Himalaya Bound Page 8

  Early in the morning, while the sky was still a wash of soft pastels, Dhumman, Yusuf, Namith (who had rejoined us the previous afternoon), and I left our camp and walked to the nearby road, where two faded white Ambassadors were waiting. I met a handful of other Van Gujjars, including Dhumman and Yusuf’s cousin, Alfa. A man of regal demeanor, he had arctic-blue eyes that added a startling intensity to his appearance. He was also a lambardar heading for Govind, and I would soon come to know him much better. In each car, three people squeezed into the front with the driver, while four of us sat pressed together in the rear. As strange as this scenario could have seemed—five bearded nomads, one local driver, one ethnic Bengali, and an American, tightly packed into a vehicle speeding through the dawn—in the moment it felt perfectly normal.

  The forest department campus was a calm and shady oasis off a dusty, traffic-filled commercial street that was lined with grain wholesalers, charcoal dealers, used-auto-parts shops and wedding tent rental agencies. A few modest buildings surrounded a parking lot, on one side of which was a low cement wall that framed in a garden in which leafy trees were planted. The trunks of the young saplings were ringed with wire fencing.

  By the time we arrived, some seventy Van Gujjars were already there. They stood around talking, sat on the retaining wall or squatted under the shade trees. Some had interrupted their migrations along various different routes and made their way to Dehradun, while others came from Gandikhatta to lend their support. I was greeted warmly by Manto and the other SOPHIA staffers, but they had work to do, so I settled in near Yusuf, among the nomads, on the periphery of the action.

  A prominent leader of Uttarakhand’s Congress Party, Suryakant Dhasmana, arrived to voice support for the Van Gujjars and to help negotiate on their behalf with the park authorities. Local journalists came to cover the story, and a handful of Van Gujjars formed a circle around them, not wanting to miss a word as they interviewed Dhasmana, Manto, and Alfa, who was nominated as the spokesperson for the nomads.

  To call this event a rally or a protest would be an exaggeration. There were no slogans chanted, no fists or voices raised, no signs or banners waved around. The men and women who had come to speak up for their rights sat peacefully in the shade, talking quietly among themselves, chewing tobacco and smoking bidis, by their presence alone showing that they supported the families who needed to access the meadows of Govind. When a small group of lambardars—including Dhumman and Alfa—went into the forest office to speak to Rajaji Park Director S.S. Rasaily—who was also in charge of Govind—some of their fellow tribespeople followed as far as the building’s porch. They waited under the awning in a hushed state of suspense. A few tried to peer through the windows to glimpse what was going on inside, but most sat patiently, mentally preparing themselves for whatever the news would be when the door opened. They seemed less like a group of people fighting for a political cause and more like a family in a hospital waiting room, wondering whether the surgeons in the operating theatre were going to emerge with a verdict of life or death for an injured loved one.

  Ever since the modern environmental movement began in the mid-nineteenth century, “no people in parks” has been a mantra embraced by conservationists and governments worldwide. As national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and other types of nature reserves have been established around the globe, millions of indigenous people have been forced off of the lands that their tribes had lived on for hundreds if not thousands of years. On the surface, the rationale behind these evictions seems simple: the best way to preserve fragile ecosystems is to keep people—except for tourists—out of them. The reality, however, is much more complex, and always has been.

  The vast majority of conservation displacement in recent decades has taken place in Africa and Asia, but the practice was first pioneered in the United States over 140 years ago. In the 1800s, as people of European ancestry spread westward across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Pacific coast—drawn by gold or land or religion or adventure or the limitless possibilities of the frontier—certain places of awe-inspiring beauty came to achieve iconic reputations in the American imagination. Among them was the Yellowstone Plateau, where abundant wildlife roams a scenic wonderland of verdant meadows and expansive evergreen forests, where rivers course through dramatic canyons and plunge over sublime waterfalls, where high rocky peaks tower over bizarre geothermal features. Two-thirds of the world’s geysers are found there—including the biggest (Steamboat) and the most famous (Old Faithful)—along with searing hot mineral springs and cauldrons of boiling, bubbling mud.

  By the time the first awe-struck reports and otherworldly illustrations of Yellowstone emerged, industrialization was rapidly expanding in the eastern part of the country and the wild landscapes of the west were being tamed and fenced and settled. As Americans witnessed the depletion of what had once seemed like a vast, inexhaustible wilderness, a collective sense of nostalgia, mixed with alarm, emerged for what was being lost. Americans rallied around the idea of protecting Yellowstone, and when it became the world’s first national park in 1872, the idea was to preserve it in as pristine and natural a state as possible.

  Yellowstone and other extraordinary places—such as California’s Yosemite Valley—became symbols of the purity of nature and the perfection of God’s original creation. Like the Garden of Eden before the arrival of Adam and Eve, they were seen as being free from human influence, places where plants and animals lived and thrived in harmony, away from the meddling, inherently destructive hands of men. As appealing as that sounds, it was a fantasy that bore little resemblance to forces that truly shaped the reality on the ground in the American West.

