Not Seeing the People for the Population: a Cautionary Tale from the Himalaya

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the General Assembly of the United Nations identified a number of patches on the Earth’s surface — the Himalaya among them — as environmental ‘hot spots’: places where, if something was not done, the environment and its human inhabitants would experience catastrophic collapse. UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme), having succeeded in being given the mandate as the ‘lead agency’ for these hot-spots, found itself faced with a considerable challenge. It had to arrive at a clear understanding of what the problem in each of these hot-spots was, and it then had to come up with the solutions. UNEP set about this challenge in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has attended a demonstration of some wonderful new piece of military hardware. After a few words from the appropriate high-ranking officers, and to the accompaniment of many ‘yessirs’ and snappy salutes, responsibility passes rapidly down the line until it reaches the lance-corporal and his trooper side-kick who, as the crew of the death-dealing machine, have to make the thing actually work. In the case of UNEP and the Himalaya, that crew was myself and my research assistant, Michael Warburton (Map 11.1).