is closed while he carries out renovations. Over the past few years, he has experienced bizarre flooding patterns where overnight his restaurant and the path beside it get inundated for weeks or months at a time, and then the waters suddenly recede. Recently, he discovered the cause: hydrodams on the Mekong in China, more than 1,000 kilometres upstream, that release and stop water regularly. ‘There have been so many fewer fish here, too,’ he says. ‘If they build the Don Sahong Dam, I will have to close my business and move up into the Bolaven Plateau. Here, I will surely be flooded.
‘The Chinese dams are already causing problems, and the government officers came and said to us: “When the waters come, take your chickens and your buffalo and move to higher ground.” We cannot live like this.’
I ask him what the people will do if there are not enough fish in the river to eat, and he says he doesn’t know. ‘I need to eat fish. It’s the way it has always been. Maybe people will work in tourism,’ he suggests. A major tourist attraction in the area is the Khone Phaphene Falls, Asia’s biggest waterfall. But this stands to be another victim of the proposed dam, which will considerably reduce its flow.
Exploiting its rich natural resources will spur the impoverished nation into rapid development, the government claims. It will also push people from subsistence farming into more profitable enterprise – subsistence farmers pay no taxes . . . But ‘poverty’ is a very subjective concept. Laos has poor infrastructure (although it is improving thanks to Chinese funds), it has next to no medical provision, poor education and no social-service protection. But people do not starve here. Many are truly self-sufficient because they exist in a low population in a naturally resource-rich environment, even if the country is being rapidly deforested. People here gather fruit, vegetables, insects and other animals from the jungle and rivers – 90% live in rural villages – and they keep chickens and buffalo, plant rice and vegetables. In terms of cash, they are poorer by far than an Indian beggar; in terms of quality of life, they are perhaps rich.
For now. As the population grows (it has doubled since the 1970s) and the environment becomes degraded, polluted and lifeless, the Laos people will become as dependent as I am on food that must be traded for something else, on rice that must be shipped from another part of the country or world and exchanged for money that must be earned in an urban environment in manufacturing or the service industry. Lao people have something extraordinarily precious at the moment, and very rare indeed in this world: the ability to live a self-sufficient relaxed life in their home environment.
There is no glamour in poverty. And certainly many of the Lao I speak to are as eager as Patagonians for access to electricity and other important trappings of development. However, in the Anthropocene we have a choice over how development is attained and distributed among the poorest people.
In a country like Laos or Chile, which has few alternatives, exploiting rivers to generate energy makes a lot of sense, despite the social and environmental penalties. So, if we accept that many controversial dams are going to be built, how can their construction be made least damaging? Jamie Skinner, who was senior advisor to the World Commission on Dams and now heads the International Institute for Environment and Development’s water division, suggests the answer might be to issue dam-builders with limited-length licences. ‘In America, the licences are only for thirty or fifty years, after which there is a review. The reason many dams are being removed now, is that their licences have expired and the dams would no longer pass the more stringent environmental planning regulations,’ he says.
Removing the permanency of dams would make them more palatable to environmentalists, especially if licences were only granted with the proviso that the firm could afford to remove it in thirty years. The problem is that in many countries, poor governance and corruption mean that such agreements could be worthless. Even in the US, where companies are legally obliged to put aside funds for environmental clean-ups, it is often the state that ends up paying. Limited lifespans are sensible for another reason too – climate change is altering rainfall patterns around the world, leaving many dams economically worthless. The international Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, released in 2011, is a method to rank dams in all phases from development to operation, and should help managers design better dams to an internationally agreed environmental and social standard and reduce conflict.
Essentially, Skinner says, dam planning needs to be a participatory process. The scientists can analyse the different engineering options and their power and environmental outcomes, but it is down to society to decide what constitutes an acceptable impact. Putting in gated spillways makes for a more regular flow that is less damaging to ecosystems, for example, but reduces power output, so is less profitable.
If local people feel adequately compensated, not just for land and livelihoods, but with a culturally sensitive approach to relocation, and if they get a share of the dam’s benefits through electricity provision, for example, then dams can become far less traumatic and even be embraced by local communities. Equally, if we as an international community decide that some environments are simply too precious to dam, then we must offer compensation to those countries for their loss of potential power generation, and provide realistic alternatives for economic development.
Laos could use its powerful geographical position, and the fact that it’s home to some of the most sought-after minerals and hydropower potential to its advantage, to ensure that its wealthy neighbours pay adequately for environmentally sustainable exploitation of the Mekong. In that way, Laos could afford to leave some important sites unexploited to the benefit of all.
The Don Sahong Dam would be built just two kilometres north of the Cambodian border, and I take an early boat across to Laos’s sad, troubled neighbour. Cambodia is reeling from decades of brutality, famine, torture and genocide – struggling for an identity, trying to emerge from the past, but failing. It is a place where the ATMs dispense only American dollars, where the roadsigns are in French and where international charities perform basic government functions from health to education. In Siem Reap, a pleasant city thronging with tourists for the nearby Angkor Wat monument, women speak in clichés from American movies produced years before they were born. ‘Love you long time,’ they murmur at disinterested men. T-shirts with slogans like ‘No money, no honey’ hang from a market stall and are bought by young American women in tour groups, with pink cheeks and blonde hair and shiny painted lips, whose plump bodies spill richly from candy-coloured minidresses.
If the Mekong is the lifeblood of South East Asia, then the Tonle Sap, here in Cambodia, is its heart. It is the biggest lake in the region and its waters pulse through the seasons. For most of the year, the Tonle Sap is a round, shallow body of water covering less than thirty square kilometres. But as I journey along its length from Siem Reap to the capital, Phnom Penh, the new rains are beginning their swell. From June until November, the Mekong ushers in gallons upon gallons of flow, filling the Tonle Sap to more than fifty times its normal size: 16,000 square kilometres. The floodwaters refresh ponds and inundate forests, proving vital breeding and nesting grounds for the fish that migrate up the Mekong. Two-thirds of the fish in the Mekong begin their life in the Tonle Sap – it is the most productive inland fishery in the world, supporting up to 4 million people and providing three-quarters of the country’s fish catch. It means that even though Cambodians are among the world’s poorest people, they are some of the best fed.8
By November, the end of the rainy season, the brimming lake actually causes the river to flow backwards. This annual flow reversal is cause for great celebration in Cambodia and occurs in the stretch outside of the king’s palace, to much festivity. The upstream dams would halve this annual pulse (perhaps spelling the end of the famous reversal), and dramatically impact the ecosystems it supports.9 Around half of the river’s water would be held in storage over the border in Laos, and instead of an annual flood, the waters would be released at the whim of dam managers, who can override the natural cycle at the push of a button.
In the early morning, I slip down a rain-slicked muddy bank of the Mekong to board a rusty ferry
