The Snow Leopard Project by alex Dehgan

Author:alex Dehgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

* At the time of writing, it is still only on a tentative list for inscription as a World Heritage site.

* Christopher Shank and John Larsson, A Strategy for the Establishment and Development of Band-e-Amir National Park, DP/AFG/74/16: Field Report 8 (Kabul, Afghanistan: Food and Agriculture Organization, 1977).

CHAPTER 7

VAMPIRES IN THE LAND OF LIGHT

IN THE POPULAR imagination and in most images (including the one on the cover of this book), Afghanistan’s landscape is parched, dusty, rocky, and largely barren of vegetation and trees, a legacy of thousands of years of deforestation. But this imagery doesn’t represent the whole country; Afghanistan is rich in habitat and colors from the western end of the Himalayas in the northeast, to the rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush and the Hazarajat Plateau, to lush floodplains along the Amu Darya River, to rich wetlands dotted with the fiery pink of flamingos and thousands of birds migrating between Africa and Asia. But it was here, in the country’s east, that we found the most unexpected ecosystems that jarred with people’s jaundiced expectations of the country’s landscape: it was verdant, thick alpine forests drenched by Indian monsoon rains, breaking the summer droughts that limit plant life elsewhere in the country, within the aptly named Eastern Forests Complex of Afghanistan.

This region contains some of Asia’s last remaining arid conifer forests. The complex runs from the border of Badakhshan Province in the north to Paktika in the southeast, also touching on the provinces of Kunar, Laghman, Nangarhar, Paktia, and Khost. Here, thick stands of spruce, oak, cedar, pine, and fir mark an interface between Asian and European fauna. The Eastern Forests are rich in wildlife, including historical populations of many wild cats (large and small), jackals, striped hyenas, yellow-throated martens, bears, ibex, markhor, urial sheep, wild boar, and even Afghanistan’s only primates, macaques. There were also reports of a rare, highly valued creature that was thought extinct in Afghanistan: the musk deer, a small mammal with remarkable vampire-like fangs.

Our goal in the Eastern Forests Complex was the bread and butter of conservation—surveying the wildlife that was here before, understanding the threats to the biodiversity, and working to address those threats and underlying drivers. The Eastern Forests were important simply for their diversity, but what made them a priority site for WCS were the risks facing the area and its wildlife. Deforestation posed a major challenge. The region’s trees are cut at unsustainable rates, especially in the lower-lying oak forests, to supply both fuel for homes and fodder for domestic animals. High-value timbers such as cedar are also cut to supply Kabul and international markets. Additional demands on wildlife populations came from the heavy hunting levels for food and for the illegal wildlife trade in furs and other animal products.

What made the Eastern Forests different from other parts of Afghanistan was the wildness of the region and its people, the danger of working in one of the world’s most treacherous borderlands, and the insurgency against the US occupation that used

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.