  Native Americans had lived in the Yellowstone area for thousands of years. In the mid-nineteenth century, one clan, called the Sheepeaters, resided there year-round, while other tribes—mainly the Shoshone, Bannock, and Crow—hunted and gathered and camped there on a seasonal basis. They didn’t simply shoot a few animals while passing through, but—as humans are inclined to do—actively engineered the Yellowstone ecosystem to meet their needs. They set fires to clear thick underbrush and to open up forested areas, encouraging the expansion of grasslands that could support the populations of deer, elk, bison, and antelope that they hunted. They created a network of trails that they and the wildlife could use to get around. They promoted the growth of the shrubs, berry bushes, and tubers that they valued as food sources, while eliminating competing plant species. In many ways, Yellowstone’s environment was, for centuries, tended and cultivated like an actual garden, not one out of Judeo-Christian mythology.

  Conservationists in the mid-1800s, however, were blinded in one eye by their visions of pure nature and in the other by their disregard for native peoples. As a result, they had little appreciation for just how profound the human influence on Yellowstone’s ecosystem had been. Lacking this understanding, they worried that warriors on horseback might hunt the large game animals to extinction or that the tribes might accidentally burn down the whole forest. They believed that the only way to create the park they imagined was to completely ban Native Americans from it.

  Yellowstone had always been important to the tribes, and at the time the park was created it had become absolutely essential to them. Years earlier, when the Shoshone, Bannock, and Crow were forced to live on reservations, the treaties they signed gave them the right to go off their reservations to hunt on public lands. But as white settlers began moving west in greater and greater numbers, the newcomers claimed vast tracts that had once been common property. Overhunting and overgrazing wherever they went, they killed off or drove out the animals that the tribes relied on for survival. Yellowstone Park, however, was off limits, and became a rare haven for wildlife—as well as the largest intact piece of public land in the region.

  The tribes knew that park officials didn’t want them there, but they now had nowhere else to hunt. And they believed they shouldn’t have had to go anywhere else, since their rights to
access Yellowstone had, in fact, been guaranteed by the government. Having already ceded most of their ancestral territory, they weren’t going to stop harvesting game in the park just because white men now wanted to take that from them, too. In the end, the U.S. Army was called in to chase the tribes out.

  Protecting wildlife was only one of the motives for expelling Native Americans from Yellowstone. Administrators also wanted to make the park easily accessible to visitors, but they believed that tourists would stay away if they knew that Native Americans—who were popularly depicted as brutal savages—were roaming freely around there.

  Besides, the authorities reasoned, by keeping the tribes on their reservations and forcing them to abandon their so-called “primitive” ways, they might one day become civilized and be able to participate in mainstream American society; banning them from the park, therefore, was for their own good.

  As increasing numbers of people toured Yellowstone, along with the other national parks that were created soon after it—from which tribes had also been pushed out—the notion of wilderness as a purely natural place, free of human influence, became cemented in American consciousness. After all, when you visit a park, that’s what you see—pure nature, inhabited by no one. The idea had shaped the reality, which confirmed the idea.

  Today, over three million people go to Yellowstone each year to experience its wonders. Most have no idea that Native Americans were once forcibly evicted from the park. Few would even imagine that to be the case—since it is pristine wilderness, it logically follows that no one ever lived there.

  From a conservation perspective, Yellowstone has largely been a triumph, protecting majestic scenery, important ecosystems, and plant and animal species from the depredations of development. As the conservation movement gradually spread throughout the world, nearly all parks and wildlife reserves were based on the so-called “Yellowstone model.” In developing nations, most places worthy of protection—from grassy savannahs, to thick jungles, to alpine meadows, to picturesque deserts—also happened to be inhabited by indigenous or tribal communities whose livelihoods and age-old cultural practices relied on, and were inseparable from, the lands selected for parkdom. Apparently, they never got the message that people don’t live in the wilderness. They would have to be moved elsewhere.

  Today, over twelve percent of the land on earth has been officially protected. No one knows exactly how many people have been displaced by parks worldwide, but estimates by human rights organizations range from at least five million to tens of millions. Some studies place the number of these so-called “conservation refugees” in Africa alone at around 14 million. In India, since the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 banned people from parks, the number of adivasis and other forest dwellers who have lost their traditional lands is estimated to be somewhere between 100,000 and 1.6 million, while another 3 to 4 million are slated for eviction. Thanks to the passage of the Forest Rights Act, they might now be allowed to remain.

  Despite the assurances made by many different governments that taking people out of the wilderness would improve their lives, many conservation refugees have struggled to adjust to lifestyles that they don’t want, wallowing in poverty as they’ve been stripped of the ability to sustain themselves in the only ways they’ve ever known. Meanwhile, cultural losses have reached tragic proportions, as communities disconnected from their lands and their ways of life, and exposed to new and different influences, simply can’t maintain many of their cherished traditions.

