by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
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A Swedish linguist, Helena Norberg-Hodge, arrived in Ladakh in 1975. Until the autumn of 1974, the entire region had been closed to foreigners for years due to Indian insecurity over the nearness to China and Pakistan, fears of infiltration and divided loyalties. A road connecting Ladakh to Kashmir had been completed in 1960, but it had only begun to usher in modernity. Over the next years, Norberg-Hodge, who quickly learned the language and became enamored of Ladakhi culture, got to watch as it began to change.
Her writings follow a narrative that will be familiar to those concerned with globalization: Ladakh was perfect, it was heaven, it was sustainable, it was humankind in harmony with the earth. Cooperation was the social model, not competition, and there was a palpable joie de vivre. But now it is being ruined, and the agent of ruination is Us, the West, consumer culture and market capitalism.
“Since Ladakh is in many ways a model society,” Norberg-Hodge has written,
it is tragic to see young people starting to reject their culture as primitive and filthy … Because of the very distorted picture of the outside world that they are gaining through contact with tourists, young people are beginning to think of themselves as poor and deprived. Since Ladakh first opened up, there has been an annual invasion of wealthy Westerners [who] are rich, and can travel thousands of miles for pleasure. They come for a few days, and spend perhaps £100 a day. In a subsistence economy, where basic needs are met without money, this is as if Martians would come to Bristol and spend £50,000 a day. £100 is what a family in Ladakh might spend in a year…
The impact on the young is disastrous; they suddenly feel that their parents and grandparents must be stupid to be working and getting dirty, when everyone else is having such a good time—spending vast quantities of money travelling and not working. For Ladakhis, work means physical work; the notion of stress resulting from mental work is unknown. So they get the impression that if you are modern, you simply don’t work; the machines do it for you. Understandably, the effect is that they try to prove that they are not part of this primitive bunch of farmers, but part of the new elegant modern world, with jeans, sunglasses, a radio, a motorbike. It is not that the blue-jeans (often uncomfortable) are intrinsically of interest; they are symbols of the modern world. Similarly, cinema films give the impression that racing around in sports cars shooting people—that violence—is modern and admirable.
Suddenly, being a Ladakhi is just not good enough; everything is done in order to seem modern. Tragically, this means leaving the village for the capital, where the money can be earned that will buy all the trappings of the modern world. It follows that basic needs can no longer be met locally. …
I was never in Ladakh at the same time as Norberg-Hodge, but I caught up with her in Manhattan in 2004, before a lecture she gave at an alternative downtown bookstore called Bluestockings, and we had a long talk. Over the years, her defense of traditional Ladakh has grown into a critique of the corporate production of food (and the centralization of any product that was once made locally) and globalization in its many aspects. I felt I could understand where she was coming from. But I wondered if she could still understand where Ladakhis were coming from, thirty years after her arrival, and asked her to put herself in the place of a young person, today, in a Zanskari village such as Reru: Wouldn’t she be in favor of a road? She thought about this for a moment.
“If I lived there and I only had the information they have, I would want the road,” she finally answered.
But wasn’t that like telling kids they shouldn’t eat too much sugar because of the likelihood (which you could appreciate only from having experience, and education) of tooth decay? You could do it if you were a parent. But tragically or not, we were not their parents. And yes, it was sad when a Zanskari replaced a beautiful thatched roof with an ugly corrugated metal one—but if it was your house, and the thatched roof leaked, might you not do the same thing?
The larger point, she responded, was that as an educated person with a broad experience of the world, you had a duty to help others find a better way, to learn from the mistakes all around you, mistakes that your culture was inflicting upon theirs.
