Tibet is often thought of as a high and barren desert, but its eastern regions have lush forests that host many plants and animals. Unfortunately, indiscriminate logging is putting these pristine woodlands in peril.
British diplomat-adventurer Hugh Richardson, who served in Lhasa from 1936 till 1950 and wrote the book Tibet and Its History, had these comments to make: "In some 15 years of acquaintance with Tibet, I saw there was a deep, almost religious respect for the rights of each strata of society…This fundamental expression was extended towards all of nature. The majority of the people made efforts to live as much as possible with nature — not against it. Tibet's ecosystem consequently kept in balance and alive."
As Richardson and others before and after him have reported, in Tibet there was traditionally a general taboo against encroaching excessively on the natural environment. This was the direct result of Buddhist philosophy's belief in the interdependence of all living things and in the inter-relation-ships among the whole spectrum of plant and animal life, as well as "non living" elements of nature such as mountains, lakes, valleys, rivers, air, sky and sunshine.
A direct result of this attitude towards natural life was that great forests of maple, oak, linden and birch were left untouched and hosted numerous species of animal life. The English explorer F.K. Ward wrote upon visiting southern Kham in 1920, "I have never seen so many varieties of birds in one place." And J. Hanbury-Tracy, a traveler in Kham in the 1930s, stated, "The Salween valley is a haunt of wild birds even in winter…there were partridges, eagles and hawks of a dozen varieties, rose-fmches, orange-beaked choughs, crows, rock pigeons and numerous dun-coloured birds. All were extraordinarily tame on account of the rigidly enforced ban on hunting."