It is a tough life up there on the mountains. Tougher the terrain, tougher it is to eke out a living, or whatever you can. Development has been reaching out, but life still remains tough. In many places today there is better health care, improved transportation, education. There are fringe benefits in away, and these do come at a cost. The higher the cost, the tougher it is on life itself.

It is not always that developmental programmes ameliorate living conditions and life itself. It is not uncommon to find such efforts culminating in pushing self-sufficient mountain communities towards recession and even decay. There, needless to say, lies a mismatch between good intentions and unexpected consequences. There is no dearth of scientific knowledge and technical information about mountain issues. Most of this, sadly, is only accessed and understood by experts and specialists. The deadlock continues. Life remains tough.

Making an attempt to make mountain issues more accessible to the general public is this compilation of 13 articles commissioned to journalists and experts from the region during 1998-99. The articles do not read like sermons, but are a series of lucidly-written journalistic reports. Contentious issues and issues of concern well covered and so is the tough terrain of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush.

Areas like Dadeldhura and Badikhel among many others in Nepal, on the face of it, have been success stories of sorts. Village communities during the past two decades have taken control over the commons, letting forests regenerate. Today, more than 600,000 hectares of forests are protected by local communities and managed by more than 5,000 user groups. There have been resultant problems too. The living conditions of hill populations in Nepal have not changed as predicted. Literacy and life expectancy levels may have increased, yet half of all hill areas still report food shortages half the year around.

Community forests have also increased pressure on national forests. Degraded land in the vicinity of villages are more productive after being taken over and protected as community forests, but users still go to government-owned forests located on the ridges for fuel and fodder. Another growing concern is that of shrinking common pasture land following introduction of community forests. In high altitude areas, sheep are commonly used as a means of transport. The conversion of traditional grazing strips along the route into community forests has introduced a new set of problems. Recently, shepherds from the Humla area in farwestern Nepal who transport goods on sheep-back were forced to abandon their trade because pack animals could not graze en route.

The lessons from Nepal's community forestry saga, says Madhukar Upadhaya in 'Seeing the forest and the trees', are clear: forest resources can only be protected and conserved through participation of the communities that depend on these resources for survival. But pressure has begun to shift from lower forests to higher, more inaccessible forests. This problem, concludes Upadhaya, can be expected to abate gradually when community forests start to produce enough products under proper management. Alternatives for timber and fuelwood also need to be found and integrated with agro-forestry and alternative energy initiatives to reduce future pressure on Himalayan forests.

With few job opportunities in the Garhwal hills, just across the border in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, more and more people now head downhill in search of a livelihood, says Mahesh Uniyal in 'Fleeing the Mountains'. A 1996 study of migration from selected villages in the Pithoragarh and Tehri districts of the Kumaon and Garhwal Himalayas revealed that nearly 60 per cent of households had members who had left to seek a better living. The bulk of the migrants (98 per cent) were men, 44 per cent of them having read up to eight grades in school.

In 'Self-sufficient slopes', Shantanu Nagpal reveals that a new form of food insecurity now threatens the lives of farmers in the Hiamalaya-Hundu Kush region - the threat of depletion of key resources like water, fodder, and soil. Increased incomes might have brought prosperity, but the steam is running out of this strategy. While nice high-value agriculture does increase food supply, these have contributed to destroying traditional, indigenous farming systems in these areas.

Development work that ignores the fragile ecology of mountains often leads to more pain than pain. Poorly designed, badly constructed mountain roads, argues Beena Sarwar in 'Landsliding Away' are a case in point. Over 2,000 people of the town of Hazara in Pakistan's northwest, had their home destroyed by landslides in 1998. The villain of the piece, ironically, which brought misery to people of eight villages was a farm-to-market road connecting Balakot to Hangaree. The ADP project was meant to make life easier for the villagers, but mismanagement and insensitivity to the environment and people had the opposite effect.

Many people would sooner die than think. They often do. - Bertrand Russel.

David Hopewell's book was the direct outcome of a chance comment by his mother on the appropriateness of a certain form of biblical justice. What followed was a series of "less-civilised" debates with is mother and sister on one side, and himself on the other. The debates were not won or lost, but they did set young David thinking. The result of his insightful studies into the Bible and fundamentalist Christian literature was this book, the title of which was taken from Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, 'Heart of Darkness'. As the author mentions in his preface: "Of course, the real story in 'Heart of Darkness' is Marlow's journey into the dark recesses of his own soul and the discovery there of his own devils. Happily, I found no such creatures within' probably because I wasn't looking."

Hopewell says apart from one or two groups of Islamic fundamentalists now or soon to be in the possession of nuclear weapons, North American Christian fundamentalists are without doubt the most dangerous group of people now occupying the planet. "The threat they pose, out of all proportion to their numbers, arise from a single fact: their imaginations have been captured and inflamed by the unrelenting sadism, the primitive racism, the Neanderthal sexism, the hysterical xenophobia, and generally, the insane gore and barbaric bloodletting, of the bible, the book they want to impose on the rest of mankind as the guiding principle in politics and education and every other conceivable aspect of life." Fundamentalism, as he asserts, provides him with a more or less "dramatic example of a pathological type: the Bible-believer". The author is scathing in his assessment of the Bible and its proponents. He does not care a fig about being called a heretic psychopath when he says the Bible is nothing short of an abattoir manual.


Excerpts:

Bible Positions makes clear that a satanic conspiracy lies behind everything that (evangelist John) Hagee and his community of unreason dislike. To them, environmentalism is a demonic cabal, monstrous in both its intentions and extent. A newspaper picture of some of the participants at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio did not escape Hagee's jaundiced eye: they were kneeling in a circle! "I recognized the significance of the magic circle used in satanic and occult worship", he offers proudly. Like everyone else, Hagee is in favour of clean air and water (or so he says). We must understand, however, that the environmentalist movement simply employs these concerns as a cover to establish its own principality of evil: "the environmental movement is not about conservation. It's about creating an environmental juggernaut that marries the New World Order crowd and the New Age occultists with the objective of bringing about a global crisis that can be solved by a one-world government". Imagine! All those wicked people - probably getting their most demonic stuff done while they're in jail, or chained to trees, waiting to be "nuked," or recovering from malaria. This would be no problem for the truly wicked, though, since, as Hagee says, "Those who went to Rio opened themselves, willingly or unwillingly, to the invasion of demon spirits". What they and the rest of the demonic, non-Fundamentalist world have failed to grasp, according to Hagee and his friends, is that the most pressing environmental question has already been settled. As part of the divine plan for the end, "The earth's atmosphere will be destroyed in a nuclear explosion. That will be the end of the environmental issue. And there'' not one thing you can do about it"" The ""agan cretins"" as Hagee terms environmentalists, will finally be exterminated.


Excerpts:

To regard as divinely inspired such utterances as "Happy shall be he, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones"; to see as a worthy expression of spiritual commitment driving a tent spike through someone's head (Judges 4:21); to rejoice as the return of a Christ who will be up to his knees in the blood of those many millions of nonbelievers he promises to carve into pieces - all of this requires a degree of insensitivity, a deliberate perverting of one's natural humanity, which I think is only achievable through continued exposure to the book itself, the "book of books." What Dante saw inscribed over the lintel of the gateway to Hell, "Lay down all hope, you that go in by me," should, I contend, be prominently etched on every copy of the Bible, but altered slightly to read "Abandon reason, common sense, and compassion, all who enter here": that would at least give prior warning for something so completely unmatched in blood-drenched, sickening, mindless atrocity which bases itself on the Bible ought, for that very reason, to be disqualified from serious consideration as a model of human conduct.