HANOI -- Not long ago General Vo Nguyen Giap -- one of the great military strategists of the 20th century -- was asked by a foreign journalist whether, hypothetically, the Vietnamese could ever wage an effective guerrilla war as they once did against the French and the Americans.

"No," the octogenarian ruefully answered. "I'm afraid that would be quite impossible."

"Why not?" the journalist asked.

"We used to hide in the forests when we fought those wars but now there's no forest left."

General Giap was only slightly exaggerating, as I discovered on a recent trip back to my homeland. Vietnam's population has more than doubled since the war ended 23 years ago -- from 35 million to 78 million. Today one out of three Vietnamese depend solely on forest and forest products for their living, and the number is rising steadily, according to the United Nations Development Program. Whereas the entire Vietnam war destroyed close to 5 million acres of forest land, some 45 million more have since been destroyed due to population pressures.

One can hardly blame the citizens of this country. Few here live beyond their means. Indeed, generations of Vietnamese have survived by turning recycling into an art form. A broken B-52 bomber's wing serves nicely as a bridge, bomb shells are turned into foundations for rural homes, broken tanks and jeep parts are sold as scrap metal, plastic bags and scrap paper feed the army of street urchins who scavenge on huge garbage dumps, and on the streets of Hanoi rickety Peugeots, now 40 years old, run about, thanks to an army of creative mechanics.

Yet for all that frugality and inventiveness, Vietnam is sliding toward ecological catastrophe. Less than 23 million acres of forest are left in the country and some 250,000 to 450,000 are disappearing every year -- much of it for firewood (most Vietnamese households still use charcoal for domestic cooking and heating), or for clearing plots for agriculture. Logging for export has been banned since 1994, but for years the government turned a blind eye to the sale of raw logs which further ravaged the forests.

The root of the problem, says a government official in Hanoi, "is too many hungry mouths to feed. We can't help but swallow all that was once sacred to us."

Indeed, the latest World Bank figures show that 45 percent of Vietnamese children are malnourished. And now a devastating drought is crippling Vietnam's central region and placing millions more on the brink of starvation. Unemployment has also been rising in the wake of the spreading Asian economic flu; the "dong" is losing value while foreign investment is also drying up. The pressure on Vietnam's natural environment is intensifying.

Take Mrs. Lau Nguyen and her three children, for instance. They live in a rural area north of Dalat, a mountainous resort town where I grew up. They are part of a large population of landless poor who were resettled here a few years ago at the expense of the last extensive forests in the country. Like all their neighbors, the Nguyen rely heavily on the forest to subsist: their home, except for its tin roof, is made of wood, as is their furniture. The small patch of corn in their backyard was clear-cut. They gather twigs and pine cones for cooking fuel and sell what they don't use. When asked about governmental restrictions regarding cutting down wood in the forest, Mrs. Nguyen shrugs: "Can the government arrest us all? I don't think so. We will starve without the forest."

Dr. Trung Nguyen, director of Hanoi's Institute of Ecological Economy, notes that the word for environment -- "moi truong" -- is scarcely known, nor does the idea of an environmentalist exist. As for governmental awareness, Dr. Trung's institute received less than $5000 a year in government support -- "not enough to print pamphlets, let alone hold seminars or promote public education."

The state finds itself in a tight spot. Although aware that the threats to the country's ecology are great, it also knows that the threat of instability is far greater. The word the Hanoi government most fears these days is "bat on" -- instability. Environmental protection, many government officials admit, is the last thing on their minds. Any movement to suppress deforestation would most likely end up in mass revolt.

As Vietnam's forests shrink, some of the world's rare species (including three of the world's ten mammals only recently discovered) now face extinction -- like the green peacock, the Java rhino, the barking deer, the Asian elephant, the kourprey ox.

Yet it wasn't long ago that Vietnamese viewed people as inseparable from nature. They taught their children to revere the spirits that protect forests and rivers, and often named their children after forest animals and plants. Visit any Buddhist temple in Vietnam and you can still see remnants of this gentle idea of harmony in the sculptures of animals and plants that grace the columns.

Almost no one I met in Vietnam seems to share this view anymore, and certainly none of the young people I met. They are too hungry or too eager to escape the rural life for the city.

In the center of Hanoi one afternoon, I saw a scrawny young man fishing at the edge of the lake of Restored Sword, venerated as the site where a giant turtle rose to the surface to present a magical sword to King Le Loi with which he defeated invading Chinese almost 1000 years ago.

Had he seen the turtle lately, I inquired? "No," the young man answered, laughing. "I don't think it exists. But if I do see it, I would catch it to make soup. It would probably feed my family for at least a month."