Himalayas in crisis? Or not? Environment & People
Trip Start
Jan 30, 2007
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Trip End
Dec 31, 2011
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Nepal,
Nepal
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The Hengduan mountain range, a recently uplifted south-eastern extension of the Himalaya, occupies an area the size of France. The mountain range is cut up as if a chef had run a knife through bread dough. Four incisions are the four great rivers of Asia - the Yangtze, the Irrawaddy, the Salween and the Mekong. The rivers lie at the bottom of deep gorges, flanked by steep-sides mountains. This is an area of melting glaciers, and the region is prone to violent weather events, earthquakes, erosion, flooding, rockfalls, snow storms, rain storms, landslides, silting - and debate.
In a short distance, the terrain ranges from 7000m peaks of limestone and marble down to sub-tropical bamboo forests and barren rock deserts. In a tourism operators dream, your clients could be enjoying eating bananas overlooking rice paddies at breakfast, lunch at an alpine meadow, and then play in snow before the sun goes down - all within 10km distance.
The forests grow up to 3,900m high, and one of the river gorges drops away 3,700m. In this diverse landscape, there are hundreds of species of plants and animals yet to be 'discovered'. The biodiversity rivals the Amazon. And the people inhabiting these mountains and valleys are a patchwork of nationalities - ethnic minorities and hilltribes - who know the forests of pine, rhododendron, and shrub oak.
from Justin's seminar - deforestation
Who know the names of palm trees, have stories about the snowy peaks and who frequent the alpine meadows and hanging valleys. While the tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, deer and even pheasants may have had their habitats destroyed or been hunted to extinction, it is too simplistic to blame the mountain-dwellers - or conversely, paint them as 'noble savages' who lived in harmony with their world.
Because the reality as any visitor to this region can see, is that large parts of this environment have been damaged, whether by population pressure, subsistence farming, or the influx of Han Chinese hungry for resources to fuel fast-growing China.
A book I've been reading goes to great lengths to challenge the notion that the Himalayas - including the Hengduan range as an eastern extension of the mighty mountain chain - is facing imminent environmental crisis. 'Himalayan perceptions: environment change and the well-being of mountain peoples' by Jack D. Ives is something of a textbook in hardback. It is quite comprehensive and follows up from his work initially in Nepal and then with a bloke Messerli.
Unfortunately it does rather labour its point. Which is that the super-crisis in the Himalayas isn't such a big deal after all.
You see, according to the author, there was this concern in the 1980s and 1990s about the Himalayas in some great crisis (think Amazonian rainforests disappearing). Ives believes this theory of Himalayan environment degradation, favoured by NGOs and environmental groups, is not founded on any science. The theory has been extrapolated into a neaty-packaged media disaster scenario, as Ives calls it. "Television viewers, with striking regularity, are assailed with dramatic visions of deforestation, landsliding, and large-scale downstream flooding, coupled with statements about uncontrolled population growth, increasing poverty, and malnutrition."
The most dramatic part of this scenario involves the glacial lakes melting, leading to massive flooding downstream. The people living in the mountains are often held to blame - farmers mainly, who Ives believes are victims of the Western conservation ethic. He believes in reality mountain dwelling farmers have less impact on forest and flooding on the plains than they are held responsible for, and blames instead Westerner environmental alarmists and the media for hyping up the situation. For centuries, Ives says, the inaccessible remote forgotten and forbidden kingdoms have been the focus for Western myth and have inspired speculation. The West imposed its cartography and its politics on the region and harboured fantasies about its sacred peaks and hidden valleys. The Himalayas at 2,500km long, were the largest and highest mountain range, holding the southern-most glaciers in Eurasia and the headwaters of vital waterways supporting millions downstream.
So when China opened up in the 1980s after three decades of Communist rule, there was concern that since 1950 there had been massive deforestation. What Ives found was widespread forest clearance, but also rapid revegetation. In some places, mature seeding trees were kept to help the process.
Using photos taken in north-west Yunnan by Austrian-American Joseph Rock in the 1920s and 1930s, Ives compared these with the landscape in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the recent population growth and growing demand for resources, the results were patchy. And interestingly, compared with 70 years ago or more, some areas had more forest cover, others had been over-cut and some areas supported the same vegetation. The research went some way in dispelling the notion that the Chinese had ravaged the forests, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.
The results were also supported by stories by local people about the felling of forests and the vegetation cover over time. But as Ives notes, early Western visitors to Lijiang in the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the roads full of heavily laden logging trucks. All that pretty much came to an end when the government banned logging along the Yangtze river and its catchment, following heavy floods downstream in 1998.
Ives is scathing on those who've predicted environment collapse, and he also suggests the Chinese government are also guilty of subscribing to the environmental degradation theory, by banning logging in 1999, citing the downstream silting and flooding as the consequences.
Throughout the book is the sense that Ives feels the local people - mainly ethnic minorities - have been maligned and continue to be marginalized. So after the government banned logging, tourism was encouraged. In the early days there were few tourists and they were mainly Westerners off the hippie trail and interested in peoples and cultures. Those tourists wanted the place 'as is' with local people, untouched landscapes, traditional cultures, and pristine nature. Such low-impact tourism would create jobs for local people and provide an outlet for local crafts. Early tourism was like Kathmandu in the 1970s, man.
