The second factor concerns their culture and ways of life. Many Karens now have abandoned traditional Karen ways of life in favour of modern consumer goods, consumption behaviour and fashionable clothes. Such cultural change has led to maltreatment of environment, which in turn has caused them to lose their basic rights to natural resources. This loss is related to such problems as increased mass migration, the state’s dispossession of their farmland, abandonment of their traditional beliefs, division in the family and youths’ interest in moving into the city to study, all of which have resulted in changes in their ways of life.