  In recent years, the human and cultural costs of displacement have begun to be recognized. Some conservationists are stepping away from a strict “no people in parks” mentality, and peoples threatened with eviction have become increasingly empowered to speak up and be heard. In addition to raising provocative human rights issues, many conservation refugees—including the Van Gujjars—make an impassioned environmental case for staying on their traditional lands. They agree that wildlife habitat needs to be protected—they just don’t think it needs to be protected from them.

  They point out that it’s their traditional territory that’s been deemed special enough, pristine enough, and home to enough rare wildlife to be worthy of becoming parkland—which, they conclude, means they must be doing something right.

  Some of these communities deliberately design their practices to keep their environments in balance, based on an empirical understanding of natural causes and effects. Others have eco-sustainable rules and taboos built into their religious beliefs and superstitions: some pastoralists in the Malian Sahara, for example, never camp in exactly the same place twice, they say, because once they leave, those spots become haunted by evil spirits; this, of course, also happens to give the land a chance to recover after it’s been used. Many forest-dwelling people in India maintain sacred groves of trees, dedicated to the gods, which are never cut and remain a rich source of biodiversity. The Maasai, in East Africa, virtually never hunt wildlife for food—though they are surrounded by it—out of a sense of personal pride and peer pressure: “If you have to hunt, it means you are a terrible herder,” a Maasai chief from Kenya once told me. In parts of the world where resources are scarce, agreements are often made within and between tribes that establish who can graze, hunt, or harvest at which times and in which places, to avoid overuse and avert conflicts.

  Strict environmentalists counter that indigenous people have never been ecological altruists and are not really interested in protecting biodiversity. Rather, their ways of life encourage the continued survival of the plant and animals species that they rely on; other species may happen to benefit indirectly from those practices, while others may suffer or be lost.

  At the heart of this debate is a fundamental difference in perspective about the relationship between man and the environment. Many forest-dwelling and indigenous peoples see themselves as integral elements of the natural ecosystems they live within. In other words, they belong there, just like the wildlife does. But most mainstream conservationists disagree: since the forest dwellers are human, they are by definition an invasive species in their ecosystems.

  This is the fundamental premise behind the “no-people-in-parks” protocols: that humans cannot be natural, native parts of environmental ecosystems.

  While conservationists have long treated this premise as fact, indigenous activists argue that it’s simply a theory rooted in deeply entrenched Western biases. The notion of a split between nature and mankind seems like an obvious truth to most Europeans and Americans, the activists contend, because it is based on a set of assumptions that is seamlessly, invisibly ingrained into the conceptual architecture upon which the Western world-view is built. You might attribute the origins of these core assumptions to the teachings of the Catholic Church, or to the philosophy of Descartes, or to an innate Western mentality; whatever their source, the understanding of man’s relationship to nature that is drawn from them is not a picture of objective reality, but a culturally-filtered interpretation. As we have seen with the way that Yellowstone has reinforced the idea of pure nature as a place without people, these kinds of assumptions and interpretations can become self-perpetuating and self-validating, to the point that it seems absurd to question them.

  Since those who drive and fund the conservation agenda—including large NGOs, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—are mainly based in the U.S. and Europe, when they implement plans that they’re convinced are best for the environment, those plans generally reflect their Western belief that humankind is not a part of the natural world. This has led to accusations from conservation refugees that “no people in parks” is a form of “green imperialism.”

  To them, the idea that forest dwellers are invasive species makes no sense. They’ve inhabited their lands for so long, they say, that removing them would alter the ecology more than leaving them where they are.

  When I was in Kenya, I visited Maasai Mara National Reserve, which is best-known as the home of one of nature’s greatest spectacles: t
he massive wildebeest migration that thunders through each summer and early fall. The Maasai tribespeople who once roamed the savannahs there with their cattle, sheep, and goats were banned from the park and now live around the edges of it. Some still take their herds into the protected area to graze, but only at night, and they don’t penetrate very deeply. A local Maasai man told me that the main reason why they were cleared from the park was for tourist appeal. “People come from all over the world to see lions and elephants. They don’t want to pay a lot of money to see cows.” As long as the grazing was done after dark, when the tourists wouldn’t notice, he reasoned, it was okay. According to him, the rangers agreed, and simply looked the other way.

  Talking later with a Maasai chief and a biologist, I asked if they had seen any ecological effects within the Maasai Mara that they attributed to the expulsion of the Maasai. Both agreed that the foraging patterns of the wildlife had changed. Before the Maasai were evicted, the wildlife had been more widely dispersed over a greater area, they said. Now, grazing animals—such as gazelles, zebras and topi—are spending more time closer to the fringes of the park, and even outside the park boundaries, in the very areas where the Maasai keep their herds. “Due to the livestock, the grasses there are shorter, so the animals feel safer. It’s harder for lions or cheetahs or leopards to sneak up on them,” I was told. Removing the Maasai from their ecosystem had been like pulling on one thread of a tapestry, which then pulls others along with it.