The forests are disappearing incredibly quickly. T here are eleven villages surrounding this large area of forest and in order to protect the forest, you've got to educate the villagers, you've got to have the co-operation of villagers. Basically you've also got to be able to give the villagers some means of making a living without destroying the forest, because right now, it's a very poor area of Thailand so they survive by poaching the logs and shooting the animals and eating them or selling the skins, so you've got to have alternatives for them to actually make a living. And this is something that has never been done before. The forestry officials don't have the manpower or the power within the society to change things, so they just get swamped and the forest just keeps being destroyed.
Monks can act as arbitrators.
Senior monks are respected, so we can act as a go-between, between the government bureaucrats and the villagers. There are people who are actually hired to work in public health, but often with these outback villages, the civil service or the government never really gets there, or when they do get there they come in and lord it over the villagers, or the villagers get taken advantage of by the civil service, so you've got to re-establish a relationship. The monks can do that. A nd then also the monks can get volunteer groups involved. Right now there are students from the teachers' college and the technical college, who put on plays and skits concerning ecology, the environment and looking after the forest.