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LAST UPDATE: Thursday October 23, 2003

BACK TO HOMEPAGE

Phuket Magazine has spent ten years displaying the incredible natural beauty of the Andaman region, of which Phuket is a part. We are fully aware that our magazine is one of the greatest motivators bringing foreign visitors to this island, and of the responsibility we share in bringing more people here.

Human beings are, after all, at the root of almost all of the many problems plaguing this region. The local population has expanded exponentially over the past few generations, putting huge pressure on all natural resources here: fisheries, wildlife, rainforests, coral reefs mangrove forests, etc. Helping to bring in more people – tourists – thus carries some responsibilities.

The Agony of Reef & Rainforest
Thailand’s Andaman region is blessed with two of the world’s richest and most diverse environments: the world’s oldest and most diverse rainforests onshore, while offshore are wonderful examples of the world’s most species-rich environment, tropical corals reefs.

But both of these environments are under attack by the forces unleashed by humans. In the case of the rainforests only tiny remnants survive, and in those many animals are threatened with extinction. The reefs offshore have also been battered by over-fishing, by dynamite and cyanide and now by tourism.

The physical environment has survived much better. The rocky mountains of Phang Nga Bay, the cliff faces of Phi Phi and the beaches of Phuket all remain intact and stunningly beautiful. The threat to them, overbuilding, is being addressed quite well, if a little slowly.

This environmental section of the Phuket’s major web site focuses mainly on the two endangered environments, the reefs and rainforests, and their unfortunate inhabitants.

The future of this section
The section is far from completed, and when complete will carry dozens of pages covering all manner of interesting topics, most being stories that have been published in PHUKET Magazine during the past years.

We will continue adding to this section since PHUKET Magazine is redoubling its efforts to find informative stories on these fascinating environments. We will have more writers contributing, and we will go further afield in southern Thailand looking for such stories and photographs.