On 22 September 2006, a ceremony was organised to inaugurate the shift from locally managed to locally owned forests in the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project (KCAP), in the northeastern tip of Nepal. Little expense was spared in promoting the handover – the first of its kind in the country – with a high-level group of ministers, conservation pioneers and other environmentalists flown in for the event. The following morning, a helicopter took a select few through a narrow gorge to the remote village of Ghunsa, for more liturgy and festivity. Yet in a grievous turn on the way back, the helicopter crashed and killed all 24 passengers on board.
Many exemplary figures were seated in that helicopter, including the one who had organised the trip – Chandra Gurung, the director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the financial and technical promoter of KCAP. Gurung had long believed in good publicity as a tool to achieve conservation work. And so, he was present at the momentous occasion along with some of his closest friends and mentors, former tourism minister and ground-breaking geographer, Harka Gurung; the previous head of WWF, Mingma Norbu Sherpa; and the "first warden of Nepal's first national park", Tirtha Man Maskey. "The handover was history in the making… conservation history!" writes Manjushree Thapa in her new book on Gurung's life and legacy, commissioned by the Chandra Gurung Conservation Foundation and supported by the WWF. This is not mere hyperbole.
Some of the most important conservation projects in Nepal took form during Chandra Gurung's lifetime, their successes largely credited to his gregarious and determined spirit. Critically, this spirit came out at a time when conservation was undergoing a groundbreaking shift in approach, from one of government decree to one of community decision-making. Gurung was hired by what was then the King Mahendra National Trust for Nature Conservation (KMTNC) in 1986 as a consultant, tasked with two others to conduct a feasibility study on launching a model conservation project in the Annapurna area, which would address the needs both for tourism and the preservation of nature for the benefit of local communities. Gurung proceeded to infuse the concept of 'people participation' with soul and sense, spending a massive amount of time travelling and talking to the local communities about their concerns.
Despite his growing international recognition, Gurung kept his home and his community close to his heart, gaining credibility and affection from the villagers with whom he worked. Himself a village boy from the southern flanks of the Annapurna range (originally from Siklis, the highest Gurung village in Nepal), he left home early to attend the Soldiers Board Vocational Training High School in Pokhara. Gurung spoke the local language, could negotiate the nuances in village power-sharing, and would respect locals' manner of dress and demeanour. The author discerningly describes him as "simultaneously a local leader and a worldly PhD, a villager and an internationalist, a son of the soil and an iconoclast, a leader, a thinker, a hippie, an activist. He was also extremely good-looking." To the surprise of some his more cosmopolitan colleagues, he even believed some of the local superstitions. In one incident, after Gurung was flung several metres by a pipe explosion, US-trained Bikash Pandey notes: "There was a belief in the village that if you suffer a fright, you lose your saato [spirit] … At first I thought he was just going along with what the villagers were saying … But he was quite serious about it. He stopped smiling, he stopped laughing. He wasn't himself anymore." Following local custom "Chandra wore unrefined threads to get his saato back, and sprinkled water on a chicken to see if his saato had returned", writes Thapa.