ANGKOR and I

127/194

121 I have the feeling Cambodia teems with the joy of life. This is due to the fact that such joy infuses the hearts of people, their original mode of thinking works soundly, they lead lives face-to-face with the vastness of nature, and the experience of contentment in their everyday living is taken for granted. The temple is where the hearts of the villagers lie, and through it they attain peace of mind. Environmental Education in Japan that Averted an Ecological Crisis Aside from city suburbs Cambodia until now has been blessed with a natural environment, and household waste had been disposed of unnoticed in large fields. In the vicinity of the Angkor ruins lie 24 villages inhabited by around 24,000 people, who make a living from agriculture. Even so however, an environmental crisis assailed the Angkor ruins. In 2003 the number of foreign tourists visiting the Angkor ruins was in excess of about 530,000, in 2017 it surpassed around 5 million, and this big tourism boom continues currently as well. Tourism is a valuable source of foreign capital for Cambodia, and at the same time it is a show window displaying the nation’s political stability to the international community. After the civil war, when the Kingdom of Cambodia had revived and peace was established in 1993, the number of tourists promptly increased. Tourists from all over the world arrived in vast numbers to see Angkor Wat, which had been barred to them for about 23 years. However in the 2000s, with the rapid increase in tourists, the garbage problem attained serious proportions. Due to discarded cans, bottles, PET bottles and so on the area of the ruins became filled with piles of debris, and the removal of these colossal amounts of trash outdid the limits of the cleaning activities that were being undertaken by student volunteers. In addition to this, air pollution by vehicles, river water pollution due to untreated sewage, rapidly increasing hotel construction, destruction of natural forests due to the expansion of parking lots, the