Stress, strain and insults

Philosophers say that change is inevitable and inexorable; that "old order changeth yielding place to new". The Himalaya and its people know well what they mean. The process that has created that whirlwind of change is the concern of both those who suffer its consequences as well as those who have conjured it by their practice of 'development'. . In the same way in which an ancient Tibetan Thangka is restored, if the process of change -™- is gentle enough, the result is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. If the process is violent—if an inexperienced or over enthusiastic artist applies new paint or, worse, puts the thangka in a washing machine to cleanse it of decades of soot — much of the harmony between dements of the fabric is lost, beauty is destroyed and degradation — a type of under development — results. Some of the processes of change occurring in the Himalaya, including some well-meant development efforts, may well be of the washing-machine variety..Change, though inevitable, can be good or bad depending on how it occurs and where it leads. If the environment is transformed sensitively, affected parts are allowed to adapt slowly and thus escape permanent injury. A rural road constructed in the Himalaya using "green technology" neither destabilises the hill slopes nor does it dump debris on the terraced farms of subsistence farmers (see Himal Jan/Feb 1990). A ´cut and dump´ bulldozer technology may be efficient if one considers only the road project´s wellbeing; but it is an efficiency achieved by transferring much of its costs to a helpless Nature and the unsuspecting poor..Change that is orchestrated in-distant Kathmandu can hit the marginal farmer with the force of a knockout blow. His traditional world falls apart and he becomes an alien in his own home. While the metamorphosis brought about by projects focussing only on constructing a factory, a high dam, or a highway has been rightly criticised for the insensitivity to social dislocations accompanying it, even environ men till projects (which tend to be pursued with myopic certitude) can devastate the world of the rural poor..When the Rara National Park was created in northwest Nepal, it was hailed as a good thing. Few, however, care even today to enquire into the fate of the highland shepherd families who were uprooted from their alpine homes and dumped as ´development refugees´ in the middle of a hot Tarai forest, near Nepalganj. Unable to cope with the stress of change, they are said to have, truly, disappeared — some succumbed to lowland pestilence, ´others just drifted away, unnoticed and unmourned. When the level of stress is so high, as in this case of the Rara oustees, their suffering can only be termed an insult and the ultimate in human degradation..Linking Three Environments.In trying to get a feel for the forces of change at work in our midst, to appreciate even a little the tectonic undercurrents transforming our age, it becomes necessary to step back, turn inward and review how we view ourselves and the world outside. After all, it is said that external institutions are only a reflection of internal ideas collectively upheld; and the values advocated by a group of people impart to its institutions its goals and objectives. This direction, this inertia guiding system, moves institutions to respond to changing external stimuli and to take appropriate corrective measures. The processes of change at work in the Himalaya today put the ideas of its people, and die world of values, under as much stress as they do its forests..The word 'holistic'— meaning the consideration of the whole rather than just the part—is much misused. Nonetheless, a holistic view of the ´environment´ needs to be first proposed, if only to serve as a peg upon which to hang certain ideas, so that we can appraise the changes occurring in our times. One such holistic definition sees the environment consisting of four key elements — the living and non-living biophysical environment (Nature), the human-built environment (physical manifestations of human interventions such as cities, highways and so on), the symbolic or socio cultural environment (the non-physical manifestations including beliefs, laws and institutions), and the linkages between the three..A focus on the linkages rather than on individual elements is what distinguishes the holistic ´environmental1 thinker from a reductionist — who concentrates on knowing more and more about less and less. An ornate temple is not just the sum total of the bricks, wooden struts and dies on the roof. It is the interrelations between these elements, their i division of labour so to speak— the bricks with each other, the wooden beams with the bricks and the roof tiles, the arrangements that create open spaces within the structure and openings to the outside — that distinguish a temple from an equivalent pile of bricks and lumber in a construction yard..It is through linkages that the views of priests, die wisdom of holy books and the thoughts of the architect are translated from die abstract into the tangible. A change in the symbolic environment (the views and values upheld by the priests, monks, architects and philosophers) would find its immediate expression in a changed physical environment. If Hindu priests with their world view were replaced by an equivalent number of Muslim mullahs or Christian padres, the interrelations between