A False Harmonising of Himalayan Experience

Social vulnerability, rather than ecological vulnerability, has been the primary driver of environmental change in the Himalaya.

Saving the Himalaya

by Derek Denniston

World Watch magazine

Washington DC

November/December 1993

Following in the footsteps of Erik Eckholm, the well-known promulgator of the Himalayan environmental crisis back in 1976, here we have another Worldwatch Institute babu drawing our attention once again to the urgency of attending to the troubled Himalayan ecology. This time around, Derek Denniston aims to undo the pervasive invisibility of the mountain problem in the international arena.

By vividly portraying environmental degradation's challenge to mountain livelihoods, Denniston encourages readers to envelop the ecologically vulnerable Himalaya within the "protective embrace of their consciousness." He starts off by deflating the old Western canon which portrays the Himalaya as a solid, rugged and impenetrable barrier, the mythical abode of deities which could only be reached through the arduous efforts of mountaineers and pilgrims. Instead, the writer stresses the geological youth and instability of the Himalaya, as well as its extraordinary ecological fecundity and cultural diversity.

Denniston's central mission, however, is to plot the dangerous trajectory currently being followed whereby the "ancient balance" between nature and people has been broken through the encounter with modernisation, which is inevitably leading to degradation. In doing so, he takes up the more recent and fashionable canon, popularised by Eckholm, whose story line has been, ironically, rather simple for a region so diverse.

The ingredients of what came to be known as the Himalayan Degradation Theory story are well-known: a growing population on a fragile ecological base will inevitably slide down the slope of poverty. Overlay this with the entry of roads and the colonial intrusion of commercial influences, and the pressure on the ecosystem is accentuated. While Eckholm's reports focused largely on India and Nepal, Denniston's distant gaze has been moulded by the broader ambit of the work of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which was set up in 1983. Denniston tries to show us the similarity of survival strategies across the full panorama of Himalayan terrain, from the Afghanistan Hindu Kush to the Chinese Hengduan mountains.

A Distant Gaze

The researcher's grasp of regional environmental change has been mainly compiled from his encounters with various researchers and non-governmental spokespersons familiar with the Himalayan predicament. While the 'indigenous' flavour of most of his sources would therefore appear to lend greater credibility to the scenario he builds, it is evident that Denniston lacks a more detailed familiarity with the landscape's character. This has largely prevented him from putting together a more rooted and nuanced presentation of the collected pieces of regional experience.

For a start, Denniston's analysis is quite brittle because he rests his case for a Himalayan problem on the ecological vulnerability which is said to exist throughout the Himalayan bloc. Yet nowhere does he explain what he means by this "ecological vulnerability". Is it simply correlated with the mountains' geological instability and youth? How is it that such a biologically diverse place becomes so fragile?

Certainly, it is quite clear that the sheer incline of the slopes in some parts the mountains pose considerable difficulty for farmers. But the tendency to see all Himalayan zones as singularly fragile is misplaced. The challenge of deforested hills to the agro-pastoralists in the Middle Hills around Kathmandu is quite different from the relative ease with which nomads are able to pursue their pastoral lifestyles in the rolling grasslands of western Tibet.

With his eyes placed squarely on the ecological basis of mountain livelihoods, the writer ends up neglecting the combination of socio-political conditions which make social vulnerability, and not ecological vulnerability, the primary driver of environmental change. An understanding of how subsistence farmers are designing new livelihood strategies for dealing with such two-edged swords as improved accessibility and commercial opportunities can be better reached through a more substantial grappling with national and regional political themes.

This political dimension, largely absent in Denniston's account, is already present in the literature. It has been popularised by political ecologists such as Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, who in their study of the Himalayan condition have pointed to the importance of identifying the "chains of explanation" which nest the farmer's decision within the broader political economic context. Also, Denniston bypasses the important work of key researchers such as Deepak Bajracharya, T.B.S.Mahat, D.M.Griffin, K.R.Shepherd and Narayan Khadka, all of whom have highlighted how government policies on land, forests and food supply have played a major role in moulding the politics of natural resource use patterns.

Generalisations

If social vulnerability is going to take on a larger part of the Himalayan Degradation Theory, then Denniston will also need to amend his portrayal of "Himalayans" as a singular species of subsistence farmers carved out of hardy and indigenous agrarian material. Somehow, for him, the changing state of livelihood strategies and responses of these mountain villagers, a culturally diverse lot, can be predicted in a unilinear response graph.

