A trip to my native village has killed something inside me

I saw firsthand how an entire society is sleepwalking into an unfathomable disaster

Look at this image first:

Then this:

And this video here:

The first one is the south-facing landscape and the second one the north-facing slope just below a mountainous peak (2,195 m) in mid-part of the Mahabharat range in Nepal. It is now mid-monsoon and I just visited this place during the book tour for my climate-themed book that was out last year.

I was devastated by what I saw: entire lush forests had turned into ghosts like this one after the unusually prolonged wildfire season last year.

Before this, I could imagine only a pine forest being wiped out like this. As such, conventional assumtion in Nepal has been that the grown-up trees have little to be afraid of a wildfire; it only burns the foliage and the saplings.

How wrong we were. Or rather, how fast things are moving on. First a total disappearance of rain in the winter leading to a wildfire season that stretches for months and months.

Then the fire itself that scorches the land and kills even the grown-up trees, even in the north-facing slopes that used to have so much moisture we didn’t even imagine them burning during our childhood.

If you are already sad and anguished reading this, please bear with me. This is not what killed something inside me. It is this: the villagers were perfectly OK, some of them even jubilant with all this apocalyptic damage to the plant kingdom—and the entire ecosystem including the animals—in our area.

Many of them openly started the fires, others witnessed them. For them, it is a net gain situation: a good fire leads to good grass the following season which can then be burnt again as there are so few people remaining and rearing livestock in the mountains.

I’m sure those of you outside Nepal and not versed with the way we Nepalis behave will struggle to understand this near-suicidal mindset.

Things get even more confusing when you notice that the fumes rising from the wildfires, compounded by the even more toxic fumes rising from the burning trash mostly in the urban areas, often take cities and villages in Nepal to the No. 1 position in the list of places with heaviest air pollution in the world through the winter and spring in the Northern hemisphere.

Nepal’s own Ministry of Health gives the data that 41,300 people die an untimely death every year due to air pollution alone. That comes to about one death every 12 minutes in a country of less than 30 million people. The daily air pollution death toll has already overtaken the entire annual death toll from flooding, landslides and thunderstorms.

Still, I found some villagers arguing like this in favor of starting forest fires: by clearing bushes, they can see the ‘invading’ troop of monkey or a lurking leopard.

Listening to this, I had to fight the wave of misanthropy and nihilism that swelled inside me against the wishes of my thinking brain. I could not resist the thought: are these the people who are supposed to be saved from the ravages of climate crisis? The flame-happy citizens, ready to set fire on anything and kill any number of living beings, just for a good view of a non-existent leopard, living in a country where the state merely extracts and exploits?

Now that the forests are decimated, I see no way forward for their regeneration with increasingly sparse winter rain. Eventually, Nepal risks undoing the achievements of the entire past half century towards increasing the forest cover in a matter of years.

Moreover, we are also set to lose billions of dollars in potential future revenues that Nepal could have made under any functioning international carbon trade mechanism.

With profound sadness and a sense of irrparable damage within me, I kept pedaling through the slippery slopes of unpaved tracks in the village.

On my way back to Chitwan, I decided to take cycling to next level by pedaling all the way to Pokhara, Nepal’s top tourist destination, from my native village about 75 km away in Baglung.

I had started the day from my village and spent almost two hours in a high school on my way mostly discussing climate crisis with the teachers and students.

I left that school at noon. It was raining on and off from the morning. By evening, after crossing dozens of streams swollen due to the rain, I reached the most difficult part of the entire journey: the 12 km non-stop uphill climb from Nayapul to Kande.

As if to test my stamina, the rain grew heavier and heavier as I ascended, eventually resulting in a downpour that made it twice harder to pedal.

Wet, exhausted, hungry and cold as I was, I felt far less miserable than I feel during an average winter or spring day in Nepal when the smog almost chokes you and every breath fills like an assault on your lungs.

Now you can imagine the level of my misery throughout the year except the few summer months.

When the ascent was over, it was already 9 pm. Pokhara, teeming with lights all over except the beautiful Fewa Lake, was visible from the other face of the mountain. But alas! I could not cruise at the expected 50 kmph or so while descending, instead I kept the speed at 10-15 kmph because the road was slippery because of the incessant rain and I—accustomed to transform every travel opportunity into a survival drill—had no source of light.

Eventually I reached Pokhara in another hour and the home in Chitwan the next day and reunited with my wife and the four-year-old son. Looking at his innocent face, I have been consumed by an escapist fantasy ever since and often literally dream of leaving toxic smog of Asia forever and settling somewhere else with clean air throughout the year.

Finally, here is the bonus content for Nepali speakers among you titled ‘What is in the future?’, the AV rendering of the opening essay I have included in the new edition of my book: