The Tibet of my childhood, paradise of wildlife
THE TIBET I GREW UP IN was a wildlife paradise. Even in Lhasa one did not feel in any way cut off from the natural world. In my rooms at the top of the Potala, the winter palace of the Dalai Lamas, I spent countless hours as a child studying the behavior of the red-beaked khyungkar, which nested in the crevices of its walls. And behind the Norbulingka, the summer palace, I often saw pairs of trung trung (Japanese black-necked cranes), birds which are for me the epitome of elegance and grace, that lived in the marshlands there. Not to mention the crowning glory of Tibetan fauna: the bears and mountain foxes, the chanku (wolves), sazik (the beautiful snow leopard), the gentle-faced giant panda, which is native to the border area between Tibet and China, and the sik (lynx), which struck terror into the hearts of the nomad farmers.
Sadly, this profusion of wildlife is no longer to be found. Without exception, every Tibetan I have spoken with who has been back to visit Tibet after an absence of forty or fifty years has reported on the striking absence of wildlife. Before, wild animals would often come close to the house; today they are hardly anywhere to be seen.14
The Dalai Lama remembers his childhood fascination with different animals, especially the ones he saw during the three-month journey across Tibet to be enthroned in Lhasa. The Tibetan government officially protected animal life, posting proclamations every year declaring that “rich or poor, no one may harm or do violence to the creatures of the land and water.” But since the Chinese occupation, development of the land and hunting and fishing have steadily reduced the presence of wildlife. Animals have been hunted for their fur, their hide, their wool, and their organs, and many species are now extinct or endangered.
In Tibet the mountains have become bald as monks’ heads
ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS ARE NEW TO ME. In Tibet we used to think that nature was pure. We never asked ourselves if it was all right to drink the water from a river. But the situation has changed during our exile in India or other countries. Switzerland, for instance, is a magnificent, impressive land. But its inhabitants tell us, “Don’t drink the water from this stream; it’s polluted!” So little by little, Tibetans learned and realized that certain things are dirty and unusable. Actually, when we settled in India, many of us fell sick and had stomach problems because we had drunk polluted water. It is through experience and meeting experts that we learned about ecology.
Tibet is a large country with a vast territory at a high altitude and with a cold, dry climate. These conditions probably provided the environment with a natural form of protection by keeping it clean and cool. In the meadows in the north, in the mineral zones, in the forests and river valleys, there were many wild animals, fish, and birds.
Once I was told a strange thing. The Chinese who settled in Tibet after 1959 were farmers who built roads and liked meat very much. They used to go duck hunting, buttoned up in their army uniforms or in Chinese clothes that alarmed the birds so they flew far away. Eventually, these hunters resorted to wearing Tibetan clothes. This is a true story! This happened especially during the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when there were still a large number of birds.
Recently, a few thousand Tibetans went back to their birthplace in Tibet. They all say the same thing. They say that forty or fifty years earlier, immense forests covered their native land. Today the mountains have become bald as monks’ heads. There are no more tall trees, and sometimes even the roots have been dug up and taken away. That is the present situation. In the past one would see large herds of wild animals, but now there are almost none left.
Large-scale deforestation in Tibet is distressing. It is not just regrettable for the natural sites that have lost their beauty, but also for the inhabitants who find it hard to find wood to heat their houses. This is a relatively minor point compared to the grave consequences of deforestation viewed from a wider perspective.
The majority of Tibet comprises arid zones at high altitudes. Thus, the earth there needs more time to renew itself than in lower-altitude regions with a humid climate. Negative effects are felt for a longer period of time. Moreover, the rivers that irrigate most of Asia, including Pakistan, India, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Salween, and the Mekong—all originate in Tibet. Pollution of the rivers has catastrophic repercussions for the countries downstream. Yet it is at their source that both widespread deforestation and drilling for mines are occurring.
According to Chinese statistics, there are 126 types of minerals in Tibet. When these resources were discovered, the Chinese exploited them intensively, taking no protective measures for the environment, so that deforestation and mining sites are causing more and more floods in the lowlands of Tibet.
According to climatologists, the deforestation of the Tibetan plateau will change the impact of cosmic radiation on ice (since forests absorb more solar radiation) and that will affect the monsoon, not just in Tibet but in neighboring regions. So it is of prime importance to preserve the very fragile environment of the high plateau. Unfortunately, in the Communist world, as we’ve seen in countries like the former Soviet Union,
