Podcast IV – Anthropocene vs. Mekong
This podcast is about a fight that takes place all around the world: humans against nature. The human-made climate change, destruction of our environment and the blind greed for profit are threatening ecostystem worldwide, one of them being the biggest river of Southeast Asia: the Mekong.
We’re awfully sorry, but this podcast is recorded solely in our mother-tongue German. But here is a brief summary to get you ino the topic. Additionally you can check out our gallery where we’ve put together the most significant photos from our journey along the Mekong:
We’ve travelled from Vietnam to Cambodia along the Mekong and saw the massive stream with our own eyes, which made us realize that it truly is the lifeline of Southeast Asia. The Mekong provides water, food, energy and living space for thousands of different species of plants and animals and 60 million humans. But nowadays this unique ecosystem is endangered by human actions changing the Mekong irrevocably.
Dams in the upper reaches lead to a continuous decrease of the delta, that is becoming increasingly fragile thus less resilinet towards climate change. Furthermore less and less fish is swimming in the Mekong, many species have already died of during the last decades or are currently facing extinction. As a consequence the fishing villages are loosing the source of their food and money. At the same time the river is being poluted by waters from the industry and agriculture, harming humans as well as animals, whose only access to water for their daily lifes is the Mekong. Proper waste disposal and treatment of waste water is clearly lacking: the Mekong is filled with plastic waste and toxics, finding through the river their way into the ocean
The list goes on and on and this podcast is not covering all aspects about this issue, but we hope that it gave a brief overview, reminding you to fight for the preservation of a liveable planet everyday – that climate justice must yet be archived
This spotify playlist below lists the songs we used in our podcast to convey some Mekong vibes to you, so please tune in if you like, maybe whilst doing further research on this issue? ;-)