? TIT.

My guess is that people are burning everything to clear land for grazing and you know what happens every wet season? Yep, mud slides and all the klongs silted up resulting in them overflowing and the whole village and anyones house that hasn't been jacked up, flooded...

I am staring to see many animals around the house that have been displaced from this, birds, wild pigs. I know there were non of these around a year ago, all the rice farmers shot them!

I cannot beleive that this can happen while the authorities do nothing. My wife told me that HRH even talked about this in his address to the people and still it goes on.

I guess the world is a little too small for the people who have to live on it these days...