The Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary here in Cambodia is a dangerous place to be a tree or an animal, but Cambodia is a land of contradictions.
Fence Update 🧱
It has taken nearly a year of saving, planning, and acquiring affordable materials, but we have finally finished putting up the fenceposts and rails. A job like this in a city or even a small town would only take a few weeks to plan for and build, but because we are 4 hours from the nearest rural provincial capital, at the end of a dead-end highway with the Thai border, and in the middle of the Cardamom Mountains National Park, everything is difficult.
Hardly A Sanctuary 🤦♂️
When I talk with locals about the constant wildfires, they mostly seem to think they fires are all natural. But I once lived in the mountains of Colorado for over 6 years, a place that is far drier than Cambodia, and even contains plants that are nothing short of explosive. There are creosote bushes that are basically kerosene in plant form, and pine trees burst into flames with just a spark, and all it takes is a careless cigarette butt or lightning strike to lose millions of acres of forest.
On my daily 2-hour roundtrip commute to pick the kids up from school, this is the site I have been seeing for at least 4 months, very sad. I haven't shared it on Hive in great photographic detail before because it is just depressing content, and I mostly try of offer silly goose content for my readers. My educational background is in wilderness first aid/rescue and wilderness guiding, and mountaineering has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, so I am more aware than the average person of the scale of wilderness being lost here so casually.
Let It Burn 🔥
Cambodia is land of irony and contradictions, and that's one of the reasons I continue living here, it's very interesting, but often frustrating. Each day I see tens, sometimes hundreds of individual wildfires, and at times I've seen these fires burn an entire mountain. The fires never penetrate into the dense old-growth forest, but the areas where the forest has suffered clearcutting burn easily due to all of the dry grasses and brush that grow where trees once stood.
Any trees unfortunate enough to be left standing here have no future because each season these unnatural grasslands are constantly on fire. First the animals disappear with the clearcutting, then the insects and biodiversity are further destroyed with the constant fires. The locals all believe or would like to believe these fires happen completely naturally, but they are a result of human carelessness and greed.
Even though where we live is a wildlife sanctuary within a national park, and it is technically illegal to cut the trees or hunt the animals here, if you successfully clear a patch of forest without getting caught, and are eventually able to demonstrate borders of some kind with either a fence or brush cutting, you can become the owner of the land and get a soft title from the government.
If you don't own a chainsaw and/or are scared of getting caught cutting trees, burning the land you want to own one day is the lazy way to get into the real estate game. The government isn't trying to catch anyone doing this, and there are only 8 or so lightly-armed workers from the Wildlife Alliance NGO to catch and arrest people for breaking the laws of the sanctuary. These guys have a hard job, and the government only allows arrest if the suspects are caught red-handed in the act of cutting a tree or lighting a fire.
Being caught next to a freshly fallen tree with a chainsaw in your hands and sawdust all over your clothes is not enough evidence, so these guys basically have to be ninja spies to gather enough evidence, but then also must be lucky enough to catch the soldiers in our village who are the ones doing this stuff. Even though they can get as close as 10 feet from catching the guys in the forest, even clearly see their face, the NGO is not allowed to arrest them at a later time.
Lastly I should mention that half of these fires are started by cigarette butts. I was actually once a smoker in Colorado, but I never flicked my cigarette butts out of a car or onto the ground. It is so easy to just push the butt against a shoe or metal until it's extinguished, then put in somewhere until you can throw it away. Here I've actually seen fires start right as a car or moto was driving away from the area. Just yesterday I saw two guys on a moto pull out in front of me while laughing after a pee stop, and immediately the area went up in flames. Well, it's clear that a little recreational arson is also the source of many of these fires too, but they are not natural as so many locals believe, there hasn't even been a lighting strike for almost half a year.
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I get that. It's exactly the same in my country. When a developer wanted a land, and it was forest reserve, magically it erupt into lava and nothing survive. Government have "no choice" since it's broken regardless, might as well sell it for good. At least someone is taking care of that piece of useless land.
If you remember the last time I told you government "take back" the mountain in my hometown? Initially they wanted to collect 200 bucks a year from hiker, now they no longer need that 200 bucks. Instead, a "small" portion of the lower mountain being leveled for building resorts 🤣
I think, both yours and my country function pretty similarly. Accidents happened for a purpose.
