Photo: Geoff Childs
Cleaning harvested yartsa gunbu prior to sale.
Thanks so much to the folks who recently signed up to follow this blog. If you joined hoping that I would blog often about the topic that drew you here, you will soon find that the posts are rather eclectic. A couple years back, Suzanne thought it would be nice to have a blog tied to Luna & Stella, and she said I could write about anything that interested me. I thought, Wow! What an opportunity!
Today’s story is from the radio show Living on Earth. It’s about Tibetans in Nepal who have managed to avoid overharvesting a fungus that’s wildly popular in China.
“Anthropologist Geoff Childs of Washington University tells host Steve Curwood how one [area] is managing to harvest the resource sustainably. …
“Nubri is a valley in Gurkha district in the country of Nepal. The residents are ethnically Tibetan. They’ve been living there for about 700 or 800 years, so it’s an indigenous population of Nepal. What they have done in contrast to other areas is they’ve limited the number of collectors to only residents of the villages, and so that keeps the number of collectors way down. …
“CHILDS: What they’ve arrived at in Nubri is a combination of what they call ‘yultim,’ which we could translate as village regulations, secular regulations, and ‘chutim,’ which are religious regulations. … What they will do is, they will decree certain areas off-limits to human exploitation, and usually that’s a sacred grove of trees, a certain slope of a mountain that a deity inhabits or something like that. … In terms of the sustainability of Yartsa Gunbu, that’s going to be important because those are areas where annually nobody will harvest it. So it can come to fruition. It can spore. It can live out its normal life cycle.
In terms of the village regulations the first one that I just mentioned is the exclusion of all outsiders. The second one is they’ve got a designated starting date, and they arrive at that by looking at the snow melt, looking at the conditions in the alpine pasture and figuring out what’s going to be the likely time when it’s best to gather it.
“And so for a couple weeks prior to the official starting date, every adult in the village has to check in four times daily to the village meetinghouse to prove that you’re not collecting early. A third thing that they do is they tax it. For the first member of your household, the tax is very low; it’s 100 rupees or approximately $1 dollar … they gather that tax and use it for communal purposes.
“CURWOOD: So this consensus process, everybody agrees, everybody trusts, but they also verify. … looking at this from a broader resource management perspective, what are some lessons that we can take away from what’s happening in Nubri?
“CHILDS: Trust indigenous people. Don’t immediately assume that as outsiders with more education we can come in and devise a system that will work for them. I think, first of all, study what’s in place. Study with an open mind and move from there.”
Photo: Geoff Childs
Mt. Manaslu (26,759ft.) in Nubri is the 8th highest mountain in the world. 
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