Himalayan Perceptions: Environmental Change and the Well-Being of Mountain Peoples

by Jack Ives

In the 1970s and 1980s many institutions, agencies and scholars believed that the Himalayan region was facing severe environmental disaster, due primarily to rapid growth in population that has caused extensive deforestation, which in turn has led to massive landsliding and soil erosion. This series of assumptions was first challenged in the The Himalayan Dilemma (1989: Ives and Messerli, Routledge). Nevertheless, the environmental crisis paradigm still commands considerable support, including logging bans in the mountain watersheds of China, India, and Thailand, and is constantly being promoted by the news media.
Himalayan Perceptions identifies the confusion of misunderstanding, vested interests, changing perceptions, and institutional unwillingness to base development policy on sound scientific knowledge. It analyzes the large amount of new research published since 1989 and totally refutes the entire construct. It examines recent social and economic developments in the region and identifies warfare, guerrilla activities, and widespread oppression of poor ethnic minorities as the primary cause for the instability that pervades the entire region. It is argued that the development controversy is further confounded by exaggerated reporting, even falsification, by news media, environmental publications, and agency reports alike.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published August 5, 2004

Reviews

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and thorough book on theories of environmental change in the Himalaya, which is about as complicated as it sounds. I couldn't follow a lot of it, but it had an interesting chapter on the Khumbu region and the Sherpa, which was what I was looking for. Basically, in the 1970s everybody predicted that deforestation by mountain tribes in Nepal would lead to mass flooding and deaths in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. It didn't happen because no one asked the mountain people how they managed their farms. The book also discusses how regional development efforts often don't go to the local people but to cheap labor brought in by the government, further impoverishing them (all of the governments involved do this).

The author does quote himself a lot (he wrote an earlier book on this) and never mentions climate change/global warming, which seems like an odd thing to leave out in 2004, but I could have easily missed it.