Text by Abby Seiff – Photography by Nicolas Axelrod
One morning, I pulled up a satellite map of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake on my computer and clicked my way around it. The water was a milky brown and at various points I could spot its floating villages if I squinted and kept my eyes sharp. They looked even more precarious in this digital soup than they did up close. A few dozen homes here and there; pinpricks against the lake’s great expanse.
To live in a floating home is to live in a constant state of flux. The materials are all land-
born: wood; corrugated aluminum;rubber tyres; plastic barrels and rope used in endless, ingenious ways. But beneath your feet: the constant feel of nothing. The steady roll of water reminding you at once how much and how little you have. We have this whole lake’ your home says with each gentle thrall to the tide. We have nothing.
In a country full of poor, very impoverished people, most of those living on the massive lake feel they sit at the absolute bottom rung. If a farmer has a plot of land that is never quite yielding enough to survive on, that is constantly in danger of being grabbed by someone richer and more powerful — well, she has earth beneath her feet. She has collateral to take out another usurious microfinance loan. She has a dirt path that leads to a small road that leads to a bigger one that leads to a school, a market, a health clinic.
The village of Kampong Prek sits near the mouth of a nameless river toward the lake’s bottom half. The houses here are something of a marvel, how do they survive the tides and wind? They have thin wood floors, lashed raft like to tyres and blue 50-gallon barrels. The walls are salvaged wood or corrugated tin; layered with green tarp or strips of palm leaf tied neatly down — the shaggy coat patchy before long; threadbare and worn.
Visitors to the Tonle Sap’s tourist-thronged floating villages rarely make it as far as Kampong Prek. Here, just 63 houses float within shouting distance of one another. When the lake swells with rain they follow the water inland, always trying to hug a shore. To call it a village seems a stretch. There is no shop or school or boat repair, just a few dozen families trying very hard, and mostly failing, to get by.
What ties people together the most here? A wild all-consuming desire to leave.
“If the government moves people who live here, in two or three years, you’ll see a lot of fish,” an aged fisherman named Mok Hien once predicted knowingly. “Before there were so many large fish here. Now, we can’t even find one.”
The Mekong river wends some 3,000 miles from its source at the mountain-ringed Tibetan plateau through the delta in Vietnam and out into the South China Sea. It runs through China and along the Golden Triangle linking Myanmar, Thailand and Laos before meandering along the border of Thailand and Laos, flowing into Cambodia, then arcing toward Vietnam. Along the way, the Mekong feeds into countless tributaries both large and small, providing fish, fresh water, and irrigation to millions.
In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, one section of the Mekong splits off into a tributary called the Tonle Sap river which carves northwest toward its eponymous lake.
For half of the year, the Tonle Sap lake looks like an elongated figure eight crossing the heart of Cambodia. At the peak of the six-month dry season, the lake covers about a thousand square miles, its edges demarcated by forests, grasslands, paddy fields, and red roads. During the rainy season, which runs from roughly May to October, all of that disappears. Viewed from a satellite, the lake’s prodigious floodplains, which can cover 6,000 square miles, make it look as though half the country has vanished below some inland sea.
Scientists call that a monotonal flood-pulsed system, poets liken it to a beating heart. When the rains stop and the water level in the Mekong drops, the lake flows into the Tonle Sap river. Come rainy season, it reverses course — the only river in the world to do so.
With the pulsation comes the fish, billions of them, representing more than 200 species. They migrate from higher reaches of the Mekong down through the Tonle Sap river and into the lake. Across the globe, only a handful of countries, all many times the size of Cambodia, — boast larger inland fisheries. None rely on their lakes to the extent that Cambodia does. The fish, more than 500,000 tons of which are caught each year, feed the nation. They provide the main source of protein for as much as 80 percent of the population, and they feed Cambodia’s neighbors, which import thousands of tons each year as part of a $2 billion industry.
The lake’s double-movement does work for much more than its fisheries. Along with water, nutrient-rich silt is pushed into the floodplains, helping rice — the country’s most critical staple — to flourish. The watershed undergirding the lake is a crucial source of groundwater for much of the country, protected, in turn, by the forests surrounding the Tonle Sap.
The system is a finely tuned ecological miracle. Pull a single thread and it will begin unraveling. We, as it turns out, are pulling all its threads at once.
All along the Mekong, Chinese-funded hydropower dams are ballooning as the rapid economic growth of the region runs headlong into an electricity shortfall. On the lake, corruption has seen large trawlers ply protected areas, while desperate individuals increasingly take up their own small-scale illegal fishing. A changing climate, meanwhile, has led to devastating droughts in recent years.
Without fish, what is the Tonle Sap?
This is the question millions living on and around the lake are struggling to answer.
With climate change and breakneck development wreaking enormous havoc, the lake is now one of the most threatened in the world. For those depending on it, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
This excerpt is adapted from Troubling the Water: A dying lake and a vanishing world in Cambodia, forthcoming from Potomac Books.
Abby Seiff is an American journalist with 15 years of experience reporting and editing in Asia. Her writing and photography have appeared in Newsweek, Time, the Mekong Review, the Economist, Al Jazeera, Pacific Standard and more.
Nicolas Axelrod is an Australian photographer and filmmaker based in Thailand, he specialises in documenting the adverse impacts of development on local communities and the environment.
You can see more of his work at https://www.ruom.net/
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