*[Editor's Note: Remember that bit about not being succinct? I've broken this part into two sections, with the first part below, so read that first. I'm still figuring out how to order posts, so bear with me if things move around a bit. And I promise no post will ever again be as long as these two! -M-]
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What I realized while sitting alongside my little stream, on the day in early April when I backpacked alone, was that I like thinking about how people related to the natural world, and specifically to the resources that we all depend on, and value aesthetically. I am partial to forests, myself, and am also very interested (particularly these days) in issues of access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and so for me it was clear that I was headed towards trees, and water.
Trees were perhaps my first love in the outdoors, from the cherry blossom tree that was planted in our front lawn at the time of my birth, which I’d grown up climbing, all the way through to summers spent wandering in the woods near upstate NY where my grandmother kept a cottage, with my Peterson’s Field Guide to Medicinal Plants in hand. I would study forests, forest management, and the way they relate to water (to be very simplistic, intact and generally undisturbed forests help to clean and purify water more effectively than disturbed or poorly managed ones do), and I would use the opportunity of returning to graduate school to do research on forests in another country, both so I could have intimacy with and expertise in a specific place, and so that I could leverage that technical scientific background to obtain a better, more influential, position in the international environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) world I’d begun to claim as my own.
I knew that forest management research would be satisfying, and enjoyable to me, and that publishing the results of my research (which is required for the FES Master of Environmental Science degree, which I am pursuing) would be of great benefit to me as a professional. I knew that the international element would prove to be important personally and professionally, but decided before beginning school that I was reluctant to return to Latin America and so would look elsewhere, even though it was the most obvious destination for someone with a Latin American Studies minor, who speaks fluent Spanish, and who lived in Ecuador and Peru during study abroad to do her research. But I was afraid I would compartmentalize myself as a Latin American specialist, rather than being well-positioned for a Staff Scientist role or, more ideally, an Associate Director of Scientific Programs type of position at an ENGO, and so decided I would instead do my research in either Asia or Africa.
When I was not selected by my first choice of academic advisors and was placed instead with a faculty member who focused on Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand, I felt that the decision had serendipitously been made for me – I would go to Asia. Nepal and Bhutan were both on my short list of countries I was interested in doing research in (as were South Africa, Argentina, Kenya, and China), and to have a professor who specialized in this area of the world seemed the easiest route to making such a huge transition in geographic specialization in a well-supported way. I knew I would learn whatever language was spoken in the country I visited (I think this is very, very important, and will touch on it again in later posts), and that I would need to work that much harder if I was to be ready for an international field season relatively “by myself,” in a country I had never been to before, which I didn’t even decide on until the first week of October, a scant seven months before I’d leave for the field.
In the end, I settled happily on Nepal and learning Nepali, as I thought that the community forestry system in Nepal, where local community members who depend on the forest for their livelihood are put in the position to manage the forest as a committee, was fascinating, and I thought the lessons that could be derived from research there were more widely applicable than those in Bhutan. Bhutan limits tourism by a very savvy practice of charging an astronomical daily rate for tourism, and as such has a steady flow of income and less evident impact of external interference (as in, cultural pollution from other more developed countries as a byproduct of globalization and tourism), than Nepal does. It would be less expensive to do research in Nepal, and there was a strong community of Nepali students at FES who I was getting to know, and who I knew would help me to prepare for a summer in their home country.
So I decided on Nepal, and committed myself to it with determination. I read everything I could find, checked out every book that had Nepal and forest in its keywords across four or five different Yale libraries, and enrolled in Yale’s Directed Independent Language Studies program, to be paired with a Nepali student as a language partner for the spring semester, that I might begin to acquire language skills. I aggressively pursued and eventually was awarded the funds to travel to Nepal on a prep trip for three weeks over my spring break, and used the time to network with professors, make arrangements for my accommodations, and take a two-week long Nepali language intensive. I short, I did everything I could reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably) fit into a busy graduate student’s schedule, in order to be ready for this experience.
And so that, at long last, is how I came to be here. I’m studying community forestry because natural resource management by the people who depend on the resource appeals to my values, my politics, and my person, and because the kinds of questions you can ask about how such participation in management has impacted the participant’s perception of their world, and their role in it, are amazing. I love the idea of going into the villages and talking about trees and plants, and how they’re used, with community members, and I love that in research we have this unique opportunity to share knowledge in both directions – to learn from the community members instead of expecting them to just learn from us. I came here in part because I wanted to experiment a little with personal philosophies about international collaboration and field research in less-developed countries, as well, and will delve into that more in a later post. But I value about Nepal that on the subject of community forestry, the Nepali PhDs and professors are by and large the world’s experts, and I like how putting myself into the position of a learner in this country subverts the dominant development model oh-so-slightly.
Traditionally, the US and other developed nations have participated (and at times, intruded) actively in the development of countries like Nepal through USAID and other organizations, sometimes with mixed results. This has absolutely been the case with forest management, and it is interesting to see how now we have learned to step back just a bit, and see what is happening in the place we seek to help before we go in there and “help” them right into a dramatically degraded forest (this actually did happen). I think we have learned that we can no more institutionalize development abroad than we can “decide” to build democracies – what we must do instead is support the work of the people in the countries where the work must happen, asking them what they need, and what they want, in terms of skills, ideas, and resources, rather than telling them what to do and how to do it, or that they must do it as we have. I cherish the way agency is daily restored to Nepal and Nepalis, and community forestry is a terrific model system through which to explore that transition.
There are many examples of how this has happened and how it has, at different times, succeeded and failed, but this blog post (or these two!) grow a little long in the tooth, so I’ll leave it at that, for the moment. Suffice to say that my coming to both Yale and Nepal was as much about a long, serendipitous sequence of events as it was about me knowing myself, and what I needed at the time when I was making the decision. It reminds me of that chorus of the song that always sticks in my head, about how “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”
-M-
