Protection came late and came on paper first. Sub-decree No. 74, signed on 9 May 2016, established the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary over 431,683 hectares reaching into Kampong Thom, Preah Vihear, Kratie and Stung Treng. What the boundary encloses is the flat, humid, tall-canopied forest type that once ran in a broad belt through the Mekong lowlands and now survives mostly in fragments: 50 threatened species live inside it, and 21 species there have been singled out as priorities for genetic conservation. Around 200,000 people live in the districts that ring the sanctuary. Another 700,000 live within ten kilometers of its edge, drawing water, medicine, building timber, food and tree resin from a landscape that has never been anyone's wilderness. It has always been somebody's pantry.

Most of the people in those surrounding districts are Kuy, an Indigenous group whose language belongs to the Katuic branch of the Austroasiatic family, alongside Bru and Ta-Oi. The 2019 census counted 70,302 Kuy in Cambodia, and only about a quarter of them reported fluency in their own language. Their history here is industrial as well as agricultural. The Kuy Dek - the iron Kuy - smelted ore in these territories from around AD 800, during the era of the Khmer empire, and archaeological evidence documents the practice across Kuy country. That tradition thinned under French colonial rule and had ended by the 1940s, undercut by imported Western metal. What continued was subtler and just as demanding: knowing where the resin trees stand, which ones can be tapped, and how long a family can live off one.

In 2007, nine years before the sanctuary legally existed, Kuy communities formed the Prey Lang Community Network to defend the forest themselves. Members walk it. They georeference stumps, photograph felled trunks and poaching camps, record forest condition, and upload the results, building an evidence base from inside a landscape that outside institutions rarely reach. The network has committed itself to non-violent action and to dialogue - with commune and district authorities, with NGOs, with research institutions - which is a considerably harder discipline than it sounds when you are standing beside a fresh stump. In 2015 the UN Development Programme's Equator Initiative named them a winner of the Equator Prize. Their own monitoring found that the protected area lost 56 square kilometers of forest in 2017 alone.

The patrols keep finding the same thing. Over July and August 2019, the Cambodian Youth Network covered 1,761 hectares in Stung Treng and Preah Vihear and reported several hundred hectares of dense evergreen forest already cleared, along with hundreds of trees marked in red paint for future felling and cutting lines pushed 200 to 500 meters into the canopy. "It wasn't usually the single trees being cut down," said CYN vice president Sar Mory, "but large areas had been cleared." Rosewood and construction timber are the prizes. Agribusiness plantations and mining concessions eat at the edges and, in places, at the core; new roads open ground for both; toxic runoff from mineral extraction reaches the waterways that downstream villages drink from. As many as 250,000 resin trees are estimated to have been lost to chainsaws - each one a household's income, taken by someone who will never meet the family.

Prey Lang has also acquired a second identity as a climate asset. The northern part of the landscape became an operational REDD+ project in 2018 under Japan's Joint Crediting Mechanism, implemented jointly by Conservation International's Cambodia programme, Cambodia's Ministry of Environment and the trading house Mitsui. Cambodia's safeguards reporting described 612,525 tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent credits generated through December 2023. That is Prey Lang expressed as a number that can be bought and sold. The Kuy account of the same forest is older and is not tradeable at all, and it remains the one that gets people to walk twenty kilometers with a phone in order to photograph a stump.