Culture vs. Ecology in Nepal

...They think they don't have to be bothered," he says with a shrug...

...We denied and ignored our difficulties because if you talked about them you might find yourself in jail...

...Among the educated here, it was known that the high child mortality rate was largely a consequence of local water pollution caused by two factors: the raw sewage being poured into the Baghmati River, and the contamination that resulted from the sewer and water pipes, both made of permeable material, having been laid next to each other...

...Near some hot springs beyond Dulikel the foothills had been densely covered with many varieties of trees...

...Pollution from the Bansbari tannery has become so dangerous that farmers in its vicinity no longer use the water for irrigation...

...None of the seven sewage plants in Katmandu are operating...

...The devastation of the Nepali forests was evident to me when I took a route 1 had traversed 14 years before, the road from Katmandu to Tibet...

...Across the way people take baths, women wash their saris, and children swim and play in the lethal water...

...As 1 traveled about I asked why, with so much foreign expertise and money, so little has been accomplished...

...Since their importance is not generally understood by the people, who consider the collection of numbers an expensive luxury, only a smattering of hard facts are available...

...They have decided to plant more of that species...

...To become educated is to be effectively removed from the work force...

...Through its awards, it publicizes imaginative forest use...

...In 1989 the three rivers that provide the valley with water, the Baghmati, Bishnumati and Dhobi Khola, were found to have 720,000 cells of coliform per 100 milligrams...

...Before setting out we had been lectured by several doctors on the prevalence of amoebic dysentery and giardia throughout Nepal, and had been shown a memorable slide of a man standing in an open field at the end of his recently passed tapeworm, which appeared to be a soccer field long...

...being close to or in the presence of the person whose favor is desired"—encourage a fatalistic outlook on life...

...No solution is likely to succeed until the people themselves are fully drawn into the process...

...Meanwhile, below the hills in the tropical terai the government opened up areas for internal migration...

...The World Health Organization (WHO) limit for safe drinking water is less than 1 coliform bacterium per 100 milligrams...

...The trust supported the forestry law revisions...

...People didn't have kerosene to cook with, so they chopped down the trees around them...

...Panday, whose business card identifies him as the "Coordinator" of the Hara Juri Trust...

...In this context, Bista says, "aid becomes merely something that is justly due to Nepal and not a resource that is meant to be considered seriously and used productively...

...Karen Swenson, a previous NL contributor, is a poet and a freelance journalist specializing in Southeast Asia...

...Most often these were city men who may have acquired book knowledge, but had scant understanding of village living conditions...

...Although the drinking water is chlorinated, when samples have been tested the level of free-residual chlorine has been below the lower limit specified by the WHO...

...His recent book, Fatalism and Development, set off an intellectual uproar in Katmandu when it appeared and has been the subject of long editorials in the magazine Himal...

...What glimmers of hope there are come not from new infusions of aid but from the advent of democracy in Nepal...

...As with other Third World countries, the ties that historically have bound the society to its natural resources, such as water and forests, have broken down in Nepal under the pressure of increased population and political and technological changes...

...Thus, once the forestry officers were trained the majority stayed in their offices, lest they lower their status by going into the field...

...A similar situation obtains in the case of Nepal's deforestation problems, although as far back as 1978 a World Bank report had warned that by the turn of the century forests would exist only in inaccessible areas...

...Nevertheless, at the temple of Pashupatinath on the Baghmati, tourists wander along the embankment watching families gather for the cremation of their dead at the edge of the river...

...It is they who decide the location and amount of forest to be given to the village committee...

...There is no systematic monitoring of water quality, no government inspection and no official standard for drinking water...

...At 90 points in Katmandu raw sewage and effluents from the Bansbari tannery, the Balaju Industrial District, the Jawalakhel distillery, the Patan Industrial District, the Himal cement factory, plus various carpet factories are discharged into the river...

...First, in their book entitled The Himalayan Dilemma, published in 1989, J. Ives and B. Messerli claim that landslides, erosion and other such phenomena are caused not by deforestation but by the rising and shifting of the Himalayas...

...Two subsequent developments are heightening the confusion here...

...To be educated is a powerful symbol of status...

...There are four pages of nongovernmental foreign aid organizations (NGOs) listed in the Katmandu telephone book...

...The influx of foreign aid has caused Nepalis to lose their sense of responsibility for their own affairs, Chitraker contends...

...The foreigners will come in like parents and take care of them, solve their problems...

...In the meantime, there will be no singing in the shower in Katmandu...

...A water resources engineer and one of a new breed of Nepalis, he is the founder of the Save the Baghmati Campaign...

...Corruption became rife, for traditionally in Nepal officials secure the larger part of their money not from those above them—virtually all are woefully underpaid—but from those below...

...Over many cups of tea in a restaurant near the Annapurna Hotel, he explained that under monarchical rule people were afraid to object publicly to official policy, while those in the government tended to ignore such issues as pollution out of fear of being charged with direct criticism of the King, a traitorous act...

...Part of the impediment to change is the lack of statistics...

...Now it was an arid, barren landscape of dusty scrub...

...Fifteen years ago, however, an examination of drinking water in the Katmandu valley showed that fecal contamination ranged from 4 to 460 coliform cells per 100 milligrams...

...But more than caste and custom account for Nepal's lack of environmental progress, asserts Ajaya Mani Dixit...

...Assignment of the waste problem to a scavenger caste, the Pore, he declares, means no one else in the society needs to be concerned with it...

