Since the early 1970s, shrill alarms have been sounded that because of deforestation Nepal is in danger of being washed away into the Bay of Bengal. Indeed, as one approaches the Bengali coastline when flying from Bangkok or Singapore, grey, turbid plumes of silt can be seen reaching out into the sea. Closer to home, the holy Ganga and her Nepali tributaries are not sparkling blue and pure, but resemble mudflow in their colour. Before the plane lands at Kathmandu's Gauchar airport, Royal Nepal's Boeing skims past the valley's rim to show mountains, stripped bare of forests.
It would seem that there is every reason to believe the prevailing deforestation syllogism, which runs thus: all poor marginal farmers cut trees for fodder and fuel; marginal farmers breed like irresponsible rabbits; because there are more of them, these farmers have to cut more trees on higher, steeper slopes; this results in deforestation, soil erosion and, eventually, apocalypse in Bangladesh.
However, the reasoning is flawed on several counts, not the least because it blames the victims. The hill farmer knows his own needs and the productive capabilities and environmental limitations of his terraces, better than the urban theorist who does not have a life-or-death commitment to the land. If the farmer does cut more trees than is ecologically sound, it is probably because of some other dynamic, such as, irresponsible forest nationalisation, or unfair land tenure practices.
No hill farmer is so irrational as to cut down his own survival base. In fact, there is universal acceptance in the hill villages that you cannot keep cattle if you don't have access to fodder and litter form the forests, and you cannot farm for very long if your fields do not get resulting fertiliser from the animal wastes. If the careful, traditional husbanding of scarce hill forest resources has broken down, replaced by the rapacious mining of forests, the culprits can probably be found in market forces that encourage it, political forces that nationalise resources and exclude those without organised clout, and the non-sustainable, energy intensive value system, peddled by the industrial world.