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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Return from 🚬 Cigarette Butts + 🪓Clearcutting + 🥀 Dry Season = ⚠️ Neverending Wildfires 🔥 to Justin Parke's Web3 Blog