the bricks, beams and tiles would be quite different. A temple-infested Durbar Square in Kathmandu is a different environment from a mosque-infested Lucknow or a cathedral-infested Vienna, although all three may be of the same order of magnitude, brick for brick and plank for plank..In the Himalaya today, the natural biophysical environment, the human-built environment, and the symbolic environment are all undergoing transmutation; but more important, changes in any one of them induce change in all the others: Receding natural forests are forcing people to shift to kerosene, pilfer electricity where it is available or plant more trees on their bari lands..Some Australian researchers have found that the decline in forest cover in districts east of Kathmandu is almost matched by an equivalent increase in trees on private terraces. A change in the natural environment has thus forced a change in the human-built environment — in private village terraces, the kitchen, and so on—but this has also been accompanied by a change in the symbolic environment, or the collective perception of villagers. After all, one can only travel so far to collect firewood and still return to cook a meal that provides the calories to collect tomorrow´ s firewood or fodder and do everything else required to sustain a village life..While the decline in natural forest cover is worrisome and the increase in private ban land trees is encouraging, both scenarios should be studied if the enigmatic links between them are to be appreciated and worthwhile lessons learned for future development intervention. How was it that one behaviour pattern, the tragic over-exploitation of the commons, was replaced by another, the spontaneous enhancing of private property? Who took the initiative? How did the idea permeate villages? How much resistance was there? How did the landless react? Can this spontaneous event be replicated with premeditated plans applied with greater urgency in other degraded areas?.In reverse, changes in the human-built environment have similarly induced changes in the natural environment. The sad state of (he Bagmati river is a result of the runaway urbanisation and uncontrolled industrialisation of Kathnnandu.lt is estimated that the carpet and garment industries alone have added in the last decade a migrant labour force of a fifth of a million over and above the regular inhabitants of the Valley. The strain on freshwater resources and the stress on the waste-absorptive capacity of the Bagmati and its tributaries have exceeded the levels of normal tolerance. It is nothing more than an environmental insult. God forbid that the degree of insult be so high that it is irreversible and that Nature strikes back, making a healthy life in the Valley prohibitively expensive..The Symbolic Juggernaut.While changes in Nature and in human habitation have been studied to some extent, the symbolic environment of the Himalaya, its metamorphosis and its impact on the other two, are still a poorly-charted territory. That such an important area of change should have escaped the attention of development planners and practitioners is surprising, given the excessive influence this environment has wrought on all the others..Socio cultural and value influences are all the more important in Asian societies where the power of thought to initiate or arrest change has always been given great importance. In one of the sacred texts recited during the autumn Dasain festival, the Devi Mahatmyam — Saraswati — the Goddess of Learning, renders the armies of the demon Shumbha impotent simply by sprinkling them with sacred water. This symbolism is a powerful expression of the supremacy of thought over raw force. Even the strongest wrestler may be unable to fight if his opponent has managed to unsettle his mind by spreading rumours about his beloved. Colonisation of the collective minds of developing societies is the beginning of Third Worldisation; control of trade in necessities, dependencia and adverse balance of payments are natural consequences of this mental colonisation..The primary change in the symbolic environment of the Himalaya comes from that great force of mimesis — the proselytising cause of modernisation demanding an initial on of the views and values of the aggressive and dominant Western civilisation. The greatest attraction that development (taken often as synonymous with modernisation) has is the modern amenities it offers when Nature is used to do some of the chores that humans had to do. When harnessed water can flush away night soil that previously required reluctant human hands to carry, when a diesel engine on a road can do away with the need for days of portering, when a small transistor radio can bring the whole world to one´s isolated hamlet, modernisation becomes the juggernaut of the Third World´s symbolic environment, unstoppable without the equivalent of a spiritual upheaval..This symbolic juggernaut has its own crushing impact on the natural and human-built environment. Engineers, economists and modern managers are the high priests standing on its bow and exhorting the masses to heave. While Northern development could shift most of the social and environmental costs to the people and the environment of the South, the South cannot externalise these costs so easily. But the priests do not stop exhorting and the juggernaut rolls on, crushing everything in its path..Perhaps, to acquire a degree of