THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

environment" (1982;6) of the Himalaya, with extreme altitude, gradients,
tectonic and climatic forces making the hills and mountains a "conveyor
belt" for the transport of eroded material almost regardless of the
activities of people upon them. Thus rather than blaming Ganges floods
on Nepalese hill farmers (an issue with obvious foreign policy
implications) people downstream should consider that, were it not for
"the transport of vast quantities of sand and silt by Himalayan rivers
over millions of years, there would be no Gangetic plain and no
developed economies to contrast with the poverty of the hills" (Gurung,
1982: 7).
The state of Nepal's forests is also being reassessed. While
Hoffpauir (1978) described deforestation in the upper Trisuli valley and
Dobremez (1986, vol. 11) wrote that forests around Salme were becoming
degraded at !ower a1 t i tudes, Macfar lane (pers, comm. ) could see 1 it t le
evidence of forest decline around Thak over a twenty year period and
Thompson et a1 (1986) cite an observer who has found that large tracts
of the forests around Khumbu have remained intact over the years,
Observations like this lend credence to Gilmour at ales assertion that
the crisis dimensions of deforestation in Nepal have often been
overplayed (1987).
Mahat et a1 (1986a,b) led the way in challenging many preconceptions
about deforestation in Nepal. They consider deforestation in the hills
to be a far from recent phenomenon (thus displacing the automatically
assumed link between it and population growth) and suggest that it might
in fact be decreasing, being as much influenced by government land-use
policies and land taxes as with the demands of subsistence agriculture
for more land (cf. Bajracharya 1983), Rather than local people being