Nation of the Forest

Prayer flags for the dead never posed a problem in Bhutan until people began moving to cities.

In the Tibetan Buddhism practiced here, mourners honor the dead by flying 108 white flags, each attached to a tall wooden pole. They plant the poles on high ridges where, they believe, the wind will broadcast the prayers and mantras printed on the flags, enhancing the well-being of all living creatures. But now that a third of Bhutanese are concentrated in cities, deaths are concentrated there too. The need to cut thousands of trees for flagpoles year after year threatens to denude the surrounding hillsides.

In the early 1960s, when Sangay Wangchuk ’93MF was a small boy, few Bhutanese could afford enough cloth for 108 flags. His parents were subsistence farmers with little cash, and the climate was too cool for growing cotton. Once a year, they walked to India to buy essentials like cloth and salt. The trip took seven days, and whatever they brought back, they had to carry.

Nowadays, people have enough cash to buy flags and easy access to them, says Sangay Wangchuk, who directs the Forestry Centre for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. (Like most Bhutanese, he uses a two-part first name and no family name.) “Suddenly,” he says, “everything is available.”

Western-style consumption has come only recently to Bhutan, where tourists were not admitted until 1974 and television and the Internet were prohibited until 1999. Today, the government is actively trying to reduce poverty by promoting economic development. In Thimphu, the capital (and, with a population of more than 80,000, the largest city by far), the stores lining the commercial streets stacked on the hillside sell DVDs, computers, construction materials, imitation North Face jackets, and, for tourists, silver bracelets and scrolls painted with deities. Specialty shops catering to monks sell robes, sunhats, and fleece jackets, all in the maroon-and-gold palette of Tibetan Buddhism. They also sell prayer flags.

To spare the trees, since 2006 forest department rules have limited mourners to 29 poles and designated which trees can be cut. The traditional number of 108 is sacred, but Sangay Wangchuk says city dwellers have actually welcomed the restriction. “It’s like any other city—there are so many things to attend to. Now when they’re told, ‘We can give you only 29,’ they say, ‘Fine.’”

Dwindling pine groves are the kind of problem posed by economic growth in any developing, or developed, country. But two things make Bhutan singular: first, its royal family has promoted an ethic of conservation, what the Bhutanese call “the vision of our kings.” Second, the Bhutanese have formulated guidelines, infused with Buddhist values, for how to reconcile old and new, prayer flags and cities, so as to raise their standard of living while conserving their culture and environment. A small group of Yale alumni—Sangay Wangchuk and a dozen others who have studied forestry or environmental management at Yale since the early 1990s—are among the elite whose efforts will help to determine whether Bhutan can pull this off.

A visitor’s first glimpse of the Bhutanese forest can be frightening. Spiky pine trees rush toward the jet as it banks to avoid the steep mountainsides and veers toward the country’s sole international airport. Its single runway is so perilous that only a handful of pilots are certified to land there.

From the plane, the vista extends to snow-covered mountains rising more than 20,000 feet—the sharp young peaks of the Himalayas. We land in Paro, a town in a valley with thick forest beyond. Bhutan is known for the richness of life in its wilds. Clouded leopards and golden langur monkeys live in the subtropical foothills along the southern border with India; giant flying squirrels and red pandas inhabit temperate woodlands; black-necked cranes overwinter in the central valley; and blue sheep and rare snow leopards travel among the glaciated peaks that stretch northward toward Tibet. Bhutan has a fourth as many plant species as North America—a continent 600 times its size. And the city of Thimphu is most likely the only national capital where tigers roam within hiking distance.

Seventy-two percent of the land in Bhutan is undeveloped forest. The extent of its forestland makes Bhutan exceptional. “All the hill stations that stretch along the arc of the Himalayas—Simla, Manali, Gangtok, Shillong, Itanagar, others—have undergone rapid, unsustainable change, to varying degrees,” says Jon Miceler ’01MEM, managing director for the eastern Himalayas program of the World Wildlife Fund. “As the surrounding countries of India and Nepal fragment their forests, dam their rivers, and undertake lots and lots of mining, wildlife—including elephants, tigers, snow leopards—will gravitate to Bhutan, because they have so much habitat intact. It’s increasingly going to be a refuge, a place for biodiversity, because its forests link up northeastern India to the east, and eastern Nepal and Sikkim to the west.” Conservation International calls the eastern Himalayas one of the world’s ten “biodiversity hotspots.” All ten together occupy only 1.4 percent of Earth’s surface.

Miceler says the value of the forest to humans extends far beyond Bhutan; a large swath of South Asia depends on Bhutan’s intact forests. “The forest is a very important hydraulic regulator for north-south rivers that drain into India and Bangladesh. Natural forms of water storage are going to be very important as we potentially enter a drought cycle. These forests help regulate water that eventually empties into the Brahmaputra [River] and runs down to the Bay of Bengal.”

And because of Buddhist and government prohibitions against hunting, says Miceler, “Bhutan is one of the few places you can go and see wild herds of rare ungulates”—hoofed animals such as goral and takin—“and feed wild monal pheasants around monasteries.” In their interactions with humans, “they have never known fear.”

But can Bhutan remain a refuge?

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