"Same same but different" as they say here in Cambodia. Seems like a similar government strategy, perhaps there should be a unity government for Malaybodia, and we can work together to destroy nature in a more cooperative manner 😁.
Funny, but one of the few things I love about the USA is our national parks, national forest, and all different types of wilderness areas. Surely we would've destroyed like anywhere else in the world, but Europeans only arrived a few hundred years ago, just as human governments were beginning to understand the value of preserving wilderness. Unfortunately for Cambodia most of its forests were destroyed before modern science would provide reasons to keep some of it around 🤔😒.
People should preserve the natural wonders and not to destroy it.
It was so weird that there are still ideas like that present in that country.
Hopefully, animals are still alive despite the destructions done to the forest.
Very few of the laws serve to protect nature here in Cambodia, and the ones that do aren't enforced. It's often up to NGOs and foreign journalists to catch Cambodian citizens profiting from the destruction of their natural resources. Most of the large wild mammals in Cambodia are extinct, but next door Vietnam still has a lot of biodiversity because they've made greater efforts to preserve natural spaces.
So people get rewarded for burning or cutting illegally by becoming landowners? That's twisted...
Congratulations on your fence :) It doesn't look like it will keep much in or out, though?
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Not technically by law, but yes in reality. It's insane, and there is no economic or other incentive to preserve a forest in any way, shape or form. The fence is partially done, but the pickets aren't up yet. I'll share more details/pics as we finish up the fence.
How are you going to protect your land from the fires???
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Well, our land in particular received a lot of backfill about 8 months ago, so there is very little vegetation and not that many trees on our property. There's little fuel to host a wildfire, and plus one side of our property is the highway and the other is a river, both good fire barriers.
Unfortunately the fires have now moved to the clearcut areas near the road about 2km from our house. It's hard to breathe and even some of the virgin forest is getting scorched. It looks like rain is coming in two weeks, so I hope that will extinguish most of the active fires.
It sounds like a never-ending cycle... Hopefully it will end though, before your property has enough growth to be at risk. Sparks can jump roads and rivers 😢
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There have been some tense moments, and recently I have tried to cut and gather all the dead dry grass near our house just in case. I wake up every morning and wipe the layer of ash from my computer desk 😒.
Sounds awful :( ...I hope you find a solution soon
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That is absolutely insane. 😮 I imagine, however, that similar actions were attempted on the wild, untamed frontiers of many countries around the world over human history. 😔
In a way it's a kind of homesteading law like Alaska has, but it is totally illegal to award land like this within a national park, and even more so within a wildlife sanctuary inside the national park. The law and reality are two different things, but it's almost impossible to become the owner of a forest and take care of that forest. If you want to own a forest, you have to secretly destroy it, fence it off, then get a title and regrow the forest, absolutely insane.
People should be careful with the way they smoke cigarette around such areas , infact maybe it will be better if they stop smoking around there..what do you think ?
I think cigarette smoking is a tough addiction to quit. However, if folks just extinguished the cigarette butts before carelessly flicking them to the side of the road this problem wouldn't exist. It is so easy to take the cigarette and push it against some metal on the motorbike until it stops burning, but I think people just don't care enough to do things like this.
You are correct
A sad example of the destruction that human beings can cause to that most important to us - nature.
Congratz on the fence job. It looks pretty good.
Sad to know the fate of so many trees is being scorched until they topple and break the power lines. The only upside is that I feel less guilty about turning these trees into a fence 🙏🙏🙏.
At least there's always some upside to be found ;<)
This is a kind of sad scenario, because of the fire burns in the place many wildlife animals lost their lives.
It is so sad to see, and our area is virgin forest, but only 10km away from destruction. I hope that our area can remain beautiful and natural for at least another 10 years, but it's not realistic to wish for more than that in Cambodia.
We really wish that our place will remain its beauty until next generations to come my friend.
Yes, and I hope the Khmer culture can begin to embrace and respect nature so that there is something left for future generations.
Sad to be a tree and an animal there. I'm wondering how the electric posts and cable wires survive...
It's a tough life for critters of the forest, and the power lines are constantly melting and having burned trees fall onto them. It's such a dangerous and sad situation, and all a result of clearcutting and cigarette butts.
Actual footage of me receiving a visit from @ewkaw...
Hahah good someone was fast enough to record that :D
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