The Necessity to Resist Dalat’s Plastic Revolution

“Forests are gold; if we know how to protect and develop them well, they will be very precious.” – Ho Chi Minh at the 1963 Mountainous Areas Party Education Conference in Hanoi

The Vietnamese Central Highlands have been the object of successive radical transformations during the French colonial era, the American War and after the country’s reunification when massive internal migration to the highlands was combined with forestry development. However, none of these are comparable with the dramatic transformations – deforestation and invasion of greenhouses
– occurring since the 2000s (and continuing today with increased speed and scale). Internal migration to Dalat and its surroundings continues to open economic opportunities for poorer populations (relocated from the Red River Delta and environs of Ho Chi Minh City), while simultaneously pushing ethnic minority groups to smaller and less desirable lands and transforming the landform of vast amounts of forested hills with large scale earth-moving equipment.

In an incredibly compressed time-frame, one after another forest hill has been integrally converted into terraces with plastic greenhouses for monocultures of flowers and vegetables.
This massive invasion of greenhouses fuels the economy while, at the same time, dramatically distorts the ecology. Age-old practices embedded within the majestic landscape of Dalat are instantly replaced by monocultures.

The Vietnamese forest, once famous for its diversity, has become a man-made monoculture in nature

Deforestation, Minority Repression and Afforestation

Various ethnic groups have always inhabited the Central Highlands, including the nomadic Kh’o, a group of tribes that practice swidden (or shifting), agriculture and cattle grazing. Their indigenous farming and husbandry methods had an intimate relationship with topography and soil types and were harmonious with the majestic mountain and forest landscape and allowed the self-regeneration of the territory.

In 1893, when the French occupied the environs of Dalat primarily as a military outpost, colonial hospital and cool-climate refuge hill station from Saigon, they not only brought with them planning, forestry and new modes of agricultural development, but also systemic minority repression. Urbanist Ernst Hebrard re-framed nature as a city of lakes, gardens and villas embedded in the forest. The newly installed forestry service worked with the principle to conserve the minimum forest necessary for advantageous hydraulic and climatic purposes. Coffee and tea plantations blanketed the territory. The forest policies of the French colonial regime were characterised by top-down state power and coercion with regards to demarcation of forest reserves (which were, in fact, areas for logging) and woodland use restrictions by locals. The traditional complex system of user rights of forests was exchanged for strict and categorical zoning — at that time a new planning concept. Rational and efficient land use is its legitimisation, but the practice of zoning rather boiled down to expropriation.

At the same time, the obsessive colonial need of categorisation rendered the indigenous groups backwards and subsequently incredibly marginalised; until today the Kh’o and others have not been able to rid themselves from this classification. It is not a coincidence that at the same time populations became the object of ethnography and spatial gazes, forests were mapped and studied. Worse yet, the postcolonial phase of ‘nation building’ also placed on the Kh’o and other ethnic groups the horrible status of being a minority even though they have occupied – unlike the recent internal colonisation waves of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) – the Highlands since time immemorial.

During the socialist era, under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the country’s forests became an arena of large- scale political projects and massive forest nationalisation. Two million ethnic minorities were resettled in sedentary, state-planned villages as an attempt to integrate them into a majority state where their practices of swidden were banned and the population could be ‘improved’. Meanwhile, between 1960-75, approximately one million lowland Kinh inhabitants were relocated into mountainous areas of state-owned logging companies, called State Forest Enterprises (SFEs). Peasants became members of production units and were turned into socialist workers, working and living communally and with state incomes. Two other larger programmes, ‘Clear the Wilderness’ created state farming cooperatives by clearing ‘wasteland’ forests and ‘underdeveloped’ hills and ‘Building New Economic Zones’, which settled Kinh throughout the mountainous areas of Vietnam, relocating millions of people internally. Through SFEs, Clear the Wilderness and Building New Economic Zones, the population in Lam Dong Province increased significantly. And the forests continued to disappear.

