Bridging for Environmental Justice across Space and Time: Cambodia and the US South

Editors’ note: This piece is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s fall 2024 issue, “Supporting the Youth Climate Justice Movement.”

When communities and movements talk about climate and environmental justice, solidarity is often at the center of the conversation. But the question becomes: How do we achieve global solidarity when the scales are so unbalanced, the challenges are separated by so much space and time, and time seems so fleeting?

I believe it starts with seeking to bridge the gaps of space and time through community building across geographic boundaries. If we do this, we can identify patterns of injustice and intervene before decades pass and the problem grows.

In 2024, while in Cambodia on a semester-long study abroad program with a cohort of 18 other American students, my colleagues and I had the opportunity to tour the Lower Sesan II Dam—the largest dam in Cambodia, accounting for nearly 20 percent of Cambodia’s national grid.¹ The project, which was in development from the 1990s on, has been operational since 2017.² Building the dam took a little over four years and cost two multinational companies (China Huaneng Group and Royal Group of Cambodia) roughly 781 million USD.³ Built on the Sesan River, the dam was part of the Chinese government’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” which sought to expand its “foreign policy interests.”⁴ The Cambodian government’s stated aim is for the dam to provide enough energy to stop power outages and further develop the country.⁵

Unfortunately, but as one might expect, the consequences of an immense project of this sort on the people and the environment have been devastating.⁶ And it got me thinking about how the construction of this dam reflects a broad and long pattern of environmental injustice globally.

Displacement, Loss of Natural Resources, Erosion of Cultural Connection

When we inquired about the Lower Sesan II Dam’s environmental impact, a representative from China Huaneng Group, the company that cobuilt and operates the dam, confidently praised the project’s positive impact on infrastructure development and “negligible” impact on the environment. This has been highly contested; in fact, the project failed several environmental impact assessments,⁷ and the only “mitigation” effort the dam representative could cite was a fish ladder—a means of enabling fish to migrate despite the obstruction of the dam. When we asked the representative about the project’s impact on the communities living there, his only response was, “I think it was good.”

A quick Google search on “community impacts of the Lower Sesan II Dam” shows that the impact on the community has been anything but good. In a video posted by Human Rights Watch in 2021, villagers describe the displacement, loss of natural resources, and erosion of cultural connection that they faced after being moved to resettlements when the dam was constructed.⁸ They describe their lives as having been ideal before the dam was built. They grew bountiful rice crops, mango and coconut trees, and other farm goods that they could subsist on and sell. They also had access to forests where they could collect timber and non-timber forest products such as mushrooms. Many people grazed cows and water buffalo, as well, and almost everyone relied on the river for fish, snails, and bivalves. The villagers were moved to a resettlement miles away that lacked clean water and fertile soil for crops.⁹ And with the addition of climate change leading to intensive drought across the country, their lives have clearly not changed for the better.

After touring the dam, we traveled just over 30 miles south to meet with four community members and activists impacted by the development. These villagers were part of what we came to call the “hopeful holdouts”—a small but mighty group who have managed to remain on their native land. They shared with us a glimpse of their lives prior to the dam, how their lives have changed, and the scrutiny they currently face.

When the Neak Ta Cries

Our interviewees were from Srekor and Kbal Romeas—ethnically mixed communities, according to our interviewees, comprising roughly 500 families of marginalized groups, notably ethnic Lao and ethnic Bunong people, who settled on the land bordering the Sesan River after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, in 1979.¹⁰ Now, only 38 families remain, we were told, and they struggle daily to maintain what little sense of stability they have left. Our conversation with these community activists reflects the true meaning of solidarity within the environmental and climate justice movements. What follows is based on their accounts.

When rumors of the Lower Sesan II Dam began swarming the riverside community of Kbal Romeas in 2008, the people were in a state of disbelief. In 2010, however, according to our interviewees, China Huaneng Group “presented” the villagers with the plan. Despite the community’s disapproval, government officials had apparently already approved and funded the plan.¹¹ Contractors started in 2013 by clearing the forest; over 100 yards of land was cleared, with claims that the timber would be used to build the existing community’s new homes in their resettlements. This turned out not to be the case. All of our interviewees suspected that the timber was sold. A year later, most of the community was forced to leave.¹²

Our interviewees recounted the day the flooding began—how when they realized that the water was starting to pour in, they rushed to warn everyone to get out of their homes, screaming, “They will flood to the roof!” Most people left, and some people cried at having to leave behind the lives they had built for themselves and their families. The river was more than just a natural resource—it held spiritual meaning, as well. It is a shared belief that by revering the river they were honoring the neak ta, an ancestral deity believed to watch over the community. One interviewee said that what took place was so devastating that “even the neak ta cried.”

