The causes of deforestation, complex and inherently economic and political, range from poverty in rural areas to economic development and consumerism in Bangkok (Rigg 1995:6).
They include commercial logging (illegal since 1989), gathering fuel wood and making charcoal by rural poor, and swidden agriculture in highland areas (although the blame placed on swidden agriculturalists often ignores the recent decrease in available land that would allow sustainable fallow periods and the upland migration of increasing numbers of lowland peoples).
Rural people, encouraged to clear more forests to join in the market economy, have increased cash-crop production, but at the cost of clearing natural forests.
National security, especially during the pre-1980 era of Communist insurgency based in remote forest areas, contributed to deforestation by building roads to make the forests more accessible and diminish the areas in which the Communists could hide.
Farmers in search of land quickly moved into the secured forests.
The process of state formation linked the national peripheries with the center in Bangkok over the past century, similarly creating greater access to previously isolated areas (Hirsch 1993:29).
Cultural views also promoted deforestation as the forests (paa and theuan) were traditionally seen as wild or untamed (Stott 1991) and available to the general population as common land to be brought into civilization and productivity.
These factors contributed to deforestation and the integration of the rural population into mainstream political discourse (Hirsch 1993: 14).
Both the environmental degradation and the limits placed upon rural peoples through public policy (in particular, the efforts by the government to remove farmers from national forest reserve lands in favor of either conservation or economic development of productive forests) affect the quality of life of the rural population.
These issues have provoked some monks into socially conscious action in the name of religious practice and responsibility.