During the first decades of doi moi (shift from command to market economy beginning in 1986), attention was focused on afforestation and reforestation, accompanied by a formal crackdown on illegal logging, agricultural migrants and shifting cultivators. Massive tree planting occurred, for which Vietnam generally, and Lam Dong specifically, is often championed as a model for the developing world. The ‘Nation Five Million Hectare Reforestation Programme’ (5MHRP, or the 661 programme for the decree establishing it) sought to establish two million hectares for protection and the remaining three for active wood production. Primarily, exotic species such as eucalyptus and aracias were planted. The Vietnamese forest, once famous for its diversity, became a man-made monoculture in nature. Since the 2000s, due to various NGO, donor and global pressures, the forests have been revalued through market mechanisms such as compensation for watershed protection areas, homes for endangered species and carbon sinks. Lam Dong has become a pioneer in both ‘Payment for Ecological Services’ (PES) and ‘Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’ (REDD+) programmes.

Successive and Brutal Transformations of the Landscape

It has become clear that ever since the French entered the Central Highlands, the landscape has witnessed brutal revolutions. The region has accumulated massive shocks and dramatic social changes that accompany the extraordinary transformations of the land. All the revolutions share a radical characteristic, namely the ‘as found’ (before) and new condition (after) appears as obvious as day and night. Historically, physical transformations of the mountainous forests — whether through colonial impositions, interventions during the American war, projects in the aftermath of Vietnam’s re-unification (such as the implementation of New Economic Zones and massive internal colonization), green revolutions, or programmes in the wake of doi moi – were always rather straightforward outcomes of mercilessly enforced political choices. JB Jackson, the renowned American cultural geographer could not have found a better sequence for coining his notion of ‘political landscapes’.

Until recently, the territory’s transformations did not go further than a drastic shave; from the deforestation succeeded by coffee or tea plantations, vineyards, agricultural exploitation, milk cattle farming or strawberry fields, to the successive reforestation programme and flower industries replacing coffee trees. The dramatic conversions followed the whims of the prevailing authority, always promising progress and targeting (colonial or socialist plan) production quotas. And, yes, always large scale and always enforced quite dogmatically, particularly while on the rebound and, as in the present circumstance, under the pressure of world market prices.

Until recently, forests were sustained as the primary element of the majestic Highlands landscape. All development which took place was for the most part enveloped in the forest environment, punctuated by the Lang Biang mountain peaks. Nowadays, this is clearly no longer the case. The landscape is receiving a complete (and more far reaching) make-over: forests cut, terraces brutally carved out of hillsides and mosaics of terraces in every valley floor endlessly covered in plastic sheets. No valley is too small, no hill too high or mountain slope too steep for the development fever
that is presently spread over the Highlands. A transformation unprecedented with regards to scale, speed and character has been unleashed. The industrial-scale blanketed by greenhouses — clogging of valleys and terracing of deforested allotments — is generating an endless sea of plastic, with forest islands remaining as relics of a vanished world.

In short, today Lam Dong Province and Dalat are witnessing a plastic revolution. Earth- scraping machinery forms an infantry that turns slopes into terraces, transforming the natural topography into an endless multiplication of 5-6 metre platforms, the average span of a greenhouse roof and a suitable size for use of mechanical potential. Cuts in the landscape
are calculated in relation to the efficient management of machinery and the resulting grades of the terrace slopes are astonishingly steep (at times nearly vertical). No potential horizontal square metre can be wasted. Ecological considerations are simply absent. Pumps and canals — or more and more plastic tubes — divert water from streams or simply extract it from the aquifer (whichever is more plentiful and easiest for the time being) and equally irrigate the ever-expanding multitude of terraced parcels.

The plastic captures light and regulates micro-climatic conditions, while bags of imported seeds and polluting fertilisers contribute to the new economy. As such, the forest hills instantly switch into a mosaic of light-blue plastic bars, hosting a world of colours and greens that cannot be picked, packaged and sent off fast enough. The resulting landscape systematically wrapped in plastic is amazingly sculptural. In comparison, Christo, the artist who made his name with large scale wrappings in majestic landscapes, is child’s play.

Forests cut, terraces brutally carved out of hillsides and mosaics of terraces in every valley floor endlessly covered in plastic sheets

Call to Arms

Ever since doi moi, Vietnam has been incredibly entrepreneurial in combing a planned economy with market mechanism production. The plastic revolution is without a doubt the ambitious implementation of a government modernisation programme. However, the planned-market cocktail turns such a programme into diabolic speculation. The plastic revolution has unleashed forces that practically escape all control. The administration of Lam Dong province takes note of 20 illegal forest loggings a week, roughly 1,000 a year. In the past two decades, Dalat lost 7,000 of its 27,000 hectares of forest. The surrounding municipalities in Lam Dong Province have undergone even more dramatic shifts towards a plastic world. The plastic revolution can be read as a distorted variant of the green revolution, similarly catalysed by the transfer of technological practices: chemical fertilisers, high-yielding varieties (HYVs) and irrigation systems. It supersedes ‘traditional’ technology and is adopted as a whole, instantly and systematically. As they do, revolutions destroy everything in their path. A sophisticated rural society vanishes before one’s eyes to be replaced by the simple mechanism of individual speculation that supersedes all forms of social organisation. To get rich is glorious.