...If they feel like it, they can assign degraded areas, or confiscate the forest should the village do anything that they consider wrong, or arrest villagers and hold them without trial...

...Moreover, it has finally been recognized that, for whatever reason, foreign NGOs alone are not the answer...

...In 1983, the Royal Drugs Research Laboratory of His Majesty's Government refused to test the water in the Dhobi Khola because it might damage the equipment...

...indeed, because of industrialization its quality has worsened...

...Instead of efficient fulfillment of duties and obligations, persistence in chakari is seen as merit, and with enough merit favors may be granted...

...Over the past decade and a half they have conducted a great many studies, held numerous conferences, and poured substantial sums into this ancient land...

...This merely attracted more migrants, creating a circular pattern and a major threat to the existing forests in the terai...

...Panday would hand over the forests to the people with no strings attached...

...No one concerned with the issue, though, means to minimize the importance of ending forest degradation...

...But Panday says the changes merely amount to a step in the right direction: "Most DFOs don't go near their areas, yet under this law they will still be in charge...

...His organization, like Dixit's, could not have existed prior to the coming of democracy...

...The 1957 law separated cultivated from uncultivated land, with the forests going to the government...

...To be sure some did venture forth, albeit not to save trees...

...Since the freeing of the press and the greater circulation of information, there has been an enormously increased awareness of what residents along the Baghmati are facing, he notes, adding: "Mine is a Ralph Nader type organization...

...Returning to Katmandu this year, I found the water was still not potable...

...Late last year legislation revising the forestry law moved in the direction of shifting responsibility back to the villagers...

...In Nepal people live all along the edges of the forest, so when the government nationalized the forests in 1957, villagers lost all sense of responsibility toward what no longer belonged to them...

...Even if both these rejections of previous thinking are correct in some limited technical respects, the danger is that they will persuade people deforestation is not really a bad thing after all and need not be halted...

...I discussed the slowly evolving situation with Kk...

...Then how would your wife and children manage...

...These give greater control to the people by allowing for private forests, and by enabling communities to design management plans with their local Department of Forestry Officer (DFO...

...Water gushed and tumbled down the rocky slopes...

...Many people laughed at us and said it was a silly idea, but we are making them aware of the pollution and of the fact that now they have the power to do something about it...

...In addition, customs concerning education interfered with the plan's implementation...

...Dixit believes the emergence of democracy in November 1990 has created an atmosphere more conducive to action...

...Another American told me he went to Stanford with a Nepali who studied sanitation engineering, but was forced by his family's horror at such a low-caste profession to take up a different career...

...Sitting in the garden of a vegetarian restaurant outside the Tibetan enclave of Katmandu, I asked Panday what had happened to the forests I remembered just past Dulikel...

...An attempt was made to educate foresters and send them out to instruct the people about preservation...

...In one area the villagers happened to notice that a variety of pine on a ridge caught fire but another variety did not...

...Essentially the same view is held by Nepal's leading cultural anthropologist, Dor Bahadur Bista...

...An American studying on a Fulbright here disagrees with Dor Bahadur Bista and points to the caste system as the villain...

...He makes a strong case: "Last year many government protected forests burned during the hot season because neither the DFOs nor their subordinates were anywhere near, but committee forests weren't destroyed because the people went out and stopped the fires...

...It could not have existed before democracy in Nepal...

...In his airy office overlooking a courtyard, Anil Chitraker, who runs forestry conservation camps for primary school children in villages outside Katmandu under the aegis of the World Conservation Union, told me he believes the international NGOs are pan of the problem rather than part of the solution...

...The forests close to the road were the first to go, since they could be easily transported...

...He argues that fatalism "has had a devastating effect on the work ethic and achievement motivation" of Nepalis...

...Oh, they probably were victims of Nepal's border dispute with India in 1989," he responded...

...The remains are pushed into the water from the ghats...

...The answers have to do with local social structure...

...Second, recent statements by the Nepal Australia Forestry Project, a bilateral undertaking launched a decade ago, challenge the World Bank's 1978 prediction that by the year 2000 Nepal's forests will be so depleted, villagers will have to travel long distances for fuel, fodder and medicinal herbs...

...We had a walk athon along the bank of the river this year...

...According to Bista, customs such as chakari...

...Nepalis involved in forest preservation hope democracy will produce active participation in their efforts as well...

...To cite Bista again, "Scholarship in the Sanskritic tradition is associated with privilege and never with labor...

...The foreign NGOs that initiated the first forest preservation projects in the 1950s imposed on the Nepalis the Western model of the national park, where land with few or no inhabitants becomes government property...

...As might have been expected, in the hills where people owned kharbari—land possessing trees and grass used for leaf fodder, fuel and thatching—they slashed away and began cultivating to retain ownership...

...When newcomers arrived in larger numbers than anticipated, and started burning and clearing property for houses and crops, the government sought to accommodate them by having foresters cut down additional trees...

...The law further stipulated that anyone continuing the practice of going into forests to gather medicinal herbs, roots and bark would be subject to arrest...

...Ecology in Nepal BY KAREN SWENSON Katmandu Visiting Nepal with a group of anthropologists 14 years ago, I amused myself each morning, while taking my shower in the Katmandu Guest House, by imagining all 20 of us huddled under the water with our lips firmly sealed against any stray drop...

...It is a passive form of instrumental behavior whose object is to demonstrate dependency, with the aim of eventually eliciting the favor of the person depended upon...