Since the dam’s construction and operation, the holdouts have faced pressures from the dam company, which has offered them inadequate compensation and the threat of law enforcement.¹³ One interviewee spoke about being summoned to court for remaining on the land and refusing to go.

Wiping the Tears of Our Ancestors

When we asked what was needed to make amends for what was clearly an environmental injustice, our interviewees asked us to spread awareness about what had happened. They hope for international intervention, since they feel their government is not helping them, and they prompted us to imagine this scenario unfolding in America. I didn’t need to imagine it—such injustices have historically been the reality for Black Americans during times of infrastructure development and expansion in places that disenfranchised communities call out as sites of environmental injustice.

Before the development of the TVA, the communities in the South, like those living along the Sesan River, contentedly lived in the valley as farmers. The valley was a place where Black Americans found themselves better off than in other areas.

I shared with them the unremarkably (given the cyclical and systematic nature of injustice) similar stories of my ancestors, describing the dams that emerged in the US South in the name of “modernity”—accounts that highlighted the stark disparities and injustices for Black and Indigenous communities.¹⁴

A poignant example is the Tennessee Valley Authority Project, which was introduced by then-President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, to develop and raise the area out of poverty through the implementation of dams.¹⁵ The project was largely successful in expanding access to electricity and improving infrastructure, but it left the most vulnerable populations without land and livelihoods. Ironically, this project later became the model for the first dams along the Mekong River Basin, built by the French occupation in the late 1950s.¹⁶ The modeling was not just of the construction of dams but also of the displacement of people.

Before the development of the TVA, the communities in the South, like those living along the Sesan River, contentedly lived in the valley as farmers. The valley was a place where Black Americans found themselves better off than in other areas, working on average 20 more acres of land than other Black farmers working in the South. They grew tobacco as a cash crop, as well as corn, wheat, and hay. They established schools and churches, and made a good living from the crops they grew.¹⁷

This all changed when the relocation began. It was done with the blatantly racist assumption that Black farmers were desperate to leave farming and were too uneducated to even understand what was going on. As Melissa Walker recounts in “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program,” unlike White farmers, Black farmers were not offered financial compensation for their losses and instead were given land elsewhere that was often much less valuable than the land they owned.¹⁸ Similar to the Cambodian communities, these farmers were offered relocation to areas that lacked their land’s natural resources—and because the farmers were now unable to make a living through farming, they kept having to relocate, often finding temporary “refuge” with White landlords. Then, when their options ran out, they were referred to public welfare. Their White counterparts who faced displacement, on the other hand, were offered subsistence homesteads.¹⁹

While it may be overwhelming to think about all the environmental and climate struggles happening around the world, it is important to consider the range of impacts that our actions in the West can have on the rest of the world. The TVA did much good for some, but it also became a symbol of destruction for many in the Global South.

Walker’s is one of very few accounts of the displacement that dams caused for Black Americans, with others being more loosely recorded—many via oral history—such as the stories of Black people living In Oscarville, GA, whose town was intentionally flooded in 1950 for the construction of Lake Lanier and the Buford Dam in order to provide water to surrounding cities. Decades earlier, according to a 2021 article by Bilal G. Morris,

a white group of terrorists known as the “Night Riders” would make it their mission to run every black person they came across out of town.

Oscarville would end up being one of their main targets, and over the short period of just a few years, 98% of its black residents would end up either leaving their homes or being murdered for refusal to move. Black property deeds found their way into the hands of white neighbors without any bill of sale or transfer. This effectively allowed many whites to steal the land once owned by their black counterparts when they were driven out by the “Night Riders.” More than 1,100 [Black people] would lose their livelihood, and in little time, the once functioning African-American town of Oscarville would be a ghost town.

Over time, pieces of the land would be sold to the government, and by 1950 a plan to build Lake Lanier was in full effect. Soon the entire town of Oscarville would be underwater, intentionally flooded in conjunction with the Buford Dam to support the growing demand for a water supply to the nearby cities. The resulting reservoir was named after Sidney Lanier, a poet and musician (who was also a Confederate private). In the end, construction would destroy more than 50,000 acres of farmland and displace more than 250 families. It would also relocate 20 cemeteries (and their corpses) in what some may see as an attempt to erase the sins of its past.²⁰

Dam projects such as the TVA and Buford have historically provided water and energy to large cities in the South, such as Knoxville, TN, and Atlanta, GA—locations that themselves have long felt the impact of the environmental racism that occurred at the time of their development, and continue to do so today.²¹ Now, decades later, communities are being encouraged to use the EPA’s community change grants to support them in meeting the environmental and climate justice goals for which these communities have long advocated.²² This is just a small step toward repairing the decades of severe environmental injustices Black communities have faced due to infrastructure development, but I am hopeful that putting these grants to work will result in some level of restorative justice.

