Public Project
Dust and Roads: The Land of Lo
Summary
Nepal’s Upper Mustang is exposed to overlapping agents of change that have the potential to reshape a mystical place that - despite being a trade route and region of significant spiritual importance - was in many ways an isolated “Hidden Kingdom” until the very last decade of the 20th century.
Development, economic pressures and climate change are all intensifying. While the climate has never been truly stable, the last century has seen changes that are unprecedented in the Earth’s history, and are right now pushing already marginalised communities toward unsustainability.
Fu Sangmo, a matriarch of around 80 years in age and Lhakpa Chouzom, a young mother of three, live in the village of Sam Dzong near the border with Tibet in the Nepalese Himalayas. Life here, never easy, has become increasingly precarious. Nestled into the landscape, the seemingly unplanned layout of the village is actually an organically emergent buffer against the winds that can tear through such valleys. Climate change is also affecting the amount of snow accumulation in the watershed above Sam Dzong, making their water supply unreliable, affecting the meagre subsistence agriculture practised in the region and threatening the animals the villagers rely on for income.
Many of these residents are beginning to abandon their homes in this village that has been occupied for the last 3000 years for a new settlement - “Namashung" - built for them and located closer to the regional centre of Lo Manthang, half a day’s walk away. However, Namashung is a linear development susceptible to the elements and the sharing of scarce resources with other nearby settlements. Looking out over the fields that stretch away from the clustered houses of Sam Dzong, and the ancestral caves lining the cliff face overlooking the village, it's easy to imagine where a reluctance to move can originate.
Adding to the pressure to relocate, the Nepali government has been improving the road along the Kali Gandaki river between Pokhara - Nepal’s second largest city - and the Chinese border crossing. With the road comes the promise of better education, health care and economic opportunity. To listen to Fu Sangmo and Lhakpa Chouzom discuss the possibility of moving is to hear firsthand of the many factors at play. What will be gained, and what will be lost. If residents of Sam Dzong stay where they are, a tributary of this road is unlikely to ever reach them, isolating their village further. The lure of an easier connection to the wider world is one which is proving hard to resist.
In the Kali Gandaki valley, this connectivity is on display as a parade of 4x4 vehicles climb the road to the walled city of Lo Manthang for the annual Tiji Festival. This gathering involves a series of ceremonies which celebrate the reincarnation of the Buddha chasing demons from the sacred land and marks the end of the dry season in Upper Mustang. Devotees gather from all over the region to witness and participate in religious ceremonies in the courtyard of the King’s palace, joined by tourists from around the world, making for a curiously mixed audience. As cameras record cultural practices that have existed for centuries, the shift that is occurring just over the next mountain pass goes unnoticed.
The Himalaya mountains serve as an effective dam that blocks the moisture-laden South Asian monsoon, leaving the entire district parched throughout most of the year. Across Nepal, farmers and herdsmen relate stories of high intensity precipitation events separated by periods of quiescence. In the past, steady longer-lasting snowfall would accumulate in the higher elevations, helping more water get absorbed and feeding the groundwater system, which in turn feeds the mountain springs that are the lifeline for communities in these arid environments. With the current climate crisis there is less snowfall and springs are drying up. As the groundwater system becomes less vigorous, more minerals and salts are entrained in the waning flow, and when that groundwater emerges as a trickle of a spring, the water quickly evaporates creating a slightly salty tasting ‘mineral water’, a more concentrated brine toxic to crops, or simply a white crust of pure Himalayan salt. The increased salinity of this water could also have the effect of increasing hypertension amongst the people that drink it, already a potential issue at such altitudes.
Factors beyond changes in the ecosystem, intersecting geopolitics, or challenges to deeply embedded cultural norms all complicate any understanding of the environmental challenges humanity currently faces. Any one factor alone will not trigger the changes we are observing in Upper Mustang and other communities around the world. What we are witnessing is in fact a collision of fronts that create shifts in orders of magnitude ranging from gentle nudges to Perfect Storms. Changes in the physical environment triggered by climatic instabilities, environmental disasters or Anthropogenic activity can often go unnoticed, or conversely, are even appreciated for bringing opportunity. However, changes in more marginal places can trigger shifts that haven’t occurred there in millennia. As climate change melts glaciers and affects freshwater springs, will roads and development then provide for these communities affected by the environmental changes unfolding around them?
Roads also have a varied impact in the monsoon-soaked middle hills and lower parts of the high mountain terranes south of Mustang. Following the aftermath of a bloody, decade-long civil war, foreign direct investment is spawning an explosion of road construction. The Government of Nepal has invested in a Strategic Road Network to connect the larger cities of the country, as well as extending to the more remote outposts like Lo Manthang. China also has an interest in seeing the road network of Nepal improved, as those roads might facilitate trade with the nation of 1.5 billion just to the south.
The routes through Upper Mustang in the Nepalese Himalayas are experiencing these pressures of economics, road construction, trade, tourism, migration and climate change. In 2010, the Nepali Army began widening this ancient arm of the storied Silk Road to accommodate vehicles for passengers who could afford neither the two weeks walk nor the airfare to fly from Pokhara to Jomsom, Mustang’s district headquarters.
The road was scheduled to be completed in 2018, but by the end of that year’s monsoon, the road had been closed for weeks at a time due to landslides and flooding and there were still no permanent bridges crossing the raging tributaries of the Kali Gandaki River pouring off the Dhaulagiris and Annapurnas.
Where the geologic substance that best embodies the road south of Jomsom would be, “mud”, the northern section would be, “dust”. The arid climate and gradual daily heating of the atmosphere creates driving afternoon winds of up to 70 km/hour when funnelled by what is the deepest gorge in the world. These winds pick up an endless supply of dust, which coats everything in a fine film and gathers in deep drifts wherever it finds shelter from the endlessly searching winds.
Throughout Upper Mustang, evidence of abandoned settlements and traces of agriculture can be seen, a tapestry of human geometry being slowly reclaimed by the elements. Surprisingly fertile patches of green share the landscape with these inhospitable remains. Such places stretch and compress time, revealing the varied pace at which change occurs. As these temporal rhythms intertwine, it is how we make sense of and respond to them that brings the question of agency back to the fore. What decisions we make, and who makes them for whom, is brought clearly into view.
Text by Tom White and Brian McAdoo.
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