From Uncomfortable Knowledge to Classic Text:
Twenty-One Years of Himalayan Uncertainty

The very first paper Michael Warburton and I wrote on the Himalaya was published, in 1984, in a Czechoslovakian journal Ziva (which, I think, means “Life”). “Nova pustina v Himalaji” was the title: “A New Desert in the Himalaya?” It is probably fair to say that it had little impact!

A few months later, however, we published a second paper “Uncertainty On a Himalayan Scale” (in Mountain Research and Development) and that did what you always hope a paper will do: cause merry hell! What the paper did was challenge what people now call an “environmental orthodoxy”: an orthodoxy, moreover, that has provided the basis for decades-worth of research and development aid in the whole region.

At the centre of this orthodoxy there stands that anti-paragon, the Ignorant and Fecund Peasant: the Himalayan hill-farmer, whose predilection for large families, together with his inability to comprehend the environmental consequences of that predilection, is the root-cause of the rampaging and ever-worsening degradation that stretches all the way from the forests and pastures of the high Nepal Himalaya, through the teeming and fertile plains of India, to the vast delta of those great rivers – the Ganges and the Brahmaputra – that, over the millennia, have actually created most of Bangladesh (the delta) and, by spreading silt to a depth of some 5,000 metres, the plains too.

To understand this orthodoxy, and the wholly unwarranted “discourse of crisis” that it has engendered among those who have fallen under its thrall, we must travel back to 1972: to the United Nations Stockholm Environment Conference. It was at this conference that the problem was convincingly and authoritatively defined in terms of population growth. Erik Echolm, who shortly afterwards wrote the influential book Losing Ground (Eckholm 1976), put it like this:

Population growth … is forcing farmers onto ever steeper slopes, slopes unfit for sustained farming even with the astonishingly elaborate terracing practised there. Meanwhile, villagers must roam further and further from their homes to gather fodder and firewood, thus surrounding most villages with a widening circle of denuded hillsides. Ground-holding trees are disappearing fast among the geologically young, jagged foothills of the Himalaya, which are among the most easily erodable anywhere. Landslides that destroy lives, homes and crops occur more and more frequently throughout the Nepalese hills.

Here, then, in stark outline, was the problem: an increasing population that is having to support itself on a resource base that it is actually causing to decline. Nor is this the end of Nepal’s problems. As the resource base slides away from under its farmers, it causes havoc in the downstream countries of India and Bangladesh.

Topsoil washing down into India and Bangladesh is now Nepal’s most precious export but one for which it receives no compensation. As fertile soil slips away, the productive capacity of the hills declines, even while the demand for food grows inexorably. Even more ominously, farmers [because of the firewood crisis] have seen no choice but to adopt the self-defeating practice of burning dung for fuel.

Nor, according to this orthodoxy, is it just themselves that the Nepalis are defeating. As they propel ever more topsoil into their mountain torrents, Eckholm asserts, they render the reservoirs and hydropower stations in India useless with startling rapidity, they provoke worse flooding in both India and Bangladesh, and they raise the riverbeds to such an extent as to cause the river-courses to meander about, often destroying prime farmland as they go. The Eckholm/Stockholm verdict was that Nepal was headed for total ecological and economic collapse within ten years at the most.

The British naturalist and broadcaster, David Attenborough, too, has visited Nepal in the course of making his acclaimed television series “The Natural World”:

We walked across hillsides in Nepal that have been stripped of their trees for firewood. Rain had gouged deep ravines down them, carrying away the soil, and the people were going hungry. A thousand miles away, in the delta of the Ganges, that same soil is being deposited, clogging the river channels. During the rainy season, the water, no longer held back by the forests, rushes down the rivers and floods the delta. Hundreds of people drown and thousands lose their fields and their homes.

Similarly, Britain’s Overseas Development Agency (now re-named the Department for International Development) identifies severe environmental degradation in the Middle Hills of Nepal—the area where most Nepalis live as the root of all the trouble.

The growing population’s requirement for more food leads to clearing of forests to provide more land for crop production. Soil becomes exposed and is easily washed away by heavy monsoon rainfall. Land productivity quickly declines, leading to a demand for more land on which to produce crops …

So, whether it is Stockholm/Eckholm, David Attenborough or the Overseas Development Agency, they all share the same definition of the environmental problem: an ever worsening, population-driven situation that, unless something is done, will result in catastrophic collapse within 10 years at the most.

