When Suwanna Gauntlett started working on conservation in Cambodia in the early 2000s, hundreds of hectares of rainforest were set ablaze every month to clear the land for illegal sales, and dozens of tigers and elephants had been killed.
Gauntlett had founded the Wildlife Alliance in 1994 to fight tiger poaching in the Russian Far East, and a decade later expanded the nonprofit’s work to India, Ecuador, Myanmar, and Thailand. In 2000, Cambodia was their next frontier, home to one of the last giant rainforests in Southeast Asia stretching across the country’s Southern Cardamom region — what Gauntlett described as a “remote and completely lawless province.”
“There were no rangers, no park headquarters, no ranger stations, no law enforcement at all in the area,” Gauntlett said in a 2016 interview with Mongabay. “It was literally the wild, wild west.”
Gauntlett spoke with the news outlet to celebrate the establishment of a new national park, which promised to protect more than a million acres of rainforest. I... Read more
