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Deforestation in the Nepal Himalaya: A Village Perspective

The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal provides an instructive showcase for the processes of environmental deterioration, especially deforestation, that so often result from the agricultural settlement of mountain lands. In fact, Nepal has been cited as perhaps the most ecologically endangered mountain country in the world.1 Nepalese and foreign writers have observed that destruction in Nepal is pervasive, that it involves wholesale removal of the land's protective plant cover, and that the causes are the expansion of cultivated land and the overexploitation of wild vegetal resources to satisfy the basic food needs of the people.2 Nepal is a land of steep, rocky slopes, poor soils, an eight-month dry season, and a subsistence and peasant economy without any feasible alternative food-producing strategies or non-agricultural employment opportunities. It appears that these conditions, coupled with the pressures of a rapidly increasing population, are pushing the country toward environmental ruin at an alarming speed.