I was familiar with these critiques of Western culture before I went to Ladakh. But their site-specificity, and Norberg-Hodge’s long engagement with Ladakhi culture, gave hers some added oomph. I knew she could go overboard: at her Centre for Ecological Development in Leh, I had watched a movie she had produced in which two Ladakhi women take a trip to London, and their experience proves what you suspected it would: that urbanized Westerners are wasteful, alienated, crime-prone, ambitious, and all the rest. She had discouraged Ladakhi farmers from using imported fertilizer, and had tried to dissuade Ladakhi women from wearing jeans. Male Ladakhi teenagers, the number-one adopters of Western ways, were her number-one cultural betrayers. Still, I felt that some essence of her message—the part about being proud of local custom and how you were raised—was true and needed to be heard.
On the other hand, I had not yet been to Reru when I spoke with Norberg-Hodge. And I had not met the children’s schoolteacher, Tenzin Choetop. Choetop, twenty-seven, was an interesting guy. He had been raised in a school run by the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), a famous institution established by the Dalai Lama for Tibetan refugees, in Choglamsar, just outside Leh. After years at the boarding school, he had lived and studied in Bangladesh, Dharamsala, and, most recently, Delhi, where he had worked as a cameraman on video productions. But life in Delhi had gotten too hectic, he explained, and he had sought out this job because it offered “time to think, and to read books.” He also saw rural teaching as a kind of giving back: at TCV, he said, “everybody was united, everybody was caring about one another.”
There were several teachers during the rest of the year but only him during the winter, and frankly, he admitted, he was going a little stir-crazy He seemed to turn up in every house I visited; he was thirsty for exposure to the outside world. Local protocol appeared to allow him to be a guest in anyone’s house at any time, and he joined in on several of the meals we were invited to—not that he gained many pounds from it. He was rail-thin and his goncha was ragged, but he had bright eyes and a quick mind, and we talked about many things. We discussed his students, and in particular, we discussed the new road.
“The roads will liberate them,” he declared in the kitchen of Lobzang Tashi. “They’ve spent a long time in a remote, secluded place. The Kargil road has improved Padum. If more roads open, with more movement of people, it will be good—everything will become cheaper, ideas will come. Right now people here are too involved in religion—they have too much culture, too much religion. They don’t think enough about outside ideas and people. The road leads to education, which will lead to more doctors, more teachers.”
Too much culture? There was a phrase you were unlikely to hear in a Western college or university. I asked what he meant by it.
“We need to escape from small-mindedness,” he asserted in the house of Sonam Dolma. “We need to keep up with the rest of the world. We need to know languages other than our own, so people on the outside don’t stare at us. Now, there’s a problem with interactions with other people: when people see us, they’re amazed. We don’t know how to interact with people.”
The shyness of the village’s young people, which I had viewed neutrally, as a cultural trait, Choetop saw as their impediment.
“Right now, most of them do not think about what education they will need—they would be happy to get a job in the army. And the girls, to marry someone in the army!” This time, Choetop spoke in the tumbledown home of Stanzin Lotus, sixteen. The teenagers who were leaving now would benefit from the exposure, but might not succeed immediately; sometimes it took a generation or two for things to change. “It takes time,” he said. “Their children will learn a lot.”
When there is a road, Choetop believed, more links between Reru and everywhere else, then “they will know there is a big
world beyond this valley, so many cultures. Right now, they don’t know, and they don’t care.” Again, their isolation and lack of knowledge, which I had halfway taken for granted, Choetop saw as unacceptable, as a barrier to development.
“If they do not change, and keep up,” he concluded, “the poor will be left behind.” The poor! Until people in a barter culture start interacting in a money culture, “poor” is not a word that comes up a lot. Norberg-Hodge has worried that people in Ladakhi villages are using it more and more. A shame, yes, but the cat is now out of the bag, and will not be going back in.
On departure day, Choetop came to see everybody off. But this time, as they bid goodbye to family and other friends, he stood apart. I knew he had some misgivings: he worried that the boys in particular were a bit immature for city life, and might not be well-supervised outside of class. I imagined that, like the many tearful parents, he was sad to see the youthful vitality leaving the village. But I also believed he was glad, because he believed that connection was necessary, connection was progress.
