Himalayan Environmental Degradation Narrative

Introduction

Narratives are often characterized as stories or arguments that tell about scenarios and revolves around the chain of events (Roe, 1991). Events in the narrative start with the normal situation in which local people are living without problems having a good relationship with the environment. Then problems or changes arise in the existing situations and the effects of such problems are assessed focusing on causal explanation. In addition, narratives are normative than ideology and explicitly programmatic (ibid:288). These are also encoded by many researchers as “received wisdom” (Leach and Mearns, 1996:443) which enables policymakers and other donor agencies. Often their intervention action gets a heroic position in the local communities (Hoben et al., 1996) although, their truth-value is in question. On the basis of this theoretical justification, this essay presents the narrative of Himalayan environmental degradation and argument about it.

Himalayan Environment Degradation (HED)

This narrative tells the story about the ecological crisis and its neo-Malthusian causal explanation in the Himalayan environment, particularly in Nepal. Himalaya is naturally fragile and instable due to steep slope and rugged topography. The socio-cultural aspect is also very diverse having a multi-cultural landscape. However, a different group of people has been living for a long time with a close relation to nature. Human-Environmental interaction and their relationships were not explained before. This scene can be seen as an initial part of the HED-narrative. After the 1950s, Nepal came out from isolation with the changing political turn and some western explanations related to the crisis of the Himalaya environment have been raised. This is attributed to an unprecedented wave of population growth, rural poverty, and peasant practices such as shifting cultivation, burning grassland, and overgrazing was causing severe environmental degradation particularly unstable and erodible mountain range (Kaith, 1960 as cited Guthman, 1997). Moreover, the publication of ‘The Himalayan Dilemma’ by Jack D. Ives and Bruno Messerli in 1989 made a prediction that created one of the global alarms to the world. It includes different eight-point scenario by showing the enormous cause of the environmental and socio-economic collapse by 2000 AD (Ives, 1987). They have presented problems as a vicious circle with identifying subsistence farming and the use of wood fuel as major causes. This is fully established as the “Himalayan Degradation Theory” linking from deforestation and soil erosion to downstream flooding of the plain areas of Nepal.

This the hegemonic view has called government, NGOs, and donors for intervention to conserve the environment controlling to the local communities. One of the examples of this was the implementation of “The Private Forest Nationalization Act” by the state that controlled the local people using forest resources (Guthman, 1997:51). But after the 1980s the HED-narrative has questioned the various facts. For instance, most of the forest clearance cause was closely related to the rent-seeking activities of the feudal state that was occurred in the past centuries (Guthman, 1997 p 64). Similarly, commercial actors producing goods for the international market and rapidly growing cities have revealed the real cases of the environment lost. (DeFries et al., 2010).

Conclusion

It seems clear that, the issue of Himalayan environment degradation in this HED-narrative have been raised by the outsider (mainly western researcher) in which the local people were seen as main cause of environmental degradation. The narrative is associated with the dominant discourse, Global Environment Management (GEM) discourse. That have created lots of policy implication in Nepal. Thus, as consequences of this, interventions implemented by the government, NGOs and donor agencies have tended to restrict the local people to use resources that created further conflict in resource utilization. So, knowledge formation should be based on a closer understanding of the complex environmental problems that would help to develop more realistic knowledge.

References

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