The perfect balance

My first trip to Cambodia was in 1998, seventeen years after my family fled war-torn Cambodia. Many things shocked me – the poverty, desperation and corruption that plagued the country. But I was most unprepared for the beauty that awaited me – the beauty of the landscape, the people, the culture and every smile that greeted me in my journey. I traveled to near and remote areas of the country, traversing rivers and jungles and dirt roads rarely traveled by foreigners.

I wondered how Cambodia would progress in the following years and how much of the beauty and culture that I witnessed would be lost or preserved.

Over ten years later, Cambodia is a different landscape, now a hotspot destination for young backpackers, service workers, and Chinese and Korean businessmen. Dirt roads are replaced with highways and large, high-rise department stores gain their way in the city. The small streets of Phnom Penh bulge with traffic, the large SUVs seemingly incongruent along the narrow boulevards. “Made in Cambodia” has become a household name in the United States, with stores like GAP importing t-shirts and jeans made by small, young, and female Cambodian hands.

All this development demands power, energy, and natural resources heretofore unheard of or explored in a country ravaged by war. (As I write this blog, we experienced two power outages in a row.) But the demand to keep pace and compete with rapidly expanding neighbors has forced Cambodia to act fast and perhaps too rashly.

As I studied the map of Cambodia pinned to the wall in our office, I began to understand how large and fragile an ecosystem Cambodia is. The country is an arterial system of rivers, with the Tonle Sap as the heart, expanding and contracting depending on the season, and giving life to its inhabitants. Over 80 percent of the population depends on fish for its sole source of protein. Any disruption to this fragile ecosystem – overfishing and hunting, lower water levels due to dam construction, clearing of flooded forests and fish spawning areas, sand dredging, extreme drought or flooding due to climate change, factory waste discharge – will be disastrous for the country.

I decided to keep a blog for several reasons – first, as a journal to record the journey and process of making this film; second, to share with others this journey; but most importantly to try to understand and decipher all the questions I know I will be asking throughout this process.

I started this project with no agenda. I was just shocked at how rapidly Cambodia was developing. As I pondered the soundness of the construction of the roads and buildings that seemed to have been built to last only a few years at most, I also wondered about the soundness of the foundation upon which the entire country was being built. What materials are being used to fuel this development? How were the materials acquired? And what people and places and creatures are impacted in the process?

This is a decisive moment for Cambodia. And so it is also, a decisive moment for the world. I hope this process and this film will help answer some questions that I’m sure all of us are asking about protection, conservation, development, and consumption in this increasingly delicate world that we live in. How do we find balance? How do we advance and develop without destroying ourselves in the process?