On our last day of walking, the Reru contingent pulled ahead of the rest of us. Rather than progressively exhausted by their travail, they seemed energized, like horses approaching a stable—the difference being that in this case most of the teenagers had never seen the stable before.
The end of the chaddar was the hamlet of Chiling, famous as the home of four metal-working clans. The copper and brass pots for tea and chang (an alcoholic homebrew), often decorated with silver and gold, that are proudly displayed in the houses of comfortable Ladakhis, are generally made here. Tradition has it that Chiling’s smiths are descended from four craftsmen brought from Nepal in the seventeenth century to construct the two-story-high image of the Buddha at the Shey gompa (monastery) south of Leh. When they were refused permission to return to Nepal with their wives, they were offered their choice of places to settle in Ladakh and chose this sun-drenched site on the side of the river, which had plenty available timber for their smelting. But Chiling was now gaining a different sort of fame, as the roadhead, so far, at this end of the Zanskar gorge. The frozen Zanskar River continued another nineteen miles, to its confluence with the Indus, but nobody walked it anymore because there was a road. The road had afforded access to a pair of small, rickety buses, into which the teenagers and their retinue promptly piled.
When we caught up in the late afternoon, they were sitting there, four to a seat, on a launch pad, as it were, to the outside world. Some of the dads and uncles were busy tying gear to the buses’ roofs—including, I noticed, one of the chaddar sleds made of bent rosewood, with its short black plastic PVC skids. There was something poignant about the sight: a Zanskari not wanting to give up an important piece of kit that had taken hours of careful work to assemble, had served him well, but would henceforth, in the larger world, be all but useless. Maybe he would store it somewhere in Leh, in preparation for the return trip.
But surely, for many of the young people in the bus, there would be no return trip. In my travels the summer before, I had tracked down a young man from Zangla whose tuition at a TCV boarding school in Choglamsar had been sponsored by an American documentary film company that had done a film in 1995 about Zanskar. Out of four Zanskari kids sponsored, three had never been back home, and he was one of them. I talked to several people, including him, about why. First, his family was poor, and travel back and forth was expensive. Second, others told me, his family had several other children, and had felt somewhat relieved that somebody else had been able to take responsibility for this one; it wasn’t like an upper-middle-class Western family sending a kid to boarding school and waiting for his holiday visits. Third, to the boy, returning home to Zanskar once he graduated was increasingly inconceivable: What would he do back there, he asked me when I visited him in his dorm—become a farmer?
I was not eager to see a road built through the chaddar. The valley was so beautiful as it was. Bad things were bound to come in; life would change, and not always for the better. But Zanskar was not a museum, and though there certainly were many Zanskaris who were satisfied with the status quo, Shangri-La was not a local idea. It was a Western idea, a symbol of what we lost when we advanced, a seductive nostalgia, a dream. Tenzin Choetop was more concerned with local reality, and with the concrete challenges faced by his students. If, of all the beautiful adolescents trekking down the dangerous ice to the unknown perils of the outside world, one—even one—came back a doctor, how beautiful would that be?
*Zanskaris were hoping to encourage adventure travelers to take a walk on the chaddar. In a market in Leh some time later, I came across a chaddar video featuring Dorjey as narrator; he had also written the script. After recounting the legend of the king’s cave, he added, “To avoid this kind of episode, it is advisable to the new trekkers to take the service of well-experienced porters and guides, preferably the native of Zanskar.”
ROAD ECOLOGY
I’M MAKING A SUMMER NIGHT’S drive from city to country. Leaving my driveway, I move from local street to parkway to interstate highway (several hours on this) to state highway to county road. I have to slow down as I approach the country house, of course, be more careful: the road’s shoulders are narrower, the verges less clear, the turns sharper, and there are no streetlights. Like every driver almost everywhere, I run things over—insects, mostly, but also rodents and the odd frog, snake, or bird. Unavoidable, of course; regrettable, yes; but not dangerous to me unless the thing is big. Deer and moose I very much do not wish to hit.
