How long does it take for nature to recover from ecocide? If you are looking for the answer, think of Vietnam. Fifty years and more after the end of the conflict, degraded ecosystems and soils contaminated by dioxin still tell the story of the long-term ecological consequences of war.
The term โecocideโ was coined in the late 60s to describe the American militaryโs use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm against guerrilla forces using jungles and swamps as hideouts. What was supposed to be a temporary tactical advantage has become a lingering wound that continues to fester unnoticed, while conflicts like of Gaza e Ukraine they repeat similar patterns.
A landscape that cries out in silence
The scars of Vietnam are not just metaphorical; you can touch them, see them, measure them. Traveling through some areas of the country today, you will still encounter soils incapable of supporting the original biodiversity, waters that hide concentrations of dioxin well beyond safety limits, mangroves that seem like ghosts of what they were.
THEOperation Ranch Hand sprayed at least 75 million liters of herbicides across approximately 2,6 million hectares of South Vietnam, with more than half of it being the dioxin-laced Agent Orange.
American veterans (and of course Vietnamese) have been recognized as victims of the health effects of Agent Orange, but what about the land? The land continues to suffer in silence. Forests, once teeming with hundreds of species, have been reduced to fragments overrun by weeds. In the A Lฦฐแปi Valley, In 80% of the forests exposed to herbicides, biodiversity had not yet recovered by the early 80s, with only 24 bird species and 5 mammal species. An ecological desert, practically.
And to think that we persist in not seeing the connection between human health and the health of ecosystems; as if we could be well while the world around us collapses.
Ecocide, the very slow march of recovery
I smile bitterly when I hear people talking about โrapid post-war reconstructionโ. At most we can rebuild buildings, not ecosystems. Do you think that The first cleanup agreement between the United States and Vietnam came only in 2006, after decades of denial and resistance. The project at Da Nang airport, completed in 2018, treated 150.000 cubic meters of dioxin-contaminated soil at a cost of more than $115 million.
Near the air base of Bien Hoa, severely contaminated, local residents continue to ingest high levels of dioxin through fish, chicken, and ducks. The barrels of Agent Orange were stored right there: large amounts of the toxin have leaked into the soil and water, where it continues to accumulate in animal tissue as it moves up the food chain.
And these are just the known sites. How many other contaminated areas are still waiting to be identified and cleaned up?
Laws that don't work
On the legislative front, we are good at writing words on paper and terrible at implementing them. In 1977, The Geneva Conventions governing conduct during wartime have been revised to prohibit โwidespread, long-term and serious damage to the natural environment.โ Sure why not. A protocol Part 1980 has limited the use of incendiary weapons. Yet the oil fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991 and recent environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine and Syria point to the limits of relying on treaties when there are no strong mechanisms to ensure compliance.
Vietnam itself was the first country to legally declare in its penal code that โecocide, the destruction of the natural environment, whether committed in times of peace or war, constitutes a crime against humanity.โ Yet the Vietnamese law itself has not led to prosecutions, despite several serious pollution cases.
Also the Russia andUkraine They have ecocide laws, but these have failed to prevent harm or hold anyone accountable during the ongoing conflict. Laws that exist only on paper, in short, and that no one bothers to apply.
Ecocide, a warning for the future
Current conflicts such as those in Gaza and Ukraine clearly show that we have not learned our lessons. Modern tools (such as satellite imagery used in Ukraine to identify fires, floods and pollution) offer greater monitoring possibilities than they did fifty years ago. But they cannot replace field monitoring, which is often limited or dangerous during conflict.
There is an ongoing international campaign calling for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to add ecocide as the fifth punishable crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. But without a concrete political will, we risk producing only more paper.
The Vietnam War reminds us that failure to address ecological consequences, both during and after the war, will have long-lasting effects. What is lacking is the political will to ensure that these impacts are neither ignored nor repeated.
While bombs fall on Gaza and Ukraine burns, nature silently counts its victims. Will someone write about the ecocides of these conflicts someday, fifty years from now? Or will we have normalized this kind of destruction by then?