The plastic revolution omits the mechanisation of the green revolution or rather it concentrates the use of mechanical means by processes of drastic reconfiguration of natural topography into terraced plots. Indeed, in opposition to the traditional terraces of so many indigenous cultures, the terraces of Dalat do not result from collective investment and coordination, but are realised individually, plot by plot. The investment of flattening land and installing plastic greenhouses is recovered in the short-term. Nobody seems to want to miss the chance. Suddenly the greatest deconstructivist sculpture of all times is realised. Christo the land artist meets Zaha Hadid, queen of architecture who defied Cartesian geometry.


All in all, one could say that the plastic revolution repackages old technologies into a (mind-blowing) cocktail: the water pump, the earth moving bulldozers, fertilisers, plastic and then, yes, also the 2-stroke motorbike – a very economic, flexible and viable means of transport that makes the entire territory accessible without requiring major new infrastructural investments. Although infrastructure is minimal, the industrial-scale eruption of flower and vegetable production requires massive and expedient movement to get the products to market (domestically and internationally). The plastic revolution leapfrogs over 20th century modernisation processes that went hand-in-hand with extended road and other hard-engineered logistic infrastructures. The airport in Dalat appears to be the only large investment. The motorbike does the bulk of the work. Access infrastructure is only the minimal spaces left in-between plots after terracing. Not an inch of cultivatable land is to be spoiled. Everything is brought into culture. Steep, flat, small, large. It doesn’t matter.

The green revolution greatly overlapped with the eras of the late colonial and early nation state building (1930-1970), characterised by forceful state interventions and massive programmes. Today, the plastic revolution overlaps rather with the mature global era of today (ironically at a moment when the entire world is aware of the environmental catastrophe plastic causes) where globalisation invades even the most remote areas and integrates them directly and instantly into world market systems while paradoxically individual governments lose control. This is not less the case in Lam Dong Province and Dalat. A Pandora’s Box has been opened and until now nothing seems to be able to stop farmers chasing dreams of wealth – the road forward appears simple and quick. There is actually no perseverance required. Just action, here and now.

For the moment, the plastic revolution brings the territory unprecedented prosperity, a wealth that is instantly invested in flashy, oversized houses that emerge everywhere and disperses urbanisation. Perhaps the houses here and everywhere express the atomised and diffused urban realm of the future, but above all else express a local ‘imagineering’ of belonging to the global world, of making
it. Or is reality more prosaic? Is it simply the lack of other investment avenues that channels the bulk of the quick gains in real estate? Regardless, today, the region clearly surfs on the waves of globalisation that seem to gain seductive momentum by the day. The issue, of course, is how brutal the awakening will be when market prospects collapse and when the short-term gains must be paid through the long- term effects of pollution and environmental destruction. Hopefully, this moment does not coincide with the emergence of soil exhaustion, erosion and landslides.

In short, an alternative mode of forest urbanism is an urgent necessity. Ideal, but beyond reach, would be a return to an economy in tune with the rhythms of the natural forest. The current path of massive terracing and plastification for monoculture destroys ecology and overloads the environment with pollution (from the intensive use of fertilisers, sewage, etc.). It is clearly a one-way ticket to disaster, where short-term gains sacrifice the future. It is simply not sustainable. Another form of territorial development where forest, urban and agricultural development constructively intertwine and weave a resilient landscape that accommodates a robust multifaceted economy must be designed. This intertwining can start today, by addressing the collectively conscious of both the government and farmer communities through issues such as water pollution. Upgraded irrigation systems can be woven into the existing system. Systematic water harvesting from the giant plastic surfaces, retention and productive use might constitute a second thin thread in the landscape mosaic. Tree planting programmes to prevent erosion and landslides could weave a third thread of very thin forest that could strengthen the carpet’s resilience, while a regular rhythm of intercropping in previous coffee plantations would diversify economies and ecologies.