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After the forest. AIDs as ecological collapse in Thailand.


 Numerous parallels can be drawn between the systematic destruction of Thailand's forests and the emergence, in the same time period, of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) as an irreversible societal crisis. Both the disintegration of the body's defense system implicit in AIDS and the erosion of Thailand's ecosystem provoked by deforestation policies are examples of assaults by capitalist economic policies on previously self-regulating systems. Centralization and industrial development have driven a substantial proportion of young Thai villagers to the cities, where they sell their labor as sex workers (there may be as many as 2 million prostitutes in Thailand) or become heroin users. Conservative estimates project 1.6 million AIDS-infected Thais by the end of 1995. Just as generally benign conditions such as the common cold can annihilate a body ravaged by the AIDS virus, Thailand's ecosystem, degraded by unregulated logging and state-subsidized, for-profit rubber planting, is no longer able to absorb natural occurrences such as heavy rainfall. The loss of forestland--the traditional source of food, shelter, tools, and medicine and the repository of cultural icons--has forced villagers to obtain cash to meet their needs, and Thailand's sex industry offers one of the highest rates of remuneration. Legislation enacted in response to AIDS and deforestation shares an emphasis on the victims (e.g., the prostitutes and not their clients or the owners of sex establishments, and impoverished forest squatters rather than plantation companies and land speculators). A powerful, combative environmental movement is successfully resisting government attempts to destroy living communities. Needed as well is resistance on the part of women growing up in the age of AIDS to societal definitions that polarize females (virgins and prostitutes) and uphold one-sided monogamy.
