My memories of Anh Long go back to the 1970s and the late days of the Anti-war movement, when I first became deeply involved in work to end the Vietnam War. But I only got to know him as the generous and playful character that he was after I joined the ranks of academia in the new millennium. I was able to collaborate with him on a few projects, including a conference on the Third Indochina War; I will always be grateful to him for agreeing to work with a newcomer to his profession. The paper he contributed to that conference and the resulting volume was a ground-breaking study of "The Socialization of South Vietnam".

In those years when Vietnam was seeking a path to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition with the US, he worked tirelessly to be a bridge between his two countries. Notably, he gained access to intellectual leaders in both Hanoi and Saigon thanks to his willingness to tell them critical truths. In his chapter on South Vietnam from 1975 to the late 1980s, he describes how he was invited to spend six months carrying out an “independent survey of the rural situation in Vietnam”. He postulates that the results of this survey (from November 1979 to June 1980) were intended to gain support for those in the Vietnamese leadership who wanted to reform post-war policies on “cooperativization” in the South, as well as the failing agricultural system in the North. The Central Committee’s Resolution 6 in 1979 began the reform process in agriculture with the “Household Contract” system, creating an immediate boost in food production. (This process would be consolidated in 1988, as the reforms known as Đổi mới got underway.) Ngo Vinh Long and his colleagues in the Overseas Vietnamese scholarly community built on this model of intellectual support to the Vietnamese government over the years, as they developed the tradition of a “Summer Seminar” on important topics facing the Vietnamese leadership, from many aspects of economic development to the South China (Eastern) Sea.

But what I recall now when I think of Ngo Vinh Long is his photography and the beauty he showed us in his Facebook posts from Maine. This is the essence of Ngo Vinh Long that stays with me – the University of Maine in frigid Bangor could not have been his first choice of a scholarly home or a personal place of refuge. Yet he found something there that brought him artistic inspiration and helped him create a vibrant scholarly community. His pictures of the autumn foliage and of the Maine coastline revealed his love of nature and place; they represent a form of spiritual reconciliation that deepens the political understanding that eventually blossomed between the US and Vietnam in the 1990s; perhaps one could call it a post-war discovery of our common humanity. He pointed us towards the movement that now consumes us – the preservation of the earth and all of its creatures.

And as I look over the obituaries of Anh Long I realize that this was not a new concern for him: already during the War years he was one of the first to raise the alarm about the environmental destruction being visited on southern Vietnam. He provided evidence of the damage to forests and humans from the spraying of herbicides by the US military. The information he provided to Harvard biologist Matthew Meselsson (and to the botanist Arthur Westing) about the damage being caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange became the basis for our notion of “ecocide”. I hope this legacy can be carried on by some form of support for environmental scholars and activists in Vietnam in the name of Ngo Vinh Long. This might be the time to begin more collaborative studies of global warming and, as one example, the dangers of rising sea levels, between Vietnam and the United States.