But despite the opening up politically (many areas around Lijiang were off-bounds for foreigners), and easier access with improved roads, new airports and investment in tourist infrastructure, Ives laments the passing of an opportunity. Lijiang and north-west Yunnan had the opportunity to be like Bhutan - a high-value, top-rated tourist destination for individual and small group tourists, who wanted authenticity and wanted to stay with locals and support family-run businesses. Ives reckons there isn't much of a gap between the needs of the traditional religious pilgrim and the eco-traveller or mountaineer.
But instead, appropriate tourism has given way to mass-tourism. And now domestic - middle-class Chinese from coastal polluted cities - account for 95% or more of the tourists - foreigners are a small minority. It is actively encouraged by the local government. And as he points out, it hasn't benefited locals - they aren't more self-reliant, or independent. Most aren't wealthier. And the cost to the environment has been high.
While I can't find the firm figures, tourist numbers to Lijiang could be anything from 3 million to 11 million (by comparison New Zealand gets 3-4 million a year). Ives cites the poor Tibetan village moved for the highest and longest golf course in the world, the cablecars which take affluent Asians up Jade Snow Dragon mountain, displacing the local Yi people who used to take visitors up to meadows on horseback.
Ives is annoyed at how lowlanders have come in and imposed their ways on local people. In Lijiang town itself he notes how local Naxi have moved out of the old town to make way for money-hungry Chinese from other parts of the Motherland. There has been a loss of authenticity and few locals have benefited.
While Ives points out that the forest destruction during the closed period of Communist China wasn't as bad as first thought, there's a danger that he gives the signal that everything is OK up in the hills and mountains. Because as a resident here in Lijiang, someone who has trekked around quite a bit of the area over the last 10 years, most places I see on-going environmental destruction. Old slow-growing trees are still cut down. Most water courses are polluted. Lakes are getting choked with weeds. Tourist developments are damaged their surroundings. Even the Jade Snow Dragon mountain is loosing its snow, and the demands of growing Lijiang for water means an internationally protected wetland and lake will be turned into a water storage reservoir.
As one critic of Ives points out, there is a danger that if you say things aren't too bad, or if you push too much your theory to counter another theory, that it provides the go-ahead for the on-going damage to the environment. Another researcher, Justin Zackey from UCLA Berkeley recently found that despite conservation edicts, peasants were cashing in on trees, due to their relative poverty and also their social discontent (and I suggest, from their alienation from the benefits of development and tourism in nearby Lijiang). In "Peasant Perspectives on Deforestation in Southwest China: Social Discontent and Environmental Mismanagement" he writes that a sense of "relative deprivation" amongst China's rural poor has encouraged poor environmental management. "Peasants justify illegal tree cutting by pointing to China's rapidly increasing inequalities, their lack of economic opportunity, and the absence of economic support from the (corrupt) government."
One thing I found a little strange about Himalayan Perceptions is that despite saying he was going to dismiss the Himalayan Degradation Theory, apart from the odd case study, it is a bit light on facts and research. A bit like a dog that is getting angry and barking, but not biting.
One review praising the book was written by a fellow researcher. When the book first came out it seemed like it was helping to alieviate the poverty of one person - it sold for $200!
And here's what another reviewer said:
I've been reading Jack Ives' latest book, Himalayan Perceptions and have found it both illuminating and disturbing. He seems to have picked up where he and Messerli left off in 1989 with that other seminal work, Himalayan Dilemma. As such, Ives' pummeling of what he has termed the "Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation" has gone on for 15 years. He has expended enormous effort at debunking the pernicious belief that the Himalayas are experiencing an environmental super crisis and that mountain farmers are mainly at fault. Furthermore, he has taken up the cause of indigenous mountain people who have often been negatively impacted by the Western conservation ethic as applied in many parts of the Himalayas.
While I agree with much of his arguments over the simplistic and prejudicial views that have been perpetuated since the 1970s, I can't help but think he may be beating a dead horse, or at least engaging in a debate that has long receded into history. His main point that mountain farmers have had far less impact on mountain forests and that even "deforestation" in the hills has played virtually no role in the periodic flooding of the plains, has been well understood in informed circles, even if it has not been taken to heart by more sensational green journalism. Today, few would dare accuse mountain people for wrecking their own commons. However, by overselling the point, Ives may risk aiding and abetting the worst exploiters of the mountains who are wreaking havoc on both the geology and ecology of the region. Due to the political embeddeness of scholarship in the region, environmental skeptics may read into his own skepticism a reason to dither and delay action. While it's vital not to blame the victims of social and environmental injustice, but by subordinating the dramatic changes that are happening due to increased natural resource extraction, urbanization, and tourism, is potentially dangerous. Ives does go through numerous case studies and outlines important caveats, but the overall tone leaves the impression that these are not as serious as the goal of debunking THED.
Interestingly, several statements in the book seem to valorize forests only for their aesthetic value and their role as a source of forest products for local communities. This limited anthropocentric view actually explains a lot. That the forests could also be important habitat for animals in the region is not mentioned at all. This omission becomes quite glaring when its pops up repeatedly throughout the text.
Also, while recognizing overgeneralizations, Ives does not discuss in great detail how THED might actually apply in certain regions.
http://blog.prayaga.org/?p=165
