- Gerald “Gerry” Flynn is Mongabay’s features writer for Southeast Asia, reporting on the intersection of human rights, ecosystems and natural resource governance.
- In January 2025, Flynn was permanently banned from Cambodia in what appeared to be retaliation for his journalistic work; he is now based in Thailand and covers the Mekong region more broadly.
- He emphasizes that environmental journalism in authoritarian contexts must expose realities often omitted from state-controlled media.
- Flynn says he values on-the-ground reporting, amplifying local voices and balancing bravery with safety.
In a region where independent environmental journalism is often unwelcome, one Mongabay journalist has made a career of tackling often inconvenient truths while accepting personal risks as a necessary part of the work. Gerald “Gerry” Flynn has been based in Southeast Asia since 2017, reporting largely from Cambodia on the intersection of human rights, ecosystems and natural resource governance.
Flynn joined Mongabay as a features writer in 2023, following a Rainforest Investigations Network Fellowship with the Pulitzer Center from 2022 to 2023, during which he investigated illegal logging networks across Cambodia, with a focus on the Cardamom Mountains. Upon joining the team, he continued to investigate illegal logging, fishing, mining and land grabs. “These stories are what drew me to environmental journalism,” he says. “Getting on the ground, holding the powerful accountable, and giving voices to those who put their own lives and liberty on the line to protect their natural resources.”
However, in January 2025, Flynn was denied entry and banned from Cambodia, a move seemingly in retaliation for his reporting — a setback that only cemented his confidence in evidence-based reporting as fundamental for revealing infractions against nature in autocratic societies.
“The violence of the response to environmental reporting in authoritarian jurisdictions only serves to highlight the importance and value of dragging environmental crimes out of the shadows and into the cold, harsh light of public scrutiny,” he says.
Despite these pressures, Flynn has observed resilience among local communities who continue to resist political repression. “Even in the direst of situations I’ve covered, there is almost always someone, somewhere, standing up against the powers that seek to profit from the plundering of the environment.”
He acknowledges that his reporting means relaying the “doom and gloom” stories about the grim realities facing nature. But in a region where state-controlled media produce overwhelming positive propaganda, Flynn says he’s inspired to tell more of the full story. “I see my role a bit more as filling in the gaps — covering the environmental issues that aren’t being published in government-run outlets.”
In a career where risk is ubiquitous, Flynn recognizes that not all risks are worth taking. “Remember that you’re likely better to be the cause of informing people and inspiring change if you’re alive and free to write.”
What follows is a conversation with Flynn about his career at Mongabay, including the stories he’s proudest of, and his commitment to covering the complex ties between human rights and the environment in Southeast Asia. This interview is part of Inside Mongabay, a series that spotlights the people who bring environmental and conservation stories to life across our global newsroom.
An interview with Gerry Flynn
Mongabay: What inspired your interest in the work you do for Mongabay?
Gerald Flynn: Much of my earlier reporting focused more broadly on human rights, democracy and corruption in Cambodia, but very quickly, land rights became a prominent issue that I found myself dealing with. This swiftly led to environmental investigations and the depressing realization that continued degradation of ecosystems is leading to an exponential perpetuation of rights abuses across the region. I’ve always liked the outdoors, and I hope those among the generations to come will be able to do so without fear of arrest.
There is a heavy reliance on natural resources across the Mekong region. The fates of of millions are tied to those of the region’s remaining rainforests, its rivers and the land, so for me, it felt as though there were few more urgent topics to bring global attention to than the myriad environmental issues that are shaping the lives of people across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
Mongabay: How does the region you work on shape the way you report on environmental issues?
Gerald Flynn: I think in mainland Southeast Asia, specifically the Greater Mekong subregion where I work, we’re seeing just how wide the gulf is between policies and practice, laws and law enforcement — and more often than not, it’s local communities who pay the price for this mismanagement of natural resources.
But one of the more defining issues that is inherent to most parts of the Mekong region is the absence or curtailing of press freedoms. This typically means that there’s a lot less information out there to begin with, whether that’s existing reporting or data that is often public elsewhere, so it means having to go a bit more DIY. We’ve often had to build our own data sets or build on data sets that we have found but that are out of date. So it’s been good in the sense that it’s forced me to learn new skills, particularly when it comes to handling geospatial data, but it’s a constant struggle just to get any word out of the governments in the region who often display an allergy to transparency.
That can make reporting trips that, in other countries, would be relatively low risk, that much trickier to pull off, because you have to factor in variables that wouldn’t be an issue elsewhere. But this too ends up as helpful training, because you learn how to work around the thorns of any given regime and establish protocols for certain situations that you run into. It’s not just about figuring out what risks you’re willing to stomach to get the story out and whether the risks are worth the reward, but figuring out how to take those risks as responsibly as possible — working out in advance what your escape routes are, what time of day is going to be the best way to do it, if you’re working as a reporting team, who is best placed to do what, etc. — so the local context in which you’re working is key to knowing how to report on issues there.
