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Earthquake highlights ecological assault on the Himalayas

By Denis D Gray

Near Jabla’s heights, a panorama of villages is precariously perched on slopes either totally bald or just patchily forested, scarred by old landslides

The earthquake didn’t destroy Mohammad Shafi Mir’s house and bury his mother, but what followed seconds later did: a torrent of bounding boulders that thundered down the mountainside at killing speed.

As he watched in shock from a nearby field, the quake-triggered landslide - echoing like ‘tank fire on a battlefield’ - mowed down trees 1.5 metres thick, bombarded houses and enveloped the village in dust that turned day into dusk.

By the time the slide’s deadly run ended in the Jabla Nala River far below, nearly half the village’s 296 buildings had been shattered. Only the skeleton of Mohammad’s two-storey home still stood, the inside gutted by boulders and other detritus off the steep mountainside.

“I had just invested in a new kitchen, but I didn’t even have a chance to enjoy a single cup of tea in it,” said the 35-year-old breadwinner for 14 family members.

His injured mother was dug out from under the rubble and the only other person inside, his leprosy-afflicted father, miraculously survived.

Jabla was not alone. Landslides tumbled across the zone of the Oct 8 earthquake, dramatising not only the power a quake can unleash, but how humans have brought tragedy upon themselves through massive deforestation and other ecological assaults on the mighty Himalayas.

The Oct 8 quake is estimated to have killed some 79,000 people on both sides of the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between Pakistan and India, although the number of those buried in landslides is as yet unclear.

In the quake-hit region of Pakistan, just two kilometres from Jabla, landslides swept away uncounted numbers of homes. They severed roads, cutting off hundreds of communities which can now only be reached by helicopter.

Mountain slopes were shorn away in many areas, exposing gray earth and rubble that still emitted great clouds of dust two weeks after the quake. Aftershocks keep triggering new slides, hampering efforts to clear roads for relief trucks.

Mohammad, a farmer and worker at the village water works, attributes the destruction of his own house to Allah’s punishment for some sin he’s committed. But others in the village offer a different explanation - one long expressed by environmental experts and activists, but little heeded.

“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 just patchily forested, scarred by old landslides.

Like Mohammad - who says he’s 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 3,000-kilometre arc of the Himalayas, which runs through seven countries from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east.

In this once-remote region, loss of green cover from commercial logging, local cutting and overgrazing has made the land less compact and less able to retain water, which now rushes easily down mountainsides to set off slides that some call ‘ecological land mines.’

Adding to the danger are continuing watershed mismanagement, the replacement of natural forest by tree plantations - which also don’t absorb as much water - and greater, irregular waterflows as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, says Nithin Sethi, of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Technology.

“The problem is immense and it’s a daily one,” he says. “New towns are going up in the mountains, urbanisation and populations are increasing, so we are now perhaps more aware of the impact than before.”

The stripping of the Himalayas continues, despite the deaths and economic losses. Slides 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.

“These recent landslides served to remind us that ecologically the Himalayas are dying the death of a thousand clear-cuts,” a newspaper commentary said at the time of the Malpa tragedy.

Sethi, quoting official figures, says more than 8,000 square kilometres of dense forest were lost in 2001-03 in six already over-exploited regions of the Indian Himalayas.

In Indian-held Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has long raged, 1,351 square kilometres vanished.

“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. Everybody had a share. Future generations will curse us,” says Saquib Qadri, of the private environmental group HOPE.

With the army making some areas off-limits as they fight the 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, Qadri said.

In Jabla, where 17 people died from the Oct 8 temblor, residents fear more quakes and more landslides. Noting heightened activity along the Indian seismic plate since last year’s Asian tsunami, some seismologists have warned that a possible bigger Himalayan earthquake has yet to hit - and could register a magnitude above 8, compared to this month’s 7.6.

Mohammad, preparing to return to his family carrying four blankets from relief workers, says he may have to abandon his home, with its walnut trees, pasture and rice field.

“Maybe the landslide will come again,” he says. “So we are asking the government to help us move down and live in the valley.” ap

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