We had a great third community conservation workshop in Kathmandu with nine students and two NGO staff participating this time. Unfortunately, it started to rain for three days almost non-stop just before the workshop began. Nearly 10 inches of rain fell. This caused flash floods in the Kathmandu Valley and across Nepal on the second day of our workshop. At the time, we didn’t realize how bad the flooding would be, and we went ahead with the workshop. Luckily, everyone made it safely to the workshop and home again. Only one person who was coming from a nearby town about one hour away couldn’t make it because the road was flooded.
If you’d like to read more about floods in Kathmandu and what causes and contributes to their devastation, you can read an article by Dr. Tom Roberson. He describes how the valley has been transformed hydrologically: “…instead of soaking into the soil, rainwater now hits the roofs and pavement and shoots directly into low areas, filling riverbeds to the brim, sometimes within minutes.”
Despite the challenging conditions, the workshop was a success. The participants were motivated, thoughtful, and enjoyed getting to know one another.
Each time we conduct the workshop in person, we include more and more interactive activities, and less and less lecturing. This is an unusual way to teach in Nepal and the first time most participants have experienced this type of learning. Through the activities, they really get to know one another and learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences. Our goal is to help them build personal and professional contacts, while fostering shared interests in communities and conservation that will last for many years.
One of the topics participants said they enjoyed the most was learning about conservation values. This is my main area of interest and I use my own research from the past 30 years to demonstrate the diversity of values that communities have for the environment and biodiversity. For the activity, we ask the participants to guess communities’ conservation values in order with percentages for different places for places like Bardia National Park, sacred forests in Yunnan, and forests in Myanmar. They were very surprised to learn that extraction and tourism benefits are not the most commonly held values. Instead, conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services (such as rain and soil fertility) are the most common.
I have found that the assumption that communities prioritize direct livelihood benefits hinders conservation efforts across the globe. People, including conservationists, often assume that communities in countries like Nepal don’t value biodiversity because of their economic circumstances.
But who would better understand the full spectrum of benefits humans receive from the environment than those who are most directly dependent on it everyday? Not only do they receive direct benefits, like fuelwood and food, they also enjoy the clean air and water, the fertile soil for farming, the shade of trees, and the diversity of wildlife.
Another topic participants felt was important was learning what community conservation is. For most of them, they assume or have learned that community conservation is about providing benefits to communities, either to mitigate problems like human-wildlife conflicts or to convince them to support conservation activities. This is definitely not how we define it.
We define community conservation as communities actively managing and conserving biodiversity according to their own values and priorities. As our founder, Rob Horwich, said, he never walked into a community that didn’t have an interest in learning about and protecting their environment and biodiversity. I have always found this to be true as well.
Another activity that participants really enjoyed is one where they pretend they are introducing themselves and their idea for a conservation project to a community for the first time. Participants in this workshop had project ideas that included the conservation of butterflies, migratory birds, and snow leopards in the high Himalayas. Other project ideas included the removal of invasive species and the conservation of tree snags for woodpeckers.
During the introductions, the other participants pretend they are community members. We assigned them different roles, like mayor, community forest user group member, and women’s group representative. We also realized halfway through the activity we needed to assign them a positive or negative attitude as well, as people couldn’t let go of the assumption that communities would be negative toward conservation and only concerned about how they can benefit.
At the end of the workshop, participants were asked to write on a card at least one goal they had for the next six months to use something they had learned from the workshop. People had some great ideas, like “I will listen to people’s perspectives and not assume,” and “Do not assume you are unskilled when working with communities. I will not doubt myself,” and “I will work with communities and not force my own ideas onto them.” We will send these to them in six months and see how they are doing!
We are looking forward to the workshops we are planning over the rest of the year. Next up is Peru and then Cameroon. And if we meet our fundraising goals, we hope to train conservationists in Myanmar and Thailand as well.