Earthquake Dramatizes
Human Ecological Assault on the Himalayas
October 24, 2005 — By Denis D. Gray, Associated Press
JABLA, India — This month's massive
earthquake did not destroy Mohammad Shafi Mir's house and bury his
mother, but what followed seconds later did: a torrent of boulders
thundering down a mountainside.
As he watched in shock from a nearby field, the landslide -- echoing
like "tank fire on a battlefield" -- mowed down 5-foot-thick trees,
crushed houses and enveloped the village in dust that turned day to
dusk.
The landslides that tumbled across the zone of the Oct. 8 earthquake
dramatized not only the power of nature but how humans have brought
tragedy upon themselves through massive deforestation and other
ecological assaults on the Himalayas.
In this once-remote region, loss of green cover from commercial logging,
local cutting and overgrazing has weakened the land's ability to retain
water, which now rushes easily down mountainsides to set off slides that
some call "ecological land mines."
Watershed mismanagement has added to the danger, as has the replacement
of natural forest by trees that do not absorb as much water, said Nithin
Sethi of the Delhi-based Center for Science and Technology. He said
global warming has also played a role by causing irregular waterflows
from melting Himalayan glaciers.
"The problem is immense and it's a daily one," Sethi said. "New towns
are going up in the mountains, urbanization and populations are
increasing, so we are now perhaps more aware of the impact than before."
But the stripping of the Himalayas goes on, despite deaths and economic
losses.
This month's quake is estimated to have killed some 79,000 people, most
of them on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control that divides
Kashmir. On India's side, landslides killed nearly 300 of the 1,360 who
died from the quake, said B.B. Vyas, a state government official
overseeing relief work.
Slides also swept away scores of villages in 2002 in areas of Pakistan
not far from the current scenes of devastation. A 1999 quake and
accompanying slides killed 100 people and destroyed 6,000 houses in
northeastern India's Chamoli area. A year earlier, torrential rains
loosened mountainsides that obliterated the India-China border town of
Malpa, killing 205.
In Jabla, where 17 people died from the earthquake, the landslide
shattered nearly half the village's 296 buildings by the time it
finished its deadly run. Only the skeleton of Mohammad's two-story home
remained standing, the inside gutted.
His injured mother was dug out from under the rubble and the only other
person inside, his leprosy-afflicted father, miraculously survived as
well.
The 35-year-old breadwinner for 14 family members, Mohammad is a farmer
who also has a job at the village waterworks. He attributes the
destruction of his house to Allah's punishment for some sin he has
committed.
But others in the village offer an explanation long shared by
environmental experts and activists.
"If there had been more trees, we would not have lost as much. The
impact would not have been as great. It is our mistake," said Qayoon
Shah, a young teacher, standing by the ruins of the village school.
Near Jabla's heights, house builder Haday Tullah surveyed a panorama of
villages precariously perched on slopes either totally bald or patchily
forested and scarred by old landslides.
Like Mohammad -- who says he has cut trees and grazed cattle on the
slope above his house -- 60-year-old Tullah has also unwittingly
contributed to the destruction, having felled trees for logging
companies and the Indian army in the 1960s.
"The forests were once very thick, but the generations pass so people
have to build houses and collect firewood and the trees disappear," he
said.
Spawned not just by earthquakes, but more often by heavy monsoon rains,
landslides and high-speed mud flows plague the entire "roof of the
world" -- the 1,800 miles arc of the Himalayas, which runs through seven
countries from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar, or Burma, in the
east.
Sethi, citing official figures, says more than 3,000 square miles of
dense forest were lost in 2001-03 in six already overexploited regions
of the Indian Himalayas.
In Indian-held Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has long raged, 521
square miles vanished.
With the army making some areas off-limits as they fight militants,
grazing grounds of traditional herdsmen have shrunk, intensifying their
exploitation of pastures and tempting them to feed their cows, goats and
sheep inside national parks, said Saquib Qadri, of the private
environmental group HOPE.
"There has been ecological havoc in the last 15 years. Security forces,
the militants, anyone who wanted to cut down a tree in Kashmir did so,"
Qadri said. "Future generations will curse us."
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AP correspondent Matthew Pennington contributed to this report from
Pakistan.
Source: Associated Press |