sensitivity to these hidden costs of blind mimesis, those professionals engaged in modern intervention exercises should be required to spend some time on retreat in a Buddhist or Hindu monastery. They may then gain something that is not given in an engineering college or a business school. This practice may also prevent foolish thoughts from finding berth in the minds of water-supply managers of Kathmandu, as when a few years back they proposed impounding the traditional dunge dharas of Kathmandu and pumping the water to an overhead concrete tank to alleviate water shortage in the V alley ´s piped water system!.Roads bring Alien Values.A healthy change in the symbolic environment means that the collective mind can respond to changes in natural and human-built surroundings, however stressful they may be, without itself degenerating into despair. Lack of confidence in facing the challenge of external change leads to unhealthy reactions such as a retreat into fundamentalism, ethno-opportunism, corruption and fatalism. Healthy social systems opt for painful change rather than voluntary suicide; but the sickly ones, with a paranoid fear of the future, are paralysed and unable to take initiatives in the future. The result is atrophy and decay..When change occurs swiftly, it is often for the worse. Rapid development has its victims and its beneficiaries. The social carriers of change are the primary winners. At the other extreme are the larger mass of primary losers. The whole world targets them, wrongly and with the active connivance of the major beneficiaries, as the culprits..The hill farmer has been unjustly blamed for Himalayan deforestation. But new evidence indicates that the poor farmer is, at best, its secondary cause and the primary cause the ever-gluttonous market and State policies feeding their voracious appetites with policies born of a world view entirely different from that of the marginal farmer..The forests of northern Tanahun District, for example, were degraded not by over breeding hill men (who have always over bred), but after the seasonal link road from the Pokhara highway was completed. With this change in human-built environment which made a remote area more accessible to large-scale logging technology, and a failure of corresponding control measures to involve, it was inevitable that the forests would be mined today for quick profit rather than be harvested sustainably with tomorrow in mind..The key link between a voracious market and denuded hillsides is that potent symbol of development — the motorable hill road — and the mindset that introduced it. Similar to introducing disease vectors to a population that has no resistance to them, building a road allowed agents of change who had alien values, who brought trucking and other technologies with them, to interact with the natural environment. These agents saw greater benefit in logging the growing stock rather than harvesting it while preserving the integrity of the forest—living off the capital rather than the interest..Nature and human societies in the Himalaya are undergoing transformation largely because of the changes in collective values and aspirations. In the high-altitude Everest region, Sherpa lodge-owners are anxious to install Western-style flush toilets. Their own traditional pit latrines tackled excreta with dried leaves and pine needles, and the compost was used in potato fields. This now is seen by the majority of Sherpas as a relic of their underdeveloped past. The flush toilet is what the rich tourists use in fancy hotels in Kathmandu and abroad, and this is what everybody wants in the Khumbu. This seems economically a logical and sensible thing to do..The widespread acceptance of this idea means that the Theso stream flowing into the Nangpa Dzangpo (Bhote Kosi) will eventually be diverted to a reservoir above Namche Bazaar and water distributed by galvanised iron or polythene pipes to homes and lodges in the area. It does not seem to matter that night temperatures in winter in the Khumbu drop to minus 25° C and the temperatures inside the well-insulated Japanese hotel at Syangboche or the "Hillary hospital" came down to minus 15° C last winter..Pipes will burst when the water inside, freezes and indoor plumbing in poorly insulated Sherpa homes will be a joke. Indeed, the Japanese hotel regularly finds its commodes frozen solid in winter. They are maintained for guests by flushing them with boiling water. But Khumbu's collective social aspiration outstrips social wisdom that can only come from unpleasant experience in the future..One cannot deny the Sherpas the comfort of modern amenities and the freedom from demeaning drudgery any more than one can deny 'development' any where else in the Third World, including Kathmandu. But technology must be adapted to suit the local natural environment and adopted by the social system; and it must be understood that adaptive physical engineering is much simpler than adoptive value engineering. Unless much more of the social and environmental costs are properly appreciated at the beginning, runaway aspirations for the fruits of modernisation invariably lead to unmanageable despair..Strip Mining a Future.One indicator of the change for the worse in the symbolic environment of rural Nepal is the prevalent usury. Unofficial moneylender rates are as high as 24 to 36 per cent per annum while that of the State-sponsored rural bank — the Agricultural