Maybe because I’m thinking of my five-year-old son back in the city, I notice a thing he might notice if he were here: a small shape near the shoulder, just starting across the road. I swerve to avoid it and then stop, alone on the road at this hour. I put the car in reverse and get that shape back into my headlights—it’s a toad. I climb out and, approaching it from behind, grab it. Near the headlight I take a closer look. It’s a pretty big American toad, Bufo americanus, enjoying the warm blacktop at day’s end. I place it in a paper bag and tie the top shut. It’s June. The toad can live with us back in the city until the fall, in a terrarium outdoors. My son will be thrilled. And I can congratulate myself on having killed one less thing on this drive.
Roads represent human progress, there’s little doubt. And yet, particularly in countries that have many roads and a long history of human settlement, more attention is being paid to the ways in which roads are obviously bad for other creatures.
After all, it is usually the case that one road follows another. Roads not only connect but intersect, again and again, ultimately dividing the land into polygons. The population of human beings thrives and expands: these are paths of human endeavor. The population of animals, however, and the number of plant and animal species decline.
The same road that lets me drive from home to mini-mart makes it challenging for a deer to get from forage to water, or a squirrel to exploit all the trees whose fruit is available at a certain time. If chickens were smart, they probably wouldn’t cross the road at all; but because living things want to move, to check things out, they do. For many animals, movement is not optional; it’s what they must do to find food, to survive.
The ones who fail are squashed on the pavement; some call it roadkill, others an animal holocaust of gargantuan proportions. Most are common species, but this is also a principal way the Florida panther, down to fewer than a hundred individuals, is going extinct, one rare animal after another, on highways like Alligator Alley near the Everglades.
But roads affect nature more subtly as well. In the 1960s and 1970s, biologist Edward O. Wilson’s research into the flora and fauna of islands led to recognition of what has come to be known as “edge effect.” Islands are particularly vulnerable to invasive species, he observed; they can encroach from all sides. Endemic species suffer when they do, and if the island is small enough, extinction may result. Wilson and others have since applied the “edge effect” concept to the “islands” of land created by roa
ds. Roads, they argue, reproduce the edge effect by allowing for avenues of invasion.
The edge effect is part and parcel of habitat fragmentation, a major consequence of roads. Researchers are looking closely at its implications. It turns out that the size and the shape of the piece of land partly determine what can live there: a few large parcels are better than many small ones, even if they add up to the same area. Certain species, for example, move away from the edge—they don’t like the commotion. Others are attracted to it—”weedy” and non-native exotic plants, and scavengers who eat roadkill. Edge zones can also be affected by chemical runoff from the road, including nitrogen oxides, herbicides, heavy metals, and road salt.
People have thought creatively about how to mitigate some of these ill effects. In the 1960s, at the behest of hunters, some 150 “game bridges” were built in France, which animals could use to cross over highways. Florida has built twenty-four passages under highways for animals, and modified others for their use. In the 1980s, hundreds of tunnels for migrating reptiles were built in Europe.* Amherst, Massachusetts, has two, designed to avert the slaughter of the spotted salamanders that migrate every spring.
Of course, larger forces are at work here than can be countered by fences, wildlife bridges, and a few pipes under roads. The road ecology movement aims to get planners and transportation departments thinking about better ways to build roads and minimize their detrimental effects on the environment. In the preface to Road Ecology, a 2002 book that is the movement’s manifesto, fourteen co-authors wrote, “As collaborating transportation specialists and ecological scientists, we are awed by both the present and imminent environmental challenge. With an additional 60 million North Americans anticipated in thirty years, how will society accommodate their desire for space and travel? Can society halt, or even reverse, the environmental deterioration caused by more roads and vehicles?” And that’s just North America. Populations are growing faster, and roads being built more quickly, in many other parts of the world. The coming of roads seems about as easy to resist as the incoming tide. And yet, maybe matters can be improved, with raised consciousness and some concerted effort, if only a bit.
