About those boys who cry "Wolf!"

[Seth Sicroff]

While there is much truth in what Lhakpa Norbu says in his recent posting, I think that he misses the mark when he presents these perceptions as somehow pertinent to the "myth" of Himalayan environmental degradation. A few general points:

1) There is in our field a persistent hazard of semantic slippage. It is true that Ives and Messerli dub their straw man the "Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation," but what they are actually and specifically talking about is the yellow-journalistic proposition that "massive deforestation" in the Himalayas is (or was) a near certainty -- a "supercrisis."  Not all degradations are created equal, and the complications to which the Lhakpa Norbu refers are probably not quite the same sort of problem as those envisioned by Mr. Eckholm. While it is true that perceived degradation must often be addressed without full scientific investigation and quantification, that has little to do with the issue raised by Ives, who argued that it is counterproductive and dangerous to cry "Wolf!" -- particularly when the fingers are pointed at poor farmers who have been doing a rather good job of protecting their stock-in-trade.

2) Tsho Rolpa and global climate change should not be slid into an argument based on the necessity of fine-tuning local forest management. The issue at Tsho Rolpa was not so much whether or not there was a threat, but how to mitigate that risk. There was no prospect of local management, which meant that considerable foreign assistance was required. Lives were at risk either way -- leaving the lake alone was obviously dangerous, panic due to premature alarm was also costly, and previous failures elsewhere suggested that cutting a spillway could be catastrophic. Scientific research was certainly necessary. Techniques are now available, according to Reynolds, that would allow rather precise estimation of the danger. The unfortunate thing is that political and financial considerations have resulted in a partial fix, contrary to the recommendations of involved scientists. A real hazard, although one whose likely impact was probably overstated, has been papered over and represented as a definitive solution. So this is not at all a case where local pragmatists have taken measures into their own hands rather than wait for scientific consensus.

Global warming, again, is not an issue commensurate with forest "degradation." It cannot be addressed locally. To mobilize the entire world around this issue certainly requires scientific consensus -- and also credibility. Persistent exaggeration of hazards in the press does not facilitate that mobilization.

3) The situation in Khumbu has had little in common with the catastrophic scenarios envisioned by THED, which focused largely on the expansion of farmland onto slopes of marginal utility (due to the expanding population), with resultant removal of stabilizing forest and consumption of dung as fuel rather than fertilizer. The impending disaster in Khumbu was primarily aesthetic and economic  (bad publicity resulting from exaggerated reports of garbage, leading to potential loss of tourist market share); another problem was that sudden wealth in Sherpa communities was leading to an unprecedented spate of new construction, with a severe impact on older stands of forest, and a continuing acceleration of fuelwood consumption due both to the number of new households and also the number of tourist meals cooked at all hours of the day. This has little to do with THED as such.

I do not mean to suggest that Himalayan Dilemma is the last word on THED, or on "environmental degradation." (For instance, Ives' more recent Himalayan Perceptions takes on a much broader array of Himalayan delusions and development disasters.) However, I think it is worth taking seriously the central point of HD, which is that groundless doomsaying has huge costs. At the very least, the rhetorical inflation forces scientists to either exaggerate whatever hazards they discover or risk having them ignored, as funding and attention are diverted toward the THED-du-jour. Mis-predictions carry the risk of substantial economic disruption. And, most alarmingly, our inevitable desensitization to pseudo-scientific rants raises the risk that we will fail to heed the genuine writing on the wall.

Seth Sicroff