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This semester, I have rarely been anywhere without my camera. I am one of those people who mainly uses their camera on “auto” – much to the disappointment of my friends who are into photography – but as we have travelled around the country learning about different ecosystems and the communities living within them, I have started to think more deeply about the photographs I am taking and the stories they tell.

Our first overnight field trip brought us to Prek Toal, a floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake. The village borders a key protected area for over a hundred bird species, including several that rely on this site as their last remaining breeding ground in Southeast Asia. Our boats glided past trees covered in cormorants and darters, and we watched the occasional painted stork flying overhead.

At times like these, photography can only capture so much. These shots miss the whirr of the boat engine, the calls of the birds, and their wings flapping as they take off from a nearby tree. More importantly, in picturing individual species, these shots risk isolating birds from the complex web of interactions that sustains these ecosystems. At Prek Toal, the moment you leave the bird sanctuary, the number of birds you can see plummets. Decades of habitat loss and fishing pressures have severely depleted fish populations on the Tonle Sap, a key food source for bird species. In order to truly appreciate and more effectively protect the birds at Prek Toal, we need to understand the ways in which many different flora and fauna species all depend on each other.

Of course, humans are deeply entangled in these relationships too. People have been fishing on the Tonle Sap Lake for thousands of years. Roughly 1.5 million people live in communities around the Tonle Sap Lake, including over 100,000 in villages floating directly on the water. The fisherman we have spoken to on the Tonle Sap have noticed significant decreases in fish numbers: where twenty years ago 1-2 gill nets would be heaping with fish, now, those same nets would not even catch enough to pay for rice. Given the significant increase in human population growth around the Tonle Sap Lake, fishermen are often blamed for the decline of fish and are targeted by government programs to destroy illegal fishing gear. Blaming people is very easy. In my eyes, though, this is counterproductive. Blame overlooks the complicated economic factors that mean subsistence fishing is the central means of survival for most fishermen on the Tonle Sap. Fishermen often lack the skills and the financial capital to transition to other sectors. Many have expressed frustration that their gears are confiscated while illegal operations continue to trawl straight through protected areas. I see photography as a way to move beyond blame and instead highlight the craft and expertise of fishers on the Tonle Sap, and their resilience in continuing a way of life their families have practiced for generations, even despite political, and now ecological, transformations.

Taking these photographs was deeply humanizing for me. When you can see the everyday connections the fishermen have to the lands and waters around them, you realize that simply telling fishermen to stop overfishing or confiscating their gear is not going to solve these issues. We need to showcase local resilience and environmental knowledge and use this to develop solutions to degradation around the Tonle Sap that will both preserve whole ecosystems and ensure current fishermen can practice sustainable livelihoods. Photography can be a powerful tool to tell these stories of persistence and, more broadly, to call for interdisciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.