A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 35

35th of a series

“They both listened to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming.”
- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

The Mekong: Letter from an Old Friend

Jamie,

Sara and I just returned from a three week trip to Vietnam (the area around Saigon – which they still call it) and Cambodia.

It included a boat cruise on the Mekong River from Vietnam up to Siem Reap in Cambodia, with numerous stops along the way to see and experience what life along the river looks and feels like.

As we made the trip, your words about how rivers define life along their banks came alive. It was truly fascinating to see, and the experience was just so different from that of the major rivers – Susquehanna, Hudson, Delaware, etc. – that I know.

All aspects of life revolve around the Mekong. I don’t say that lightly. Folks eat the fish and vegetation, irrigate their fields, swim to get away from the heat, gather socially, drink the water, wash their scooters, clean their clothes, use it as a highway, live on and next to it, and more. It was almost totally true in the rural areas and remains true for many, even in places like Phnom Penh.

Despite its importance to daily life, the river clearly has a growing plastic pollution issue and a basic pollution problem (many people put allium salt in a container of water to get rid of the silt and then boil the water so they can drink it). Keeping the river clean is clearly not a priority for the governments of either Vietnam or Cambodia. In fact, in large parts of rural Cambodia there is no recycling or trash removal, so roadways and vacant land can be full of litter.

It was a fascinating trip, and the river captured my almost constant attention. It was stunning to see, given how important the Mekong is to the lifeblood of the people and how taken for granted it is by seemingly everyone.

A long way of saying again, your words came alive on this trip.

Editor’s note: The 3,050-mile Mekong has been called “the world’s most important river.” Arising in the Tibetan highlands, it runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, before flowing into the South China Sea. It is second only to the Amazon in its biodiversity, and hundreds of millions of people depend on it for their survival, particularly on its fish. The Mekong produces one-fifth of the world’s annual freshwater catch and provides the entire protein consumption for 60 percent of the people of Laos and Cambodia.

Reinforcing John Kirkpatrick’s observations, Stefan Lovgren writes in Yale Environment 360, the Mekong is a “troubled” river. It “may look healthy on the surface but has grown increasingly sick from a wide range of problems, including dam building, overfishing, deforestation, plastic pollution, and the insidious impacts of a changing climate.”

The primary culprit, at least for the moment, is dams, primarily hydroelectric dams, with 13 on the Mekong’s main stem, 160 more on its tributaries, and hundreds more being planned. China, the country farthest upstream, has long been the worst offender, and its complete lack of concern over the impacts of its dams on the five downstream countries seems to have caught on in the rest of the neighborhood, where dam building is surging.

Dams on the main stem of the Mekong River, 2020

Still, “the Mekong is not dead,” says Sudeep Chandra, director of the University of Nevada’s Global Water Center. “We’ve seen huge environmental pressures causing the Mekong to dry up and fisheries to almost collapse. And yet we also see the incredible resilience of this river in the face of those threats.”