The larger Nepal experience confirms the effectiveness of this people-based approach. A study was done with the Annapurna Conservation Area whose policies were shaped the year after the Saldima Meadow conference. The study found that twenty years after Annapurna’s creation while only 15 per cent of the population perceived economic benefit from the park’s main revenue source of tourism and eighty-five per cent reported hardship due to loss of crops or livestock from wildlife, support for the preserve was high. They recognized receiving other benefits such as infrastructure and services.7 In addition to these other benefits, they had learned and expanded their understanding. The Annapurna people like those of Shyakshila had pride (as do so many people around the world when they can live with nature).
When we learn to live in something we had never noticed before and with all its interlinked parts—the socio-econo-info-biosphere—a dimension of wholeness grows in our lives. This is more than conservation (using less) and more than protection (not using). Conservation or protection often begins in the premise of taking land off-limits.8 Doing so robs people of connection. People do not voluntarily join in working together when seeing things taken from them. What works is to adopt the mindset of being part of. Effectiveness comes in mutuality.
Nepal’s community forestry experience also proves this. Historically, Nepal’s forests belonged to government or large landowners. As Nepal’s population trebled, villagers stole timber as they needed wood. As the villagers were winning, it was not just the forests that were losing but also the national life. Then, in 1976, forests began to be transferred to Community Forest User Groups. Over two decades 17,700 groups formed and 1,650,000 hectares of managed forests came into being. Now one out of every three Nepali citizens is a member of a user group. From shared forests the people get fuel wood, fodder, grass, non-timber forest products, and poles for home construction.9 Other benefits come too, such as breaking down caste and wealth barriers, diversifying governance, and expanding income and credit opportunities.
Forests too benefitted. Nepal’s once denuding hills, which I remember prognosticating in 1970, would be bare red earth, today grow green across the country. My prediction was wrong because I saw people as the problem. A representative study of eleven user groups found that forest cover and biodiversity has improved in all eleven research sites.10 Particularly significant is how through the ten-year civil war, the forests continued to be maintained even when the rebels were using the forests as military redoubts.11 To enable the growth of trees, communities come together.
Parallel proof is in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. The Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve spawned thirteen other protected areas, conserving 44 per cent of the land area of Tibet.12 (More recently, that growth has expanded further to 54 per cent of Tibet and eighteen preserves.) A 1,200-acre preserve was even established in the city of Lhasa, bringing the wild into the heart of the city, right up to the valuable urban land of the Potala Palace.13 Across the Tibet Autonomous Region, each preserve is managed by community-engaged systems that follow with adaptations the Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve model. Every species of wild animal, when assessed at the Tibet scale, has population numbers rising. There is a regeneration also of forests on the lands outside the half of the land formally protected.14
SO AT THE END OF THE SEARCH FOR A WILD MAN IN THE SNOWS, a new wild grows. As a result, living with people are snow leopard, wild ass, musk deer, four types of wild sheep, rare pheasants, dozens of species of rhododendron, the majority of species of earth’s poppies and primulas. Many interesting aspects of life are included in this such as the giant cypress, one of earth’s largest and least known trees found only in the Tsangpo River gorge between the high-water flood mark and the riverbank.
On exiting from my solitary pilgrimage through these valleys, I met old friends Lendoop and Myang after a gap of a quarter of a century. Walking into Shyakshila, these men now old literally picked me off the ground with their colleagues and threw me back and forth. As we sat again on floors of their homes eating boiled eggs and drinking tea, Lendoop asked for help to make a walking trail into the Barun jungle. I was shocked. Of all places, the Barun is sacred—it must be kept unpeopled. While I can advance people-based management as national policy, certain areas should be apart I thought. And, of course, the cathedral of Nepal’s wildness was holy: the Barun.
Sitting on the floor where years before I had slept, neither the home’s floor nor wealth had visibly changed, and still it was these people who, to external material perspective had not advanced, had brought the wild back. Lendoop explained that because of the new park and the strict protection given to the Barun, now tourists walked around the Barun Valley when they went to see the mountains. As a result, the people of Shyakshila were losing employment, and, they noted, the tourists missed seeing the special jungle they had conserved for then a quarter of a century and through a civil war.
Embodying holy meaning, making the sacred sacred, I realized, comes from people valuing that above themselves. An idol, a crucifix, or a mosque becomes sacred when people lift it up to be so. The opportunity Lendoop was proposing was for the world to join in making the Barun sacred. To place their vision into my words, that would happen when people from outside could walk into the sacred space. People would enter the holy of Divine organization when they walked into the Barun—making the proposed trail would enable that—as in cathedrals an aisle allowing people to approach the alter makes profound the act of devotion. Maybe my science-minded colleagues and I in emphasizing action that denied access three decades had erred.
What creates authentic preservation? I could raise money and hire people to protect the land. I could even raise money to preserve Shyakshila as a ‘historic village’ that displayed traditional life. The Barun and Shyakshila would then be ‘preserved’. But if every human holds equal right to partake of the world, Shyakshila should not be held in the past. Shyakshila should not just be invited into the process, but could help lead others.
