Nigel JR Allan - IUCN - Pakistan

The Author
Nigel J.R. Allan was born in Scotland and had the uplands of that
country as his introduction to the land beyond the lowlands. He became
a shepherd on a Western Highlands mountain sheep farm in Scotland
at the age of fourteen, and later did his National Service as a Royal
Marines Commando in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus. Upon his
arrival in the United States he worked for Dr Chester C. Housh who
was responsible for relocating the local inhabitants of the Blue Ridge
Mountains of Virginia when America’s second most visited National
Park, Shenandoah, was created. Prof. Allan later designed appropriate
recreational landscapes in the Rocky Mountains for the U.S. Forest
Service while a faculty member at the University of Wyoming. He first
saw the Himalaya in 1966 when he lived and worked in India for a
year with USAID and travelled to Kashmir and Nepal. Since then he
has lived in and done extensive field research throughout the
Hindukush-Karakorum-Himalaya, including Afghanistan, Tajikistan,
Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Pakistan, India, and
Nepal. He has published Human Impact on Mountains (with G.W. Knapp
and C. Stadel), Mountains at Risk: Current Issues in Environmental Studies,
and Karakorum Conquered: North Pakistan in Transition. He is Professor
of Geography at the University of California at Davis. He also serves
as Research Affiliate in the Center for South Asian Studies at the
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