Knowledge Networking Portal for Sustainable & Responsible Tourism
Mountain Shepherds Initiative
| Contributor | DiegoNunez |
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| Country | India |
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| Postal address | Village & Post office Lata (via Joshimath) Chamoli District, Uttarakhand, India 246443 |
| Phone | +91.971 931 6777 |
| bhotiya@gmail.com | |
| Webpage | http://mountainshepherds.com/ |
| Release date | 30/03/2018 |
| Landscape type | Mountain |
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Finalist, People Award 2015
The mountain of Nanda Devi was once the second most popular summit to attempt in the Himalayas after Everest. However, such popularity brought heavy environmental pressures on the surrounding region, and in 1982 the Indian government created the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve and shut the whole region to human access. This may have helped the natural environment, but it was a multiple tragedy for the local people, an Indo-Tibetan ethnic group known as the Bhotiya. In one go they lost access to their prime alpine pastures, to their source of medicinal herbs, and to the tourist trade that sustained them. The irony is that a few years earlier these same communities had given birth to the Chipko movement, whose activism to save the region's forests is one of the most celebrated stories in the history of Twentieth Century environmental activism.