Sometimes though, these hardline approaches to press freedoms that we see in more authoritarian parts of the world can be helpful. In Cambodia, for example, there’s an incredible level of solidarity among the remaining journalists and I think it ends up making reporting in these environments more of a team effort. People are much more willing to help others out with things rather than necessarily viewing one another as competitors, which is rare in journalism.
Mongabay: What project are you most proud of and why?
Gerald Flynn: Personally, one of the stories I’m most proud of is our 2023 investigation into a massive legalized logging operation that we uncovered in the northeastern Cambodian province of Stung Treng, one of my favorite parts of the country. It’s a beautiful sleepy province near the Laotian border; the 3S Rivers (the Sesan, Srepok and Sekong rivers) all flow through the town into the Mekong River, and there’s dense forest and mountains still left relatively untouched.
That’s partly what made this logging operation so egregious; it was eating into old-growth primary forest that had been left undisturbed for countless years. The Ministry of Environment was in the process of registering it as a new national park when a private company was granted nearly 6,000 hectares (nearly 15,000 acres) of forest as a land concession. There were no public plans announced by the company or the government, no clear idea of what would happen to this forest or why it was being cleared, but it took us months to get to the bottom of it all.
We were monitoring the company’s concession almost daily via satellite imagery, watching in real-time as logging roads were being carved out from inside the concession, way out into the forest that the company hadn’t been given a license to log. Through fieldwork investigations, we were able to determine that the company was logging outside of its concession, laundering and processing the timber at sawmills inside the concession, and then shipping it out in trucks across the Sekong River by ferry before the trucks delivered it across Cambodia, mostly to the capital, Phnom Penh. We were able to follow these trucks across the country, tracking them to warehouses, but there are no publicly available cadastral records in Cambodia, so we weren’t able to establish who owns the warehouses.
However, we were able to follow an immensely complicated ownership network through what little data the Ministry of Commerce does make public and then through social media. We must have spent hundreds of hours combing through Facebook accounts, identifying people connected to the company and establishing who they were. In the end, we managed to ascertain that the man at the head of this logging operation was a high-ranking civil servant, a former general in the Cambodian military and a ruling party political operative who frequently made trips to the United States to promote the party’s interests among the Cambodian diaspora. In other words, he’s an extremely well-connected man within Cambodia’s upper echelons of power.
We were able to really map out this guy’s life: from his rather gaudy luxury wooden home in Phnom Penh, to his business networks done through companies registered in his wife’s name, and essentially we were able to show that this senior official had, for a long time, been involved in Cambodia’s timber trade, much of which is illicit.
But to pull this off, our fieldwork meant partnering with local activists, traveling by car until we needed to switch out onto motorbikes to get deeper into the jungle, and then switch again onto boats to be able to fly drones over the logging operations. It was a great marriage of boots-on-the-ground reporting and open-source intelligence methodologies to really tie the whole story together.
We know that this story made its way to the then-prime minister’s desk, because there were swift denials of any connections between the man running the logging operation and the man running the country. It didn’t stop the logging, though. One local journalist who reported on our reporting was jailed for incitement. Many of the activists who helped us to report on this story have since been threatened into exile. I myself have since been banned from Cambodia, but I think the violence of the response to environmental reporting in authoritarian jurisdictions only serves to highlight the importance and value of dragging environmental crimes out of the shadows and into the cold, harsh light of public scrutiny.
Mongabay: What do you most enjoy about your work?
Gerald Flynn: I enjoy the adventure. The occasional element of danger is always a joy (until it isn’t), but I far prefer the human elements of it. Through journalism I’ve had the joys and terrors of meeting people I’d have had no right to meet whatsoever otherwise. It’s fascinating to find so many people, often living in repressive societies, who are willing to speak out and hold power accountable for the destruction of shared natural resources.
There are few jobs in this world that let you explore other people’s lives so intimately, and so while it’s fun trekking through jungles or hurtling down dirt tracks on decrepit old motorbikes, I think the most rewarding and often humbling element of journalism is when you spend a few days with a source. You get to learn what daily reality is like for someone you’d likely never have met in any other circumstances. At a time when it’s very easy to be disconnected — perhaps ironically as a result of the social media platforms that promised to connect us all — it’s good to be able to spend some time in another person’s shoes to understand how these abstract issues have very real consequences for very real people.
One of the best cases I’ve experienced in relation to this was while we were filming our documentary on illegal fishing and coastal land grabs for Mongabay. We spent a lot of time with our sources for this. It’s one thing to see the cost of government policies in data or via satellite imagery. It’s another altogether to see the impacts such policies have on ordinary people up close and personal. This is why I always advocate for field reporting; I think it’s so much easier to tell a story when you can be there, on the ground, with the people affected.
Mongabay: What do you do when people say that environmental reporting is always “doom and gloom”?
Gerald Flynn: It’s true that I rarely get to report good news from Cambodia, but that doesn’t mean that, amid the grim realities we uncover in our stories, there aren’t flickers of hope. Even in the direst of situations I’ve covered, there is almost always someone, somewhere, standing up against the powers that seek to profit from the plundering of the environment. There’s even a small joy in finding the weaknesses in the networks that orchestrate this destruction — this can, in the right circumstances, lead to greater transparency and accountability. And so, while the news is often bad, there is always something good to look for — if you know how to look.
