Saving the Himalaya.

• Author: Denniston, Derek
• Position: Himalaya Mountains - Includes related article - Cover Story

With a human population as large as Japan's, and an extraordinary diversity of plant and animal species, the land of the world's highest mountain range is ecologically vulnerable--and troubled

To have a first glance at the Himalaya is impossible, since even to approach it takes--by most methods of transport--many days, shifts in visual perspective, and dramatic changes in weather.

But if a first glance were possible, it would probably suggest that no feature of the Earth is more impervious to human presence. The Himalaya has been the ultimate destination for generations of pilgrims and mountaineers, whose accounts of their journeys have endowed this ancient domain with mysterious and mythical qualities. In the popular imagination of the west, the Himalaya is too rugged, hostile, and lonely an environment to be affected--say nothing of damaged--by people.

That perception, however, is wrong. While the Himalaya towers eight vertical kilometers above the estuaries where its great rivers finally empty into the ocean, it is not made of immutable rock but of unstable geological formations and vulnerable ecosystems. While the Himalaya may appear hostile when a sudden gust flings a group of climbers to their deaths, these mountains and their intertwining valleys are extraordinarily hospitable to life overall--providing sustenance to one of the richest varieties of both human communities and wildlife on Earth. And while there are places in these mountains where one might walk for a day without seeing another person, in fact more people now live in the Himalaya than in Mexico City, Tokyo-Yokohama, New York, Seoul, Sao Paulo, and Bombay combined.

What the popular perception overlooks is the ecological fragility of the Himalaya--a condition made all the more precarious by the poverty and density of its human population. Many of those who live in the encircling plains do not understand the nature of the high peaks that send them their water, topsoil, and weather. The natural processes of uplift, tectonic movement, and erosion make the range one of the most dynamic landscapes on Earth, prone not only to natural hazards--earthquakes, landslides, flash floods, and glacial lake outbursts--but also to human damage.

At least 118 million people now struggle to sustain themselves from Himalayan fields, pastures, and forests. But it was not always a struggle; for millennia, the integration of small farms and herds with the forest ecology gave Himalayan society a fairly uniform class structure, with few rich landlords or landless laborers. The farmer-herder society did not have great wealth, but it had an enduring stability.

That stability was broken by the British explorations of the colonial era, which opened the Himalaya to commerce with the heavily populated plains districts of India. The terms of trade quickly became unequal, as mountain villagers developed a taste for--and increasing dependence on--mass-produced goods from the south, and were increasingly controlled by distant governments that regarded their mountain abode mainly as a ready inventory of cheap labor and natural resources. As the surrounding plains-based nations penetrated the range, the Himalayan people quickly found themselves on the margins of urban governments and industrial economies they could not control.

Mountains have long been viewed as symbols of permanence and strength, so it is ironic that the largest mountain range on Earth is being rapidly transformed by human exploits ranging from overgrazing grasslands to flooding valleys for hydroelectric dams. For both the mountains and the people who live among them, these activities have produced effects that cannot be sustained without profound natural and economic impoverishment.

Fortunately, there is also a countervailing trend, emerging not from the dominant governments in the plains or the industrial-world development agencies, but from the Himalayans themselves. Across the range, locally-directed projects are restoring the self-sustaining nature of the mountain economy and ecology. By placing natural resources back under the control of villagers, these projects give local people both the incentive and the means necessary to break the interlocking grip of poverty and environmental decline. Now the challenge is to incorporate the principles demonstrated by these projects into a bioregional strategy for the entire range. Himalayan Dimensions

Most widely known as the site of the world's highest peak, at 8848 meters (variously named Mt. Everest, Chomolungma or Sagarmatha), the Himalaya is the world's largest mountain range, coveting 3.4 million square kilometers. It is also the youngest range; at about 30 million years of age, it is less than half as old as the skeletons of even the most recent dinosaurs.

Flanked on the southeast by the Hengduan mountains and on the northwest by the Hindu Kush, the Himalayan region stretches more than 3,500 kilometers across eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Burma (Myanmar), Nepal, and Pakistan.

But just as they revere it for its size and beauty, the Himalaya's inhabitants and admirers now see looming problems arising from its distinction as one of the world's most fragile and unstable mountain environments. The Himalaya is still rising two to five centimeters each year, and with the Indian continental plate thrusting itself underneath the Eurasian plate, the range perched above is extremely seismic, sporadically shuddering with major earthquakes. It rises from an altitude of 100 to 300 meters to an average of 7,000 meters within a spatial distance of just 200 kilometers. This formation gives the Himalaya the highest peaks, steepest escarpment, and deepest gorges of any mountain range: nowhere on Earth do people feel as dwarfed by the landscape. Because of its height and orientation, the Himalaya obstructs the movement of monsoonal currents, causing annual rainfall to vary on average from an arid 100 millimeters per year in Gilgit, in the west, to more than 11 meters in Cherrapunji, in the east--the second wettest place on Earth.

This unparalleled variation in altitude, slope, rainfall, and temperature over short spatial distances fosters havens of biological diversity rich in endemic (unique) species, such as the endangered snow leopard, wild yak and black-necked crane. According to a study by British biologist Norman Myers, the eastern Himalaya has the seventh highest number of endemic species of any bioregion in the world. At the Dali annual fair in Yunnan province, China, peasants trade as many as 550 species of herbal medicinal plants, in addition to hundreds of food plants.

Surrounded by a crowded, heavily transformed lowland to the east, south, and west, the Himalaya is a vertical archipelago of ethnic and natural diversity. It has cradled some of the world's most ancient civilizations, in Tibet and along the Indus and Ganga valleys of northern India and Pakistan. More than 300 distinct languages and tribes can be found in Nepal's hill country alone. "Cultural diversity is not an historical accident," says Anil Agarwal, founder and director of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "It is the direct outcome of the local people learning to live in harmony with the region's extraordinary biological diversity."

A Losing Race Against Poverty

For more than a thousand years, Himalayan villagers made their living by subsistence hillside farming and herding, and by bartering for goods like salt and wool from Tibet, silk from China, and medicinal herbs from the eastern Himalaya. They had simple lifestyles, lived in wooden or mud huts, and collectively used the surrounding fields and forests according to elaborate customs designed to balance their productivity and ecological health.

A few decades ago, the construction of roads began to bring perhaps the most sweeping changes these villagers had ever experienced. With accessibility by road, bartering and subsistence farming began to be replaced by commercial farming, mass tourism, logging, mining, construction of hydropower and water storage facilities, export of medicinal plants, and--in the foothills--even the development of some urban industries. From the plains...