***

While it may be overwhelming to think about all the environmental and climate struggles happening around the world, it is important to consider the range of impacts that our actions in the West can have on the rest of the world. The TVA did much good for some, but it also became a symbol of destruction for many in the Global South. And if we are intentional about building models of restorative justice through authentic community and government partnerships—with such dam projects in mind as cautionary tales—we could explore what is possible with respect to compensation and other reparations for the harms that communities like the Srekor and the Kbal Romeas are facing. To bring us back from the brink, we must pull from the margins—and be mindful that these margins naturally extend beyond our borders.

Notes

1. See “Hydropower Lower Sesan II,” Royal Group, accessed July 13, 2024, royalgroup.com.kh/business-portfolio/energy-division/hydropower-lower-sesan-2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. John Sifton with Yaqiu Wang, “Underwater: Human Rights Impact of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” Human Rights Watch, August 10, 2021, hrw.org/report/2021/08/10/underwater/human-rights-impacts-china-belt-and-road-project-cambodia.
5. Ibid; and “Hydropower Lower Sesan II.”
6. Lucy Chang and Vutha Srey, “Tensions between National Development and Local Needs in Cambodia: Lower Sesan II Dam,” Heinrich Böll Stiftung, May 25, 2023, boell.org/en/2023/05/25/cambodia-lower-sesan-ii-dam.
7. “Lower Sesan 2 Dam,” EarthRights International, accessed July 13, 2024, earthrights.org/what-we-do/mega-projects/lower-sesan-2-dam/.
8. John Sifton, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” YouTube video, 3 min., 45 sec., August 10, 2021, youtube.com/watch?v=Wz5nlGnPjwE.
9. Ibid.
10. All the data in this sentence are from the author’s field and interview notes from February 28, 2024; the interviewees remain anonymous for their See also Chang and Srey, “Tensions between National Development and Local Needs in Cambodia: Lower Sesan II Dam.”
11. According to interviewees from February 28, 2024; but see also Sifton with Wang, “Underwater.”
12. The interviewees communicated that the year that most of the community was forced to leave was The year differs in some reports.
13. See “Villagers Resist Relocation by Dams,” Radio Free Asia, accessed July 14, 2024, rfa.org/english/news/special/riverinperil/blog05.html.
14. See Emma Fagan et , “Dams of the Deep South,” ArcGIS StoryMaps, November 23, 2020, storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9ef5262e76846dfa1074cbd9b064f04; and Cranston Clayton, “The TVA and the Race Problem (1934),” VCU Libraries, Social Welfare History Project, accessed July 14, 2024, socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/tva-race-problem/.
15. See Melissa Walker, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program,” Agricultural History 72, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 417–28.
16. From author’s class slides, which include the following bullets: “French had plans to develop Mekong in Line with TVA”; “1959 creation of Mekong committee—explore potential and WB funding, based on TVA.”
17. Ibid.
18. Walker, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property ”
19. Ibid.
20. Bilal Morris, “The Haunting Of Lake Lanier And The Black City Buried Underneath,” NewsOne, August 21, 2021, newsone.com/4185919/lake-lanier-black-city-oscarville/.
21. See “Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB),” TVA’s Local Power Company Partners, Tennessee Valley Authority, accessed July 14, 2024, tva.com/energy/public-power-partnerships/local-power-companies/knoxville-utilities-board; “Buford Dam,” Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, National Park Service, accessed July 14, 2024, www.nps.gov/places/buford-dam-place.html; Willy Blackmore, “The Racist History of Atlanta’s Water System,” Word In Black, June 5, 2024, wordinblack.com/2024/06/the-racist-history-of-atlantas-water-system/; and “Black Farmers FAQ: The history of discrimination against Black farmers and policy initiatives to remedy these inequities,” Legal Defense Fund, accessed July 14, 2024, www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/black-farmers-faq/.
22. See “Community Change Grants Technical Assistance,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, accessed July 14, 2024, epa.gov/inflation-reduction-act/community-change-grants-technical-assistance.