In the more authoritarian parts of the world, the state will have stenographers and propagandists in place who are able to focus on the good news, so I see my role a bit more as filling in the gaps — covering the environmental issues that aren’t being published in government-run outlets. And so in that case, there’s always going to be a slight skew toward the mad, bad and depressing to read, but I do think it’s important that people are able to access information that highlights the true cost of things — whether that be governmental agricultural policy or the sourcing for electric vehicle components. There may be a lot of “doom and gloom,” but in reality, that’s just the price tag of the way that we collectively live as a species. And given the rapid rate at which the climate crisis is intensifying, I think we have be more able to look at that price tag and ask whether it’s worth it.
Mongabay: What is one of your favorite stories you’ve written for Mongabay, and why?
Gerald Flynn: This two-punch combo of stories on illegal logging in Cambodia’s Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary and Chhaeb-Preah Roka Wildlife Sanctuary remains a highlight from my journalistic career, not least because we were able to produce hard-to-deny evidence of criminality, but also because we got to experience firsthand, and then convey to our readers, just how dangerous environmental activism is in Cambodia.
We witnessed exactly how forest defenders are treated by Cambodian authorities and the risks they take to expose bad-faith actors that are illegally extirpating what remains of the country’s forests.
To me, these stories are what drew me to environmental journalism — getting on the ground, holding the powerful accountable, and giving voices to those who put their own lives and liberty on the line to protect their natural resources.
Mongabay: What are three interesting takeaways from these stories?
Gerald Flynn: A big takeaway was the importance of corroborating satellite data with on-the-ground reporting, because while platforms like Global Forest Watch offer invaluable data insights, the situation on the ground was much more different and we were better able to understand routes that loggers had taken through forests to illegally harvest high-value timber, which wasn’t immediately clear from satellite imagery.
Another learning we took from these stories was the complicity of Cambodian officials, which was always — at some level — assumed, but with little idea as to the extent or how it worked. But during our interview with the director of a company hounded by allegations of illegal logging, he complained of having to pay bribes to officials at many different levels just to be able to operate. We also saw firsthand how government rangers were able to rapidly track our reporting team down in the jungle, yet seemed incapable of preventing loggers from coming and going as they pleased.
Lastly, I think we were able to put together a more nuts-and-bolts view of how the illicit timber trade works in Cambodia, which has one of the highest rates of deforestation in Southeast Asia. It took a very holistic approach to put the stories together, from multiple field reporting trips, extensive satellite imagery analysis, as well as combing through government databases, social media and other online resources to piece together this investigation.
Mongabay: Do you have a behind-the-scenes moment that stands out from working on these stories?
Gerald Flynn: The trips we did for these stories were rollercoasters — from getting urinated on by a bug with corrosive urine, to creeping through the jungle as quietly as possible to evade government rangers. It was a wild one.
The homemade tractor-trailer that we rode into the jungle would frequently hit ruts in the muddy logging routes and tip us out, at one point nearly crushing me. Eventually getting frog-marched out of the jungle at gunpoint by government rangers was grim, but while it was a hairy few hours, it also served as a learning experience: these were the brutal realities that many forest defenders face regularly, so, as ugly as it was, I’m glad we got to see it up close and personal.
Mongabay: What advice would you give to someone following your footsteps?
Gerald Flynn: I recently heard a far more experienced journalist say that the situation for environmental reporting had become so urgent that it was necessary for journalists to “put their bodies on the line.” And while I agree to some degree with this, I guess my advice would be to remember that you’re likely better to be the cause of informing people and inspiring change if you’re alive and free to write. So while we need to be brave in holding the powerful to account, we need to be smart too. That’s something I wish someone had told me before I started covering the climate crisis and its many sprawling tentacles.
Besides that, though, I think if you’re reporting from another country, you should do your best to learn the language — not just because it’s a polite thing to do, but because it’ll open doors and help foster trust among sources, local journalists and other people who you’ll want to interact with. Local expertise is invaluable, and so this really needs to be factored in when planning a reporting trip, especially if there’s an element of risk to it. I’m very grateful to Mongabay for having a relatively robust set of procedures in place that force you to think very hard about the possible outcomes and risks, the potential mitigation methods and the emergency protocols.
But mostly, I’d advocate for reading as much as you can on a topic, especially if it’s a new one for you. I’m often guilty of overreporting and sometimes that can slow things down when you’ve got your head buried in reports from 10+ years ago, but often I find that you’ll be much better prepared to tackle a topic if you’ve got your head around the historical context of it. People always say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but if you haven’t done your homework on a topic ahead of an interview, you’ll quite quickly establish that there are at least questions that can make you feel stupid.
Banner image: Gerald Flynn’s first reporting trip outside of the Cambodian capital took him to Banteay Meanchey province, in the country’s northwest, near the Thai border, in 2020 to report on the impact of climate change on livelihoods. Image courtesy of Pann Bony.
Credits