Development Bank of Nepal (ADB/N) — is officially between 15 to 19 per cent. When one adds high transaction costs, this rate can go up to 36 or even 40 per cent in real terms..High interest rates on loans are a reflection on a society´s inability to put any faith in the future. The higher the rates, the more clearly a society is saying that it values money now more than in the future. In the past, when we -off Nepali villagers made charitable endowments to guthis of established temples, they were saying that the future, and future generations, were important enough to invest in today. When a State-sponsored bank promotes interest rates that double a loan burden in three or even two years, the social message is loud and clear — do not take the risk and invest in anything such as industry, which requires start-up time and does not give immediate returns..Villagers across Nepal are getting wise to the fact that the ADB/N, set up to help the marginal fanners, has managed instead to shift all its risk burden onto the poor villagers who are being pauperised. In the process, the Bank has possession of enough land-holding certificates (held as collateral) to become the country´s biggest and owner. It was not the farmers who went to the Bank, but the Bank that came seeking them with loans and projects in the name of the State. The farmers trusted the ADB/N, and now they find themselves worse off than before because of the-crushing interest rates..Tek Bahadur Ranamagar comes from an upcountry village in Gorkha and can be found today toiling over carpet looms in a Kathmandu factory, together with three of his brothers. How did this come to pass? Under coaxing of the development motivator in his village, his father took a small loan from the ADB/N to start a small cottage industry — basically a knitting device and woollen yarn. Unfortunately, neither the raw-material supply nor the sales projected euphorically by the motivator could keep pace with the 15 per cent interest on the loan. Before long, the Bank was threatening to auction off the family´s meagre landholdings held as collateral..Unable to salvage what they had, the family members have no w fanned out to do the best they can. Instead of tilling the fields and living in rhythm with their seasonal rituals, able-bodied sons have migrated to the urban slums, pauperised by a satanic mill which grinds men into masses who have only their labour to sell for subsistence wages. Tek Bahadur and his brothers have lost the saftey and comfort of their social net; and they have lost it for the next generation as well, for there is nothing left to bequeath..The Bank´s lift-irrigation scheme at Karma sing Phanton the road to Gorkha is another grim illustration. The farmers there were poor and had sufficient land to feed themselves only for about eight months a year with one or two crops. They used to migrate in search of seasonal work to make enough for the remaining four months. Theirs was hardly the most desirable of lifestyles but it was at least one in which the marginal farmers were independent of external obligations..Then came the Bank, In order to test a lift-irrigation technology, it offered the villagers a pumping scheme, which has been installed and has now been operating for several years. On the face of it, the scheme has achieved its objective it now allows three crops a year on Karmasing Phant. On the dark side, however, the loan burden is crushing the community. Even with three grain crops, they find it impossible to clear their debts; and the three-crop pattern is leading to depletion of soil nutrients and declining yields. The fanners are now being presented with another project— a loan package to buy chemical fertiliser. These days, the farmers wistfully talk of the old times when they were marginal, poor villagers or migrants..Rethinking Development.The lesson from these examples is that market expansion, so blithely mentioned in development seminars and which seems such a peaceful process, is socially most violent. The legitimacy of the market comes from a changed symbolic environment where it is accepted as proper to ´mine´ a future instead of allowing one´s future or that of a later generation to harvest it when the time is ripe. Capital not earned in by social responsibility converts land and labour into grist for the market mill where the social and cultural assets of fanners are stripped away as bark from a tree. Only drudgery remains as saleable lumber..Development, as practiced today, is based on ideas of how the human-built environment of the future should look. It has both export and import components. Ideas of development and progress are exported from urban centres and the global metropolis of donors and they are imported by the recipient communities. The linking elements are credit and technology. While donors have been the focus of much criticism for inappropriate concepts, and rightly so, it is worth while to direct attention to those who import concepts, the faceless and unaccountable national-level bureaucrats. Not to mention those who have such notions thrust upon them — the countries and people who are the targets of development..The people who have remained exploited and underdeveloped for centuries continue to perceive development as a form of liberation gifted by a Western knight in shining armour. This kind of impression may be termed "koselee bikas" ('gifted development'), a kind of a cargo cult