Photographs by Ethan Welty; text by Alex Baron
The Nam Ou River of northern Laos flows for 450 kilometers through a landscape of limestone bluffs and deciduous forests before it reaches the Mekong River. The people who live along the Nam Ou depend on the river for their survival. Until recently, the area had few roads, and although villagers aren’t strangers to modern technology, they still live a subsistence way of life.
In 2011, with construction of three dams already underway, the Lao government announced plans to build a total of seven dams along the river, which will fully or partially submerge nearly a hundred villages. The power they generate — more than one thousand megawatts, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor — will be sold to Thailand and Vietnam, part of the government’s goal of making Laos “the battery of Southeast Asia.”
In January 2014, photographer Ethan Welty and Robert Hahn, a geologist and environmentalist, rafted three hundred kilometers of the Nam Ou, interviewing people they met along the way. Some of the locals welcomed the project and spoke of the dams as missions of national progress. “Wherever people live, they will always prefer to have a road and electricity,” said one villager. Another was also hopeful that the dams would bring transportation improvements to the region: his son had died, he said, because there were no direct roads to the hospital. Others were more ambivalent but felt powerless to change the government’s decision: “We cannot resist what has already been planned for us.”