High Frontiers by Bauer Kenneth Michael

Author:Bauer, Kenneth Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science/Life Sciences/Ecology
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

CONSERVATION DEVELOPMENT: SHEY PHOKSUNDO NATIONAL PARK

Amid the rise of a global environmental movement in the 1970s, Nepal’s first national parks—Royal Chitwan and Sagarmatha—were created.16 Before this, protected areas in Nepal had been sacred places, guarded by custom and religion, or hunting preserves, playgrounds reserved for the elite. Nepal’s first parks were organized around conserving two international icons: the endangered tiger and Mount Everest (Sagarmatha). Foreign governments, led by New Zealand, helped create the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (or DNPWC; a unit of the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation) and trained the first generation of Nepal’s conservation workers. Strict nature protection ideals were prominent in the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act of 1973 (cf. Stevens 1997c). Today, the DNPWC is responsible for the management of almost 15 percent of Nepal’s total land area.17 This land network was set up to protect representative samples of Nepal’s ecosystems and shelter important watersheds.

The Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has defined national parks as areas where one or several ecosystems are not materially altered by human exploitation and occupation and where “the highest competent authority of the country has taken steps to prevent or eliminate … exploitation or occupation.”18 To some visitors’ consternation, though, the lofty mountains and dense jungles of Nepal, which they had supposed were wilderness areas, were in fact highly humanized and being actively used by local populations for natural resources. The wilderness paradigm of conservation, as expressed in the Wilderness Act of 1964 (United States), held that

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