On verge of degradation
- (un)common sense
On August 3rd, Al Jazeera English’s website featured a numbing story on the rapid decline of the earth’s life-support system. The establishment of over 1,00,000 protected areas—the national parks, wildlife reserves, marine parks, among many others—have been unable to tame the human onslaught on natural
system. For many this revelation might have been nothing short of shocking. After all, the growth of these protected areas have been impressive. Currently, they cover whopping 17 million square kilometers. According to the Al Jazeera report, a lot of these are paper-only parks. But the major problem is an ‘enclave mentality’ implicit in the design and operation of protected areas. Two major points about this mentality is worth introspecting.
First, for a long time, conservationists assumed that the earth’s biological treasures could be protected under pristine conditions if they were made off-limit to human use. Nature was assumed to lie outside the human habitat. Second, and in line with the first, it was assumed that the fenced-off protected areas could halt the degradation of the living system.
Nineteen years ago, I began working with fishing communities along the bank of Narayani river in Chitwan valley. Three years of my work with them revealed the gross limitations of the protected area management in the valley. Spread over several villages along the 50 km long north-south stretch of the Narayani river bank, the fishing communities had relied on the river for their livelihoods for several decades. One evening old Chigharam Majhi brought an old, crumpled lump of paper to me as I was sitting on the woven cot outside his thatched, one-room house. This one room worked as kitchen, living and dining room for his family.
The old faded paper was in reality the patta (the title paper) for boating and fishing in the river. That paper was given to the fishing community by the then Rana administration. No Gandak dam had been built and the river Ganges was flowing relatively unencumbered down to the Bay of Bengal. Many old Majhis and Botes I interacted with told me how different fish species swam across vast distances upriver to spawn at the Himalayan foothills. Fishing was done with nets and the catches used to be plentiful. “We used to get many many kilos of fish in one swoop of the net,” Chigharam Ba told me that evening.
Things changed in Chigharam Ba’s life time. Two timelines were particularly striking. Gandak dam was built in the early 1960s. After that, Chigharam ba and his folks noticed significant decline in fish catch. In the early 1970, the Chitwan National Park was set up. Armed guards began to roam around. They began to demand their share in the fish catch. By now Chitwan National Park sports tropical riverine and saal forest with impressive array of wild animals, the most famous among them being one-horned rhino. But outside this over 900 km enclave, things are not honky dory.
Last week, I wrote about indiscriminate use of poisons in fields in eastern Chitwan. Not far away from Bhandara is Rapti River. That river is part of Chitwan National Park. We can imagine what is happening to the fish and other water ecosystem around there with all kinds of poisons poured into the fields. Late Chigharam Ba regularly lamented the precipitous decline of fish in the Narayanni river. He is dead now, but the young ones in the village can hardly catch in the whole day’s fishing trip what they would catch in one swoop of the net.
Narayangharh’s rich and poor empty their garbage on the river—with no apparent qualm. Tandi’s growing urban dwellers don’t think twice when they dump their household garbage on the water bodies near them. Bhandara’s farmers poison their own land and the water bodies around them. Across the Chitwan National Park forest, in the gorgeous Madi valley, the use of poison is on a full swing.
On 6th August, over thirty people huddled together in an office room of sub-district animal development office in Basantapur of Madi. Thirteen sprayer-tanks, built in Sweden, with red-body and black nozzle, were ready to be distributed. Most of these were women and they belonged to thirteen of the local farmer’s groups, one of them was even named Ganatantrik Krishak Samuha (Republican Farmers’ Group). The Bagauda village development committee had allocated money to distribute these sprayers to these farmer’s groups. A leader of the farmers’ group lamented that they had not been able to give it to all the groups in the VDC and that these had to be generously shared with as many people as possible.
What are they going to spray and where? A plant clinic immediately followed this sprayer-tank distribution ceremony in the same building. One after another farmers who had brought in their infested plant parts revealed that they had been using poisons all around. They were spraying potent fungicides to deal with mosaic virus—that makes the leaves go yellow. This was the most absurd thing. Ironically, the India-made fungicide most commonly used was called Saaf (clean).
The enclave national park looks pristine, but the rivers within it are full of poisons. Land beyond is both poisoned and littered with increasing amount of non-biodegradable plastics and other materials. A lot of tourists—foreign or native, white or brown—and commoners alike use bottled water and throw plastic bottles that
end up choking the rivers and streams. Processed food wrappers have become common road-side eye-sores. The wetlands outside the park are filled to make room for yet another batch of speculative real-estate transactions.
We can make endless lists. The point is, protected areas increasingly look like sanitized islands surrounded by the oceans of poisoned and degraded landscapes.
Next week’s column will discuss new partnerships required to halt these practices.
Bhattarai is conducting PhD dissertation research on ecological farming practices
Anil Bhattarai anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2011-08-09 08:27
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