Such a position stands in contradiction to Denniston taking at face value the romantic beliefs of environmentalists like Anil Agarwal of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, who is quoted as saying that the region's "cultural diversity is not a historical accident", but rather "the direct outcome of the local people learning to live in harmony with the region's extraordinary biological diversity". The naivete of environmental determinism which binds nature and society together in such a tight causal manner went out in the social sciences quite some time ago. The lesson to be gained for those who study the Himalaya and its people is that we need to recognise how the region's complex sociopolitical history has contributed to its rich cultural constitution.

The evidence Denniston uses in demonstrating how subsistence farmers are battling with the nature of ecological fragility allows him to make some elementary mistakes. For example, the difficulties of firewood collection, a key facet of the Middle Hills experience, is mistakenly translocated to the arid Tibetan plateau. Denniston is misinformed when he states that nomads in this region "travel with a small herd of yaks for seven to eight days to collect several weeks' worth of firewood." Dung, not wood, is the main source of fuel there.

Part of the same thinking method permits the writer to prolong the myth that population growth invariably contributes to accelerating environmental degradation throughout the Himalayan range. This statement can no longer remain unquestioned, especially after a whole series of research has contradicted such simple logic. For the Middle Hills of Nepal, certainly, we find that the relationship needs careful examination. Jefferson Fox's study of Nepal's Bhogteni village over the period 1980 to 1990, for one, shows that the forests were in a better condition ten years later despite an annual population growth rate of 2.5 percent.

Overall, Denniston lets himself get caught up with events which although of central importance to parts of the Himalaya most affected byroads or urban markets, are not key signifiers of all village experience. The bald declaration that "mountain villagers developed dependence on mass-produced goods from the south", or that "apple orchards…now cling to marginal hillsides from the Thimphu district of Bhutan to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan" give a false impression of the extent to which modernisation bears upon village life.

In those areas which have come under the 'development' umbrella's closer care, such sectors as tourism, education and health have probably been more keenly impressive in guiding the direction of 'progress'. Quite simply, the region's experience are somewhat more diverse than is made out, very often due to the very different role government plays in the various Himalayan countries. There has not been .the same "downhill migration" everywhere: farmers in the Hengduan mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan have largely stayed put while those in parts of Nepal and Uttarakhand have descended to the plains.

The driving forces behind deforestation also vary, as Denniston does point out. Commercial logging is the central culprit in China, Himachal Pradesh or the Tarai, whereas it is household use which has played a larger role in much of the Nepali hills. For that matter, we have also not witnessed the emergence of soda] movements such as the Indian Chipko in other parts of the Himalaya.

Bioregionalism

What type of Himalayan panacea, then, is required to "Save the Himalaya", that overused activist slogan which the editors of Worldwatch have also fallen for? Denniston recommends "a Himalayan-wide initiative to return local forests to the collective ownership of villagers would give them the direct incentive they need to sustain this natural wealth." While there is no doubt that the recent decentralisation of forest management in Nepal has provided village communities with greater incentives to improve their forest quality, the enhanced zest with which Denniston can claim "now that villagers again have common ownership of their forests, degradation through excessive grazing, clearing of farmlands, and harvesting fuelwood has virtually ceased" weakens the credence of his policy suggestions. If Denniston had carried out a more politically contextualised analysis, it would have been less easy for him to so assertively put forward the straightforward populist plea for "a bioregional strategy for the entire range". His prescription lacks a recognition of the enabling role that the State can potentially play. How will farmers in the plains be able to communicate their concerns to communities upstream. How can a bioregional strategy emerge without coordination at a higher level beyond the villager or valley? And other than the fact that the plea for a "bioregional strategy" seems rather naive, it is unclear what he really means by the word "bioregional". Does this involve a regional approach? Or, is it one which sees the bioregion as one within which one type of ecosystem exists? If the latter is the case, then clearly we are left with this deep-rooted problem of how we define the ecological character of the entire Himalayan range? Is it one bioregion, or need we become more sensitive to the differing nature of ecologies from locality to locality?

In sum, one wonders if distance prevents these Washington babus from really discriminating between the types of signals being emitted from the Himalaya? Is there a political economy of knowledge whose rippling structure only manages to transmit the stable image of the Himalayan fragility, and not the fluctuating vagaries of political lives in the region? Denniston might take a lead from the incongruous illustration accompanying the article, where the mountains are being dunked with chopsticks into some sort of Chinese dip, and attempt to submerge himself more fully in Himalayan histories, in all their diversity.

The sculpting of the Himalayan image and the portrayal of its woes could have been done more artfully. Denniston's cover feature — which one expects will also appear as a World watch monograph before long — is only the latest in a long line of research works that have over-simplified and over-generalised the Himalaya. What has been said here will apply to numerous others who have written similarly in the past, and doubtless will in the future as well.

N.J.Jhaveri is a doctoral student in geography at Clark University, Massachusetts, and is specialising on the common property resource management systems in the Hengduan mountains.