Part Ioutlined plans being made by businesses and governments in China, Thailand and Myanmar to harness the Salween’s vast hydroelectric potential.
#Karen vs karen on the side of the highway series
This is the third article in a five-part series exploring Myanmar’s Salween landscape amid galvanizing plans to develop hydropower projects along its course. The Salween Peace Park lies in the heart of the ecoregion the WWF has termed the “Kayah-Karen Montane Rain Forests,” which is the fourth richest ecoregion in the Indo-Pacific in terms of mammal species (168), and the second highest for bird species, which number 568. Along the entire eastern edge of the proposed park, striking mountains drop off into the mighty Salween, which has forged its way south from its glacial source in the Himalayas.
The region’s wild beauty is indebted to the Indian and Eurasian continental plates that collided and gave Earth the Himalayas, 50 million years ago. Much of the terrain is rugged and textured with limestone mountains that crumple the land with sharp rises and high ridges dropping into steep verdant valleys. Born out of collective experience of the negative impacts of large-scale development projects elsewhere in Karen state and across Myanmar, the project aims to forge a peaceful and more sustainable economic development pathway for the Karen lands west of the Salween River. The Salween Peace Park would set aside a 5,200 square kilometer (around 2,000 square miles) swathe of Myanmar’s southeastern Karen state as an indigenous Karen-led protected area - including the site slated for the large, export-oriented Hat Gyi dam.
Great hornbills are among the many species currently found in the Salween Basin. It exemplifies the ecological wealth that a large protected area in Karen (Kayin) state could support - and what is at risk here if large-scale development projects continue without wildlife and indigenous peoples in mind. This spectacular array of little-studied biodiversity is evidence of the resilience of the wildlife that has managed to survive here, despite seventy years of civil war and multiple other threats including habitat destruction for large infrastructure projects such as dams, roads and pipelines.
#Karen vs karen on the side of the highway Patch
In a single patch of land hemmed in by the Salween, they documented 194 plant species and 42 endangered mammal species, among them the Asiatic black bear, sun bear, eastern hoolock gibbon, slow loris, dhole, Sunda pangolin, Chinese pangolin, great hornbill, as well as several previously unidentified plant and animal species. “But it is precisely this obscurity that makes the Salween Basin a place of great biodiversity,” wrote the study’s authors, and with good reason. “To most people on earth - even biodiversity scientists - the Salween Basin is like the dark side of the moon.” So begins a 2008 study of the flora and fauna of a single bend of the Salween River by environmental NGO Karen Environmental Social Action Network (KESAN). The stated aspirations of the park are “peace and self-determination, environmental integrity, and cultural survival,” a stark contrast to the conflict, environmental degradation and oppression of minorities that have historically defined development projects in Myanmar.The proposed park includes existing community forests, as well as the site of the planned Hat Gyi dam.
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