South Asia: Pakistan and the Himalayan States - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 212

The Impact of Population
and Modernity

the situation and increased dependency relationships
with outside political and economic forces. Attitudes
take a long time to change.
Commercialization has transformed a barter econ-
omy to a cash economy . This, along with public interven-
tion, improved accessibility; media exposure and
tourism have combined to raise expectations. Simultane-
ously , social and economic inequities have intensified,
with little opportunity for improvement.
Until recently , efforts to improve conditions have
been top-down and rarely implemented effectively if at
all. Even with changing attitudes of large organizations
such as the World Bank and the United Nations and
the presence of more NGOs, funds continue to be fun-
neled into the foreign bank accounts of the politically
powerful. As we observed earlier in this chapter, cor-
ruption and vested interests reign supreme in this
region.
Research in the region of the Himalayas has made
clear at least three important facts. First, a society' s in-
ability to live within the usable limits of a biophysical re-
source base generates responses that inevitably cause
environmental alteration and degradation. Second, mar-
ket forces can be singled out as the most significant fac-
tors underlying those responses. Third, policy makers
and farmers perceive neither the problems nor the solu-
tions in the same way . This derives from differing degrees
of closeness to the problem and differing stakes in out-
comes of both problem and solution.
While the situation is critical in many areas, espe-
cially environmental, for many people general well-being
has improved. Land reform, health care, income subsi-
dies, increased education, self-help programs, and so
forth have exerted some positive impacts. However, most
of these have bonded mountain communities to outside
power structures more tightly than ever.
Clearly this northern region of South Asia is rife
with complex problems. Some of these arise from envi-
ronmental constraints. Others emerge from transitional
political settings. At the turn of this twenty-first century ,
however, two trends are apparent. On the one hand, in-
ternational and global economic and strategic concerns
are increasingly overriding the impacts of local geogra-
phies. On the other hand, global frameworks are coun-
terbalanced by cultural and territorial identity
consciousness. This is an era of rampant and proliferat-
ing nationalism. Unfortunately , in many regions environ-
mental integrity and social well-being have become lost
in the shuffle.

For thousands of years, Himalayan villagers have sur-
vived by subsistence farming and herding. For many ,
transhumance was a way of life. But all this has changed
as the region becomes more populated and entangled
with the forces of modernity .
Populations increased with immigration of Indians
from the twelfth century and again with eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century food surpluses. However, road con-
struction in the 1950s allowed the advent of modern, al-
though limited, health care. This resulted in a drastic
decline in death rates, an increase in life expectancy , and,
inevitably , a population explosion. The populations of
Pakistan, Nepal, and Bhutan are predicted to mushroom
by 85, 67, and 46 percent, respectively , by 2050 (refer to
Table 3-1).
With the increasing population, land use intensified
on already limited farming and grazing areas, resulting in
reduced crop yields and ruined pastures. Greater wood
requirements meant that woodlands were rapidly de-
pleted. Productive land use systems that sustained
smaller Himalayan populations for centuries were unable
to support the added numbers.
The average population growth for the entire Hi-
malayan region is 2 percent. This, combined with a de-
crease in the area of cultivated land and a mere 1 percent
increase in farm yields, means that local food produc-
tion can no longer keep pace with human requirements.
Because living conditions are deteriorating, many poor
women feel the need to have more children to help
them.
With self-sufficiency destroyed, ecological migration
began in earnest. People sought new land in higher and
even more fragile environments, where too-steep slopes
and thin soils cannot support intensive cropping or graz-
ing. A second, mostly male ecological migration to lower
elevations is an ongoing process. Cities and towns of the
hills and lowlands swell with unemployed males, while
women and children assume added burdens in their
mountain villages.
Many outsider “experts,'' agencies, and national and
local governments have held the view that the people
were “destroying their own environment'' with their
primitive and harmful methods. But proposed solutions
have been drawn from experiences elsewhere. These of-
ten do not appreciate the intricacies of varied niche
environmentsof mountain settings. Consequently , mod-
ernization efforts and palliative programs have worsened