The recent tragic plane crash in Nepal reminded me of an excursion
trip I once made in a similar rickety-looking plane while in
Kathmandu on holiday about 15 years ago. The notional reason for
this excursion was to see Mount Everest at close quarters. My own
reason was to see the tops and flanks of the smaller mountains which
lay below and cover a great deal of the country before reaching the
dramatic uplift of the Himalayas.
Days before, I'd noticed young men carrying heavy churns of milk down
mountain paths that snaked their way upwards, well above the terraces
of the rice-growing farmers (where, incidentally, one farmer allowed
this hubristic Western tourist to try his hand at ploughing with the
community's one and only water buffalo. Needless to say I made a
complete mess of that particular terrace, and received more than a
hateful glance from the buffalo!) Back to the milk run, it was
finally delivered to a cheese factory in late afternoon. The next
day, like a clap of thunder, I suddenly realized that the mountain
farmers must be even poorer than the rice farmers below them because
they couldn't afford even a community donkey to carry the milk as it
was collected from them, pint by pint, from this goat and that, on
the daily round.
Back to the plane, thus while all the other tourists were crowding
up-front to see the Himalayas better, I stayed in my seat and looked
downwards. The tops of these mountains, still peaky but more eroded
than the chisel-edged Himalayas, lay only about 500 feet below so I
could clearly see the miles of foot paths that lay between them and
occasional patches where grass and vegetables could be grown.
Somewhere among them must have been the occasional general store,
though I never saw one, because, during the flight, I saw many
peasants trudging along the paths miles from anywhere carrying goods
on their backs. One of them, I distinctly remember, had obviously
bought a cooking pan.
Their destinations were very obvious. Their farmhouses were widely
scattered about, usually on the tops of mountains that were vaguely
plateaux. It was then, with a shock, I saw that many farmhouses were
situated on the very edge of what had been major landslides. Not all
of them, but quite a number. The landslides looked fresh enough to me
to suggest that they had occurred in the peasants' fathers' or
grandfathers' time. No doubt in many instances the farmer had plans,
or was in the process, of moving his house further away from the
edge, but many of them were within inches of a steep scree slope.
Perhaps, in some cases, the farmer judged from the state of his soil
that the next landslide might be a generation or two away, there were
many that would surely start to go whenever there was a heavy
rainstorm. But they stayed because there was no other suitable place
to move to. No doubt, whenever it rained badly enough, such a farmer
would remove portable items from his farmhouse and he and his family
would sit in the rain for the duration.
Nevertheless, this was a graphic reminder that although the
agricultural revolution of roughly 8,000 years ago is much celebrated
for giving rise to cities, and then advanced civilization and all the
fantastic technologies that we are so proud of, it also caused
remorseless expansion of population to a level thousands of times
great than in hunter-gatherer epochs until every square yard of the
face of the earth that could possibly be exploited by manual labour
was, in fact, so used. Or very close indeed at the present time.
It is strange indeed that the powerful personal computer I'm now
addressing is owed to the same effect that is also causing more than
a few Nepalese families to take the risk of living on the very edge
of destruction.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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