Ecosystems of Vietnam's coastline in peril

By Grant McCool

NHA TRANG, Vietnam (Reuters) - It was the destruction of coral reef and over-fishing that moved artist Nguyen Lieu to paint brightly coloured canvasses warning Vietnamese that their coastal environment is in peril.

"Nha Trang is the most beautiful bay recognized worldwide but exploitation there is chaotic," Lieu, 53, said at Galerie DEWI, where 15 of his oil paintings were exhibited in June and July.

His home town on the south-central coast has smooth sandy beaches, islands and mountains, but it also carries the burden of the ugly side of rapid development and fast-growing tourism.

It is a story being repeated up and down the impoverished country's 3,200 km (2,000 mile)-long coastline, despite awareness among officialdom and non-governmental groups to harmonize conservation and making a living from the sea.

Oil slicks, dead rivers and polluted air are part of an often-bleak environmental picture as Vietnam's 85 million people head toward industrialization.

Lieu's art is unusual in communist-run Vietnam in that it displays a consciousness about a contemporary global issue. Seen through his eyes, there is a dire need to preserve and protect coral reefs and marine life for future generations.

For good reason, environmentalists say. Research shows Vietnam is a "biodiversity hotspot" with ecosystems under threat. Less than 25 percent of coral reefs surveyed have living coral and 75 percent are at high or very high risk, eight times the southeast Asian average.

MOTHER PROCTECTOR

Lieu's impressionist works in the exhibit "Sea 80 Square" each feature a mother protector as an elongated, cloaked figure in a conical hat or a face in the ocean.

"I would like to send a message to viewers to understand that the sea is like the mother," said Lieu. "I used the image of a mother's face as the face of this sea, this bay."

Lieu varies his colors from blues to greens, to reds and browns and violet to depict each stage of the ocean's condition, whether it be clear and clean or dirty and damaged.

Visitors and residents of Nha Trang say they can find fish swimming close to the beach one day but the water unswimmable the next because of styrofoam, plastic bags and pieces of wood.

Diving clubs and businesses have spawned along the main palm tree-lined oceanfront boulevard alongside high-rise hotels and some unfinished grey concrete buildings.

"It was really up there compared with a lot of the places I've been. Beautiful," Tanya Anderson of Normal, Illinois, said on one boat after a dive to see the coral. "I saw a little bit of garbage and so it would be nice to clean up some of the garbage."

In one of Lieu's paintings, a smear of yellow and brown represents an oil slick threatening fish in the blue sea.