Illiteracy and Poverty; Conservation Adversary

Human life totally depends on nature and natural resources. Forest and the forest based products are means of subsistence of most rural people in Nepal. Having no alternative options, people are compelled to embrace forest destruction and animal hunting / poaching activities. To feed, school and medicate their children, rural people use to collect firewood and sell them in market and generate money. They are unable to afford electricity, oil-lamp, petroleum gas and agricultural product that is why resources degradation and environment pollution are high in rural areas.
Conservation can not be made by keeping rural poor outside from the resources consumption. Conservation will be worthless by grabbing the poor people’s life. If we conserve the resources by ignoring rural people’s need then the saying will not represent “Resources Conservation for the human / life existence”. Therefore, poverty should be reduced first for conservation.

Similarly, In Nepal, to protect the forest and natural resources, government handed over forest to local communities and provided conservation and utilization responsibilities. Government assumed that forest will be conserved after delivering responsibilities to local people. But people did not know how to manage forest and utilize in sustainable way. They used to extract the resources irregularly and unscientifically. They used resources in order to fulfill short term benefit only because they were illiterate and unaware about long term benefit or to set proper vision and unknown about ecosystem, ecology and nature balance. As the result, we lost many fauna, flora and ecosystem in Nepal. Therefore, illiteracy should be eliminated for the conservation.

PARC therefore believes on “POVERTY REDUCTION & EDUCATION; CONSERVATION ADHERENT” and appeals conservationist and allied agencies to embrace it.

Dear reader, write on these matter whether you agree or disagree or you have more experience regarding this saying, ILLITERACY & POVERTY; CONSERVATION ADVERSARY”.

Thank you

Suman Bhattarai
PARC (Partnership for Rhino Conservation)
Nepal