Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Claiming The High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, And Environmental Change In The Highest Himalaya By Stanley F. Stevens., Robert Stoddard

Department of Geography: Faculty Publications

If we were to believe everything proclaimed in the popular press, we would conclude that most of the vegetation and soil on the slopes of the Himalayas is being destroyed by humans—by either the local inhabitants or foreign tourists. To place these shrill proclamations in perspective, it is essential to have scholars carefully investigate the myriad of interrela-tionships among natural and human phenomena and to report their findings in a manner that recognizes the complexity of environmental changes. Such a service has been provided by Ives and Messerli in their book, The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation (London, New …