deforestation mt. everest essays

deforestation mt. everest essays When examining the effects tourism has on the environment, Mount Everest never comes to mind as high tourist attraction. However, in the last fifty years since Sir Edmund Hillary visited the region in 1953, mountaineering and trekking expeditions have been increasing in the region. With this increase in tourism comes a need for timber and timber related products. Stan Stevens, in this article, tries to determine the causes of degradation and forest thinning in the Sherpa-inhabited Mt Everest region of Nepal. The Sherpas are the local people of the region and have inhabited this area since roughly the 1500s. Although the area around Mt Everest has been a national park in Nepal since 1976, the Sherpas are completely dependant on the land in the area for survival, and thus have had to coexist with the sanctions places upon the region. The paper examines how tourism has placed new pressures on the forests and vegetation regions in the area, and the effect the Sherpas have had on these forests with the creation of inns in the area. The Sherpas using timber from the local forests around Mt Everest built these inns, which are used for the expeditions to the mountains. The increase in tourism has brought about a great deal of prosperity to the Sherpa people, but at the same time the prosperity has come at a cost to the environment. The inns built by the Sherpas have increased the felling of trees. As a result of the increase in tourism, an increase in the need for firewood has also occurred. The increase in tourism has created a need for up to 2000 tons of woods per year by the inns. In 1976, the creation of inhabited protected area, Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) National Park, has caused the Sherpas to obtain timber from nearby Pharak forest, which has caused these forests to also begin to thin out. Root causes of the forest degradation and thinning of the forest can be traced to two major factors, economic gain and convenience. ...