But now, we come to the weak spot in this orthodox definition of the problem: the timings of these doom-laden pronouncements.
Stockholm/Eckholm      1972
David Attenborough      1984
Overseas Development Agency     1997

The orthodox definition, we now see, has the Overseas Development Agency standing on the very edge of an environmental abyss that is the self-same abyss that David Attenborough was standing on the edge of 13 years earlier and which, in its turn, is the self-same abyss that Erik Eckholm was standing on the edge of 12 years before that! How fortunate for all of them that they should have been there, in Nepal, at just that climactic moment, and how strange that they should have been there 13 and 12 years apart, over a period of 25 years in all, when the collapse was due to happen within, at the most, 10 years!

Similarly authoritative predictions for Himalayan deforestation – “25 years to baldness” – have been made over the past quarter century. Yet there are as many, if not more, trees now as there were then: an observation that has prompted the great Swiss geographer, Bruno Messerli, to wryly point to a new crisis: we now have only one or two years in which to get rid of all those trees!

Well, to cut a long and dismal story short, the orthodox definition of the problem – the definition that has shaped the region’s development policy and dictated its research needs throughout the Age of Aid (roughly the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union) – is sensationally wrong. Teasing out exactly what is wrong with the environmental orthodoxy is inevitably a complex and at times technical business, and that is the task that was started in the 1985 paper and developed further in the 1986 book. However, the gist of that wrongness, and the main implications of that wrongness, though not entirely clear at the time, are now quite easily summarised. (Hence the rather lengthy new introduction by Dipak Gyawali and myself.)

Twenty years, to misquote Harold Wilson, is a long time in environmental politics: long enough, for instance, for the crisis predicted by the orthodox definition to have come at least once, and long enough (and now we are talking about things that really have happened) for Nepal to have had its not-so-velvet revolution (1990), run through democratically elected coalition governments of every possible permutation on the Left to Centre to Right scale, nurtured a Maoist uprising that has grown strong enough to actually take over the administration of some of the remote districts of the kingdom (2001), invited a serious enough reaction from the king and the army (2005) to put a question mark on many aspects of democracy, development and the Shangri-La image of the country, and led to another “rhododendron revolution” (in April 2006) that is re-structuring many aspects of the Nepali state. The orthodox definition, we can now see, has had a considerable influence on the course of this recent history and, at the same time, has itself been much clarified by it.

• With the environmental apocalypse it predicts having now been postponed at least three times, the orthodox definition really is way past its sell-by date.
• In seeing the Himalayan farmer as an ignorant and fecund peasant, the orthodox definition blames the victim, thereby ruling out any consideration of how, and to what extent, he or she can be part of the solution. It is therefore seriously out of step, not just with those (like us) who are eager to write the obituaries for the Age of Aid, but with current thinking within the development community. Social capital, civil society and good governance – New Millennium shibboleths of the World Bank and its ilk – would simply be non-starters if Nepal’s citizens (more than three-quarters of whom are small-scale farmers) were ignorant and fecund peasants.
• By pinning the silting-up of Indian dams and Bangladeshi water channels, and the worsening floods and droughts that have beset downstream communities all the way from Bihar to the Sunderbans, on the axe-wielding zeal of the Nepali hill-farmer, the orthodox definition has encouraged and justified finger-pointing and sabre-rattling throughout a region that is, at the best of times, far from being a haven of international harmony when in fact there are none of these man-made trans-boundary risks.
• And in Nepal itself, the orthodox definition has distorted the development process – particularly through the justification it provides for large-scale water-engineering projects as a panacea to this mistaken view of environmental degradation – to the point where the country’s hard-won democracy is in danger of being destroyed.

This is not to say that there are no environmental problems in the Himalaya – of course there are. Only that the problems are demonstrably not what they have been asserted to be, and that millions and millions of dollars-worth of aid, over getting on for half a century, has been directed at solving the wrong problems! The end of the Age of Aid, though it brings with it short-term, “cold turkey” miseries for those countries, like Nepal, that have become aid junkies, is therefore something to be welcomed rather than just endured. That is the optimistic message that, twenty years on from its original publication, we now see in this book. That, we feel, is the justification for its re-publication, and for this rather lengthy new foreword.

Extract from a talk by Michael Thompson delivered at a seminar, at Oxford University’s James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation, 9 January 2007, to launch the re-published book (with a new introduction by Michael Thompson and Dipak Gyawali) Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale (Michael Thompson, Michael Warburton and Tom Hatley, first published in 1986).

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Last updated: 01 Aug 2007