June 15, 2026
The following piece is a guest post by Pianporn Deetes, Executive Director of Rivers and Rights.
For six days, I walked alongside monks, Indigenous communities, women, youth, artists, and river defenders along the Kok River, a tributary of the Mekong in northern Thailand near the borders of Myanmar and Laos.
We carried out this Peace Walk because people are afraid of what is happening to the rivers that have sustained them for generations.
Along the Kok, Sai, Ruak, Mekong, Salween, and Kraburi rivers, communities depend on these waterways for drinking water, fisheries, agriculture, transportation, and cultural identity. Rivers are not simply part of the landscape here. They are the foundation of life.
Today, many people no longer trust, or even touch, the rivers that raised them.
Over the past year, Thai authorities and independent researchers have repeatedly detected arsenic and other toxic heavy metals in rivers flowing from neighboring countries. Scientists have found contamination in water, sediments, and aquatic ecosystems. Communities report declining fisheries, unusual fish deformities, and growing anxiety about long-term health impacts.
What makes this crisis particularly painful is that the source lies largely beyond the reach of the communities who suffer from it.
Across the border, in conflict-affected areas of Myanmar, unregulated—and mostly illegal—mining for rare earth elements, gold, tin, tungsten, and other critical minerals is expanding rapidly. The minerals extracted there enter global supply chains that feed the world’s appetite for electric vehicles, wind turbines, batteries, data centers, defense technologies, and consumer electronics.
In other words, the contamination of our rivers is connected to the global race for a green future. This is the contradiction we need to talk about.
The world is rightly moving away from fossil fuels. Renewable energy is essential. Decarbonization is necessary. But, if the transition to clean energy depends on poisoned rivers, devastated ecosystems, and communities living with toxic contamination, this is not acceptable.
Too often, discussions about critical minerals focus on supply security, market access, geopolitical competition, and industrial policy. Communities living at the extraction frontier are almost invisible in these conversations. Yet they are the ones carrying the costs.
The contamination now spreading through these rivers is not simply an environmental problem. It is a warning about what happens when the demand for critical minerals outpaces governance, accountability, and environmental protection. It is also a warning about sacrifice zones.
We do not reject the urgent necessity of the transition to renewable energy. However, we cannot accept a transition that requires some communities to lose their rivers, food, health, and the future of their children in exchange for sustainability in another part of the world. If the world needs renewable energy, then the world must also take responsibility for the impacts arising from the extraction of minerals used to produce that energy.
Tuenjai Deetes, a Goldman Prize recipient from Thailand in 1994 and also my mother, often reminds us that this is not only an environmental issue but also a business and human rights issue.
“A truly green transition cannot be achieved by violating human rights or destroying the environment somewhere else,” Tuenjai asserts. “Businesses that benefit from critical minerals must be accountable for the impacts throughout their supply chains.”
For decades, Goldman Environmental Prize winners have challenged the idea that vulnerable communities should bear the environmental costs of development. Today, that struggle is re-emerging in a new form through the global extraction of critical minerals.
This month, Tuenjai, joined another Goldman Prize winner, Niwat Roykaew, to make a stand against this growing disaster. Niwat received the Prize in 2022 for his successful campaign to protect the Mekong River from destructive rapids blasting and river channelization projects.
The two leaders, representing different generations and different ideas, stood together with affected communities and joined the Peace Walk to confront a common challenge: how to ensure that solutions to one global crisis do not create another.
Niwat often says that those profiting from rare earths and critical minerals claim that they are building the future. “But, in the process,” he reminds us, “they are destroying the world.”
His words resonate far beyond Southeast Asia. This is not merely a Thai or Burmese issue. It is a global supply-chain issue.
The minerals extracted from conflict zones and environmentally fragile regions do not remain there. They move through international markets. They become components in products sold worldwide. Investors profit. Manufacturers profit.
Meanwhile, the environmental and social costs remain concentrated in communities that have little voice in decisions that affect their future.
This imbalance must change.
Governments need stronger mechanisms to address transboundary environmental harm. Companies must be required to trace the origins of critical minerals and conduct meaningful environmental and human rights due diligence. Investors must stop treating environmental destruction as an acceptable externality. International institutions must establish stronger standards for responsible extraction.
Most importantly, communities on the front lines must be heard.
On World Environment Day, on June 5, the Peace Walk concluded in Chiang Rai, where community representatives submitted recommendations to the Thai government calling for stronger action, international cooperation, long-term monitoring, and cross-border accountability. They also called on governments, investors, and companies benefiting from the critical minerals supply chain to recognize the impacts.
The future of clean energy cannot be built on poisoned rivers and lands. And no river should have to die for that future.
Top: Participants in the Peace Walk walked through farmland, much of it contaminated from the unregulated mines (Photo: Rivers and Rights)
About the author
Pianporn (Pai) Deetes
Executive Director of Rivers and Rights
For more than two decades, Pai has been at the forefront of campaigns to defend transboundary rivers—particularly the Mekong and Salween—and the rights and livelihoods of riparian communities who depend on them. Before co-founding Rivers and Rights, Pai served as the Southeast Asia campaigns director for International Rivers, where she led cross-border advocacy on transboundary water governance, accountability, and community participation in natural resources.