So I reached into my bank account and gave several thousand dollars to purchase axes and shovels. Friends added more thousands to cleave The Yeti Trail through the jungle that today transects the Barun Valley (see A.1 and A.3). What is being created is pristine jungle connected to the world. The natural cathedral has that aisle now up its centre, and the people of Shyakshila are this basilica’s sextons.
A.3 The People of Shyakshila Village Making the Yeti Trail through the Barun Jungles
Source: Author
We have the opportunity to grow the wild back. In this wildness is the preservation of the world. Because, when (and if) the Yeti is proven to not exist, what will happen? Humans will have lost a travelling connection for the journey of human experience. Humans will live, then, in separation from life. And, in this narrowly made creation, we shall have lost our genealogy.
This new wild of human making is more dangerous than the natural wild we once lived with. Homo sapiens today prowl in a world more perilous than that of tigers, cobras, and bears. That approach that separated us from the wild, saw nature as fearful, and changed the planet’s age from Holocene to Anthropocene. Unless we now change ourselves, we risk recoding our species in aspects more determinative than DNA from sapiens (wise) to Homo arroganticus.
Postscript
This narrative of my Yeti journey is factual with place, time, and discovery—except in one instance. The frozen lake behind the waterfall above Saldima is as described in Chapter 15. But it is not at that place where the community lives that was discovered with their homes adjacent to a glacial meadow. Nor does this community live in the Barun or Gama Valleys. I am not revealing the location, but there is such a community in the Himalaya, indeed I know of several, and their story is woven in here to recognize people that are now intentionally moving from privilege into living with the wild.
To find them we do not need to search the Himalaya. The Hindi word for them is sadhu, seekers of moksha—liberation.
Such people circle the world. On the Chinese side, these people are called xian. We live in a planet-connecting community of individuals learning to live with rather than take from. The communities they create exist everywhere—each of us has the opportunity in our lives with our neighbours.
In my distinctive life journey, I have been fortunate. All children grow up with spirit worlds—goblins, bogeymen, and spectres that give persona to incomprehensible natural forces. These characterizations explain the forces we naturally sense, feel very alive in our imaginations. One explanation for the Yeti is just that, persona to incomprehensive natural forces—where, for some people, wild hominoid understanding will always be.
I have been blessed, though, to grow up with a different Yeti. Convinced of a wild human life, I followed it through splendid valleys. I grew from this engagement so that with many colleagues from many countries we worked, and from that shared work brought forward a way. I am not a sadhu, but I have been privileged many times to touch moksha. Being with the Divine is joined through prayer as well as the work of service. Such a possibility is there for all, those lucky to know the wild, as well as those who imagine the wild. We thrive within these opportunities if we let them open to probe the deepest meanings of what it means to be alive.
A.4 The Author in an Ice Cave at 19,000 Feet in Gosainkund Himalaya
Source: Lorenz Perincoli
Notes
Chapter 4. My First Yetis
1. Eric Shipton, The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951 (London: Hodden & Stoughton, 1952), p. 54.
2. L.A. Waddell, Among the Himalayas (London: Constable, 1900).
3. J.R.P. Gent, ‘Letter to Royal Geographical Society’, quoted in Bernard Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), pp. 135–6.
4. Quoted in H.W. Tilman, Mount Everest 1938 (Kathmandu: Pilgrim Publishing, n.d.), pp. 127–37.
5. Tombazi quoted in Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals, p. 130.
6. Tombazi quoted in Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals, p. 131.
7. Smythe quoted in Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals, p. 134.
Chapter 5. Yeti Expeditions
1. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 81–2.
2. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, pp. 86–7.
3. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, pp. 44–5.
4. Peter Byrne, unpublished documents, quoted in Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989), pp. 62–3.
5. Foreign Service Despatch, 30 November 1959, ‘Regulations Governing Mountain Climbing Expeditions in Nepal—Relating to the Yeti’, signed by Counsellor Ernest H. Fisk, American Embassy, Kathmandu, Nepal (quoted on Slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2103/02/26).
6. Sir Edmund Hillary, View from the Summit (London: Doubleday/Corgi Books, 2000), p. 242.
7. The World Book Encyclopedia 1961: Annual Supplement, S.V.E. Hillary (Chicago: Field Enterprises).
8. William C. Osman Hill, 1961, ‘Abominable Snowmen: The Present Position’, Oryx, VI(2): 86–98.
9. Eric Shipton, The Untravelled World: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1969), pp. 195–7.
10. Anthony Wooldridge, 1987, ‘Yeti Discovery in Western Himalayas’, International Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology, Vol. 6, pp. 145–6.
Chapter 7. Towards the Barun Jungles
1. Edward W. Cronin, The Arun: A Natural History of the World’s Deepest Valley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 153.
2. Cronin, The Arun, p. 167.
Chapter 8. Our Evidence Meets Science
1. See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/nyregion/thecity/06zoo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
2. Edward W. Cronin, The Arun: A Natural History of the World’s Deepest Valley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 157.
