Post #6 - Luang Prabang Dam

A bit further upstream, the quiet gives way. Barges grind past. A concrete wall juts out from a scraped hillside. Multiple cranes swing their arms, metallic insects busying themselves with heavy loads. Trucks thrum and kick up clouds of dust. The air is raw with the smell of earth moved. To shift a river is always a violent act.

This is the site of the Luang Prabang Dam, one of seven planned for the Mekong mainstream in Laos, in addition to the two already built at Xayaburi and Don Sahong. Laos imagines itself as the “Battery of Asia” by harnessing the river’s current for power export, even at the peril of the river and downstream neighbors. No one is blameless, though. Thailand is the largest customer of Lao’s hydropower. Vietnam and Cambodia also buy electricity and build their own dams on Mekong tributaries.

“No river on earth has more migratory fish than the Mekong,” Brian Eyler reminds us in Last Days of the Mighty Mekong. Fish follows the monsoon pulse. Flood carries them into new feeding grounds until the retreating water pulls them and their offsprings back again. Not far downstream, the Xayaburi Dam has already interrupted this rhythm. Once Luang Prabang is complete, the fish will face yet another barrier. Fisherfolks already complain of declining catches, of river levels that fluctuate wildly under the influence of Chinese dams upstream. What will happen once all the planned dams are constructed?

Fish migrations stall while villages are uprooted, moved, resettled; their old lands drowned beneath reservoirs. These shifts unravel more than livelihoods. In Mekong Dreaming, Allan Johnson writes of how new infrastructures disrupt older conceptualizations of time. For centuries, river time, fish time, Buddhist time, and monsoon time were braided together—fish and ritual calendars following floods, festivals aligning with the river’s rise and fall. Now that entanglement is unraveling. The river’s pulse is being rewritten by turbines and generators.

Migration patterns of humans and nonhumans, once tethered to the ebbing and rising of water, are now subject to gates and switches and urban technocrats. The Mekong is still a river, but it is also a machine, a managed controlled infrastructure. And somewhere between these two truths, a way of life is being unstitched.

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Eyler, B. (2019). Last days of the mighty Mekong. Zed Books.

Johnson, A. A. (2020). Mekong dreaming: Life and death along a changing river. Duke University Press.