development where wealth and wellbeing are seen as gifts from without and not the result of reward for self-striving. This view is prevalent not only in the poor and backward villages, but per meat is even the highest echelons of State power. The inevitable result is a further shackling of the mind and attempts to change the human-built SS environment to suit. Development is hijacked from the poor in order to benefit sharper elites..Only a few agencies or NGOs among those that are doing ´development´ seriously attempt to bring out inherent creativity within social groups (who are waiting for gifts). Only reformist movements based on self-reliance, or political agitation based on anger at the unfairness of it all, may be able to change this state of affairs..Worse is the symbolic environment of the development consultants that considerate valid to shift the burden of risk onto the shoulders of the poor whom they have come to help. If high-interest development loans impoverish an already poor people, high-volume loans for large development projects are also bad because the element of risk involved is so much greater..If a small dam or a village watermill is washed away, it can be restored by the villagers themselves. If a high dam or a large development project is destroyed by an un for seen disaster, it is beyond the recuperative powers of underdeveloped Himalayan societies to restore things to their previous condition without falling into an even greater debt trap. Developing countries and poor rural communities cant described as having ´low-risk resilience´ when it comes to large projects. They should not be forced to undertake very large projects in the name of the nirvana of development without assessing their risk-absorptive capacities..Change with Confidence.The process of modernisation and interventions in its name, if it is understood and controlled, induces changes that can be called ´development´. Industrialisation is an expression of controlled changes within the natural environment and, done within the bounds of 'risk resilience' not only of society but also of Nature, it may be a good thing. It is a scientific control over natural processes. Similarly, democratsation controls the process of social aspirations through the use of consensus-building. Here, the ability to reason and convince others is more important than the use of force and threats. On another plane, scientific rationalisation can be seen as a way to streamline the processes of mental change. To generate consensus, to cope with the forces of Nature and to change long-he Id beliefs, an appeal must be made to reason in a peaceful and nonviolent way..If changes are induced such that members of a society feel they are helpless when buffeted by external forces, if they do not understand what is going on around them and believe that they have little control over the processes of change, then they ´under develop´ or, in extreme cases, plainly ´degrade´. When the values of the internal world change, one should expect external institutions and external Nature to change; and the quality of the sum total of changes in the three environments, measured with the yardstick of risk resilience and sense of control, determine whether the changes can be called development or degradation..Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, have considered time and desire together be the Great Destroyer as well as the Great Creator — the essence of power and change. While time destroys the old, the new is created by desire, only to be destroyed with the passage of time. This play of creation and destruction — dynamic and perpetual change — expresses itself in the symbol of Skakti the Mother Goddess and her maya the power of form. The power to change forms of reality — in essence change the environment—is expressed as a trinity of relationships. Raw physical power is symbolised by Maha Kali, the power arising from human relationships by Maha Lakshmi, and the power of thought by Maha Saraswati This symbolism conveys the same image of three environments, their power and their interlinkages — that of Nature, that of human endeavours and finally that of thought. It is worth approaching the composite problems of change in a complex environment through indigenous metaphors such as this which capture and convey the primacy of interlinkages in environmental thinking..Perhaps Himalayan societies, if they wish to regain harmony in their development processes, which entail changes in all the three realms, need to go back to symbolisms within their social psyche, redefine them for a new age and regain some control over their lives and surroundings. This is a task for Himalayan philosophers mid development thinkers. Development gifted is change passively accepted; whereas development reconsidered and redefined is the first expression of attempts to control change in all its manifestations and of efforts to save oneself and one´s society from helpless buffeting by fate. To the defenceless villagers suddenly visited with development disasters, a redefinition of change based on their own symbolic meanings may be more digestible than the charts, graphs, projections and promises of change grafted from without..D, Gyawali, an occasional contributor to Himal, is a member of the newly reconstituted Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology. He is also the Honorary Chairman of a grass-roots organisation, Swavalamban.