3. See Daniel C. Taylor, Something Hidden behind the Ranges (San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1995), pp. 137–8, 201–4, 213–16, 221–5, 273. In this earlier book, I first outlined many of the concepts developed more contemporaneously in the present volume.
Chapter 9. Evidence Slipping Away
1. With multiplying numbers of people consuming planetary resources at an ever rising rate, I offer this quaint term as descriptive of the change in the human species behaviour.
2. Johannes Krause et al. 2008. ‘Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal an Explosive Radiation of Extinct and Extant Bears Near the Miocene–Pliocene boundary’. BioMedical Central Evolutionary Biology, 8: 220.
3. R. Nowak, Walker’s Mammals of the World, fifth edition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
4. Gary Brown, ‘Bear Behaviour and Activities’, in The Great Bear Almanac (New York: Lyons & Burford, 1993).
5. D. Reid, M. Jiang, Q. Teng, Z. Qin, and J. Hu, 1991, ‘Ecology of the Asiatic Black Bear Ursus thibetanus, in Sichuan, China’, Mammalia, 55(2): 221–37.
6. Jewel Andrew Trent, Ecology, Habitat Use and Conservation of Asiatic Black Bears in the Mountains of Sichuan China, thesis for Master of Science (Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech University, 2010).
7. Christopher Servheen, Stephen Herrero, and Bernard Peyton, Bears: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN/SSC Bear Specialist Group).
8. John R. Napier, Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: E.P. Dutton Books, 1972), p. 61.
9. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterson-Gimlin_film.
10. William Bright, Native American Place Names of the United States (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), p. 422.
11. Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004).
12. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 336.
13. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 349.
14. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 361.
15. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 363.
16. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 443.
17. Long, The Making of Bigfoot, p. 447.
18. Korff, Kal K.; Kocis, Michaela (July–August 2004). ‘Exposing Roger Patterson’s 1967 Bigfoot Film Hoax’. Skeptical Inquirer. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 28(4): 35–40.
Chapter 10. From Whence Knowledge
1. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. xiii.
2. Armstrong, The Battle for God, pp. xiv–xv.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals IVA 164 (1843).
Chapter 11. The King and His Zoo
1. Michael Tomasello, Origin of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2008); David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. Sometimes the word used is namaskar, which literally means ‘I bow to your form’. Here again the palms are pressed and there is a slight genuflection—speech originating through a language of body movement, not words. In English, we seem to be tiring of our once almost-universal ‘hello’, and, as the language evolves, we are turning to ‘what’s up?/good-to-see-you’ or other experimental salutations. Perhaps our earlier greeting (hello) indeed needs to change, having lost its origins in old German, according to which ‘Halo-ing’ means ‘fetching’ a ferry, or in the cry of ‘Hollos’ that originated from old English hunts.
3. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997); Tecumseh Fitch, The Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4. Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Holt, 2015).
Chapter 12. Back in the Barun
1. The Bible, ‘Book of Ezekiel’, Chapter 34, Verse 18.
2. The Bible, ‘Book of Jeremiah’, Chapter 2, Verse 7.
Chapter 13. Bears and Bioresilience
1. Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (Urban
a and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
2. Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons, p. 51.
3. Reid and Taylor, Recovering the Commons, pp. 8, 9.
4. Daniel C. Taylor and Carl E. Taylor, Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), pp. 6–9, 32–3.
5. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Chapter 14. Entrapping the Yeti
1. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), pp. 138, 143.
2. John Napier, Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973), p. 141.
3. Bryan C. Sykes, Rhettman A. Mullis, Christophe Hagenmuller, Terry W. Melton, and Michel Satori, ‘Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates’, in Proceedings of the Royal Society, B281: 20140161, recovered 26 February 2017: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/281/1789/20140161.full.pdf.
4. Eliecer E. Gutierrez and Ronald H. Pine, ‘No Need to Replace an “Anomalous” primate (Primates) with an “anomalous” bear (Carnivora Ursidae)’, published in Zoo Keys 487:141–54; 15 March 2015.
5. Modern Bhutanese Yeti reports, of which there are many, are not dealt with in this book. They fit with Nepali and Tibetan reports with features like the backward feet—and Bhutan has high mountain and jungle habitat of significant expanse. In 1961, The Third King did not suggest that the Yeti was a real animal; his curiosity about possibly a real animal came from the Nepali footprints, but he did speak of a spiritual animal his people believed in. However, it seems in the late 1960s into the 1990s, Yeti sightings as animal were reported in Bhutan, but now Yeti sightings appear to be fewer. A recent BBC report studied why, concluding that Yetis are less discovered because children spend less time in the mountains, and in so doing have less opportunity to find mysterious footprints. Relevant about this explanation is how Yeti footprints are being found by children who then live their lives with this childhood mystery. As with me! The footprints were not being found by experienced people of the mountains, like Lendoop, who could identify animal signs. Also relevant is that the king never believed these stories. Recovered 1 November 2015: www.bbc.com/news/magazine-3448314.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 34