50 Years On, Vietnam War's Ecocide Still Not Healed

2025-04-30 08:20:09

(MENAFN- Asia Times) When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage . Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses.

The term“ecocide” had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the US military's use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover.

Fifty years later, Vietnam's degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecological consequences of the war. Efforts to restore these damaged landscapes and even to assess the long-term harm have been limited.

As an environmental scientist and anthropologist who has worked in Vietnam since the 1990s, I find the neglect and slow recovery efforts deeply troubling. Although the war spurred new international treaties aimed at protecting the environment during wartime, these efforts failed to compel post-war restoration for Vietnam.

Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show these laws and treaties still aren't effective.

Agent Orange and daisy cutters

The US first sent ground troops to Vietnam in March 1965 to support South Vietnam against revolutionary forces and North Vietnamese troops, but the war had been going on for years before then. To fight an elusive enemy operating clandestinely at night and from hideouts deep in swamps and jungles, the U.S. military turned to environmental modification technologies.

The most well-known of these was Operation Ranch Hand , which sprayed at least 19 million gallons (75 million liters) of herbicides over approximately 6.4 million acres (2.6 million hectares), of South Vietnam.

The chemicals fell on forests, and also on rivers, rice paddies and villages, exposing civilians and troops. More than half of that spraying involved the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange.

A U.S. Air Force C-123 flies low along a South Vietnamese highway spraying defoliants on dense jungle growth beside the road to eliminate ambush sites during the Vietnam War. Photo: AP via The Conversation / Department of Defense

Herbicides were used to strip the leaf cover from forests , increase visibility along transportation routes and destroy crops suspected of supplying guerrilla forces.

As news of the damage from these tactics made it back to the US, scientists raised concerns about the campaign's environmental impacts to President Lyndon Johnson , calling for a review of whether the US was intentionally using chemical weapons. American military leaders' position was that herbicides did not constitute chemical weapons under the Geneva Protocol, which the US had yet to ratify.

Scientific organizations also initiated studies within Vietnam during the war, finding widespread destruction of mangroves, economic losses of rubber and timber plantations, and harm to lakes and waterways.

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