Punya Chaiyakum

Punya Chaiyakum, using his background as the environmental field's leading artist, is building a national movement of school-based environmental clubs for young Thais. His work is based on his belief that the seven to fourteen year old age group is the most open to understanding and ultimately lead Thailand to policies that will preserve its environment and endangered species.

Children have been the first to grasp the environmental problems caused by man's blindness. Punya, a sensitive environmentalist, artist, and Buddhist, is a fellow spirit.Drawing on a decade's work in the Thai environmental movement, Punya has developed an approach that he believes will enable children to understand environmental issues more deeply, to lead their elders and to ultimately become a new generation that treats the land and its living creatures with respect.With permission from a school's principal, Punya and his volunteers enter a school and give its one to two hundred students intensive exposure to environmental concerns. While working and interacting with that original group of students, he searches for a much smaller group of leaders who then constitute that school's environmental club.He elicits their attention by using his repertoire of artistic and story-telling skills. From that first beachhead, he then moves quickly to give the club a set of activities they can successfully pursue. For example, he helps them build a statue of one of the area's endangered species on the school grounds. He also initiates a practical on-going activity that produces income for the participating children- he teaches them how to make souvenir models of endangered species in the area using waste materials (plastic bags molded together and covered with sand, for example). The environmental club then purchases and markets the children's products. After the club is established, he and his volunteers only provide them with new materials and visit several times a year. On occasion, successful groups are rewarded with an inexpensive telescope.

Although the growing Thai environmental movement has made significant progress over the last several years, Thailand's environmental problems are still notorious. Thailand's very rapid economic growth and urbanization have created a series of demands on its underlying natural resources and ecosystems that have far outstripped the country's environmental understanding, let alone its protections.

The fact that the country is surrounded by weak, undemocratic, unresponsive, and divided societies commonly suffering violent civil war (Burma and Cambodia, for example), only aggravates the problem. The misery and troubles in Indochina and Burma have pushed more and more tribal peoples across the border into Thailand. As they have struggled to find a foot hold, their traditional practices have been devastating to the forests in many of the country's key water catchment areas.

Thailand has begun to set aside major environmental reserves, however, including one giant internationally recognized biosphere reserve. In these areas, there is an especially urgent need to educate the local population about what is at stake and to build long term constituencies for the preservation of those ecosystems and the species that depend on them. For example, around the biosphere reserve there is a population of some two million people engaged in the production of rice, corn, tapioca, and sugar cane. With industry encroaching, the lowlands have been almost completely denuded of trees.

Punya's strategy turns on creating children's youth groups in hundreds of schools across the country. Considering how difficult it is to maintain student organizations year in and year out even at the university level, doing so for seven to fourteen year olds is a challenge.

Punya has, consequently, thought more about how to solve this problem than any other strategic hurdle facing his venture. First, he has set a realistic objective: he does not aspire to create large groups in each school, but rather merely a ginger group that will set the tone for the school as a whole. Second, he has designed and tested methods that he knows succeed in attracting an initial group of enthusiastic students willing to begin the venture. His larger demonstrations, not to mention the new statue sitting on the school grounds, help give that initial group of leaders visibility and standing. Providing the group an attractive revenue flow through the production and sale of hand-made souvenirs of endangered local animals is a further inducement. Periodic return visits from his organization interspersed with mailings and an occasional award provides further encouragement. Finally, he hopes to find one or more teachers in each school who will be supportive, as well as encourage local Buddhist monks who might take up the challenge of working with the student groups.

Punya hopes to complement this core organizing thrust with the continued production of new, attractive drawings and other materials that he and his group distribute in schools. From his prior work with The Nature Conservation Club, he has good contacts with the media, which he uses to develop and to further encourage and reinforce his young students' groups.

Punya is the youngest of eleven children. His father's modest income did not allow him a childhood with many frills. However, he dreamed of becoming an artist and was ultimately able to obtain schooling in the arts. He studied arts at the university level, but was discouraged by a faculty divided into "academic" and "contemporary" factions.

Punya's considerable artistic talent has supported him financially for quite a few years. He's been successful in applications as diverse as film animation and developing and executing wall murals for Buddhist temples.

However, he has also always had a concern for and commitment to society and particularly to the environment -- a concern reflecting his strong Buddhist values.

He has been active, for instance, in Thailand's well known Nature Conservation Club since its founding. He continues to write and illustrate regularly for its magazine. He has also launched a number of Club programs over the years, such as rainy season forest education programs. Before his initiative, no one would go to the forests during that season.

Punya has now made the transition to full time work helping the next generation of Thais understand and begin what he hopes will become a life-long pattern of actively organizing in its defense on issues not limited to environmental protection alone.