Cambodia’s green fatigue

During his time as CEO of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation, Stephan Bognar has witnessed many changes in Cambodia. While organisations such as the MJP Foundation are working to conserve Cambodia’s rich natural environment, vast tracts of the country’s forests are at the same time being logged and destroyed. But it’s not just Cambodia’s rural areas that are under threat in the name of development – ninety per cent of Boeung Kak Lake, one of the most significant natural assets in the capital, Phnom Penh, is currently being filled in to make way for the trappings of modern life. In this article for HPHP Central, Stephan Bognar reflects on the impact of this development on the health of the city and its residents.

Living in Southeast Asia and walking the uber-congested streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, my mind easily drifts to the time when I was running up the dirt paths on Montreal’s Mont Royal Park with my McGill University track and field team, and breathing in all the natural chemicals that the forests and plants had to offer for the day. Competing with an urban-city diet of oil fumes, asphalt, traffic jams and everyday city noises flooding the immune system, Montreal’s largest green space felt more than just a picturesque postcard in the city. It was like a refuge for my body to wash off the man-made detergents and for my brain to take a cognitive maintenance break.

I’ve always wondered how Montreal would look today if it didn’t have this ‘green brain’ located in the heart of the city. Although many people refer to urban parks as the lungs of city, I tend to look at them as the brains, simply because once you’ve entered the green space, it has the power to re-engineer your thoughts and regulate your body. In essence, it has the ability to manage your very existence.

Phnom Penh, a city quickly trying to remake itself into a micro-Asian hotspot with cafes, glistening office towers and boutiques offering the latest fashions for the new Cambodian elite and emerging middle class, has certainly embraced modern industrialisms (build, consume, produce, sell and then rebuild, consume more, produce more and sell everything, etc) like England in the industrial age. On the surface, at least, one can make the comparisons. But explore a little deeper and you would see that even Victorian England, when the industrial age was in full swing, understood that its people needed a place to breathe clean air, see greens, explore natural landscapes to recharge after spending the day inside the factories.

Fast forward to Phnom Penh 2011, where rapid industrialization and economic data shows that over 200,000 of the nation’s population of 14 million are toiling in the cities’ garment factories for the world’s aggressive consumer class – and running, resting and recuperating in a large, green tropical urban park may be lost forever.

Until recently Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak Lake (pronounced Bang-kok) was like a rural jungle surrounded by the city’s expanding urban transit-fats (asphalt, all-equipped SUVs, motorcycles, and supersized commercial trucks). In 2003, the Phnom Penh municipality looked at the lake site as a potential urban green tropical oasis, joining some of the world’s greatest city-parks like New York’s Central Park with its 845-hectare site, or London‘s Hyde Park, Vancouver’s Stanly Park and Montreal’s Mont Royal Park. Boeung Kak Park and its 133 hectare green space would be the latest, making Phnom Penh one of the first Southeast Asian cities to join the green cities club and offer its citizens the needed greens to sustain their well being. Or so it was thought.

Today, visit Boeung Kak Lake and you will see vast piles of white sand and trucks filling in all but 10 percent of the lake’s area. In 2007, the area was leased (or some would argue given) to a local developer, with a link to a Chinese firm, for 99 years. No one really knows for certain what will be built on site, but city hall officials note that hotels, entertainment centres, housing and condominiums (at a cost of $2.17 billion) will be included.

Perhaps John A. Livingston, one of Canada’s famous conservationists was correct when he said, ‘Places not used by us are “wastes.” Areas not occupied by us are “desolate.” Could the desolation be in the soul of man?’ Seeing the way Phnom Penh has re-landscaped its city in the last five years, one can only assume that developers saw Boeung Kak Lake in its natural form as a wasted space and, as such, adopted the Chinese New Las Vegas-Macau blueprint to build its Asian hotspot.

Sadly, even with the growing body of evidence which clearly shows the measurable benefits of urban green spaces on the human brain and body, Phnom Penh’s demand for an urban diet prevails, potentially accompanied by what some people in the West call nature deficit disorders (Richard Louv) or, as I say, nature-meltdowns; behavioral problems or disorders that come about from people spending less time outdoors in natural landscapes. Of course this ‘disorder’ is not recognized in any of the medical manuals for mental disorders. But spend some time working with children, teenagers and young community development volunteers coming to work in rural areas with no connections to the e-grid young people who have only logged (clogged) onto facebooks, twitters, and whatever Sony, Google or Microsoft have e-vented – and you’ll quickly see that we have a problem. Isn’t it interesting how we (yes, humans) have evolved with or in nature, physically and mentally, and now we think that we can do without it in our next phase of e-volution?

So the question is how are we going to re-energize an established medium – green space/nature – and rebrand it so that all communities will value it, including our Generation O (Overloaded/Oversized/Over-processed), the new youth which has so much of everything except nature (the real nature, not the virtual one on your desktop). Scientific research has clearly shown the cost benefits of connecting to a real ‘nature-based operating system’ for a range of health and development problems facing humanity; whether obesity, diabetes, depression or childhood development disorders. Even Parks Victoria (Health Parks Health People) and the United States National Park Service (See Park Prescriptions) are in the process of working with the medical communities to highlight the value of health interconnecting with parks.

Travelers who come to Cambodia and expect to see rich green spaces inside and outside of the urban centres may be somewhat surprised. While deforestation – both legal and illegal – continues to clear large tracts of virgin forests to supply the demands of the wealthy and growing agro-businesses, Phnom Penh’s only remaining natural green space will, without a doubt, disappear and with it, the status of one of the most desirable cities to live and work. The raw truth is that the parking lots and entertainment centres that it supports have priority over protected areas and parks.

Stephan Bognar, CEO Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation

*This article did not touch the issue of land rights and the 4,000 poor families that had been living on the lake site since the end of Cambodia’s civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. Three thousand families have already been forced to leave Boeung Kak Lake with minimal financial compensation to break ground for the controversial development project owned by a senior government official. As this article was being published, Phnom Penh city officials were preparing to join other government officials to celebrate the official launch of the project. The remaining 1,000 families still living at the site will certainly be hosting their own ground-breaking eviction celebrations. Earlier this year, the World Bank joined their ranks by conceding that their land titling project in Cambodia failed to provide these families with the needed land titles to keep their homes.
Stephan Bognar

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