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Like Rotational Farming, volunteers should first keep in mind that all forest-related fire issues exist in a social and political minefield (really, all forest issues do, period). In areas with ethnic groups, racially discriminatory biases cannot be separated out of the forest fire discourse. By entering into any conversation directly related to forest fires (as opposed to field fires or "Fire" in general), you are risk either unintended propagating of these biases or associating yourself in front of the community with those parties most responsible for their enforcement (considering doing a search for "officials" in either of the previous two articles).

This risk is not limited to mixed-ethnicity communities. Consider the statement, "One reason to burn the leaf clutter is so people can find hed paw, [...] small, dark brown mushrooms (called hed tawp in Northern Thai) half-hidden in the soil," a common explanation for forest fires (one both present in government discourse, foreign academic work, and the comments of PCVs' community members). The statement appears to be far less loaded than "the hilltribes don't care about the forest," for example, but it also intrinsically implies that local villagers are willing to overlook all of the negative consequences trumpeted by anti-burning advocates (and the government), solely in order to harvest a mushroom.*

So, while Thai government policy focuses on centralized solutions to fire prevention with minimal local input or reliance on traditional knowledge, I would personally remind the inquiring volunteer that such an approach runs contrary to 45 years of Peace Corps development philosophy.

But all is not without hope.

As noted in the field burning projects section, volunteer focus on other less discursively-loaded burning/smoke topics may have a secondary effect of helping to change local traditional knowledge in a respectful, community-centric, manner. Circumstantial information from Chiang Mai seems to indicate that such a change is possible. (link also includes good examples of that farang, the one you've spent 10 weeks trying not to act like). So go attack trash burning, and advocate composting. Heck, hep create a mushroom house. You never know, the act may be a catalyst for subsequent generations in their reassessment of environmental stewardship.



* More sympathetic commentaries- such as the one linked above (which, this particular diatribe notwithstanding, is a pretty good primer on rotational farming and fire)- also bother to mention "that hunters will also set fires to avoid the noise from dry leaves as they stalk their prey." Given the almost non-existence of wild game in Thailand, this argument, too, relies heavily upon an uneducated farmer-hunter who s trying to smoke-out an extinct Bambi while threatening his own village, burning down a natural resource deemed critical to national security, and poisoning his baby with smoke. Again, in this discourse, that farmer in need of reeducation need not be of a non-Thai ethnicity.