Sumana Serchan

This morning, we woke up to the sight of white snow covering the bushes that ran along our porch. It had stopped snowing and outside the rain mixed with snow made snow slush on the pavement. We trotted on the snow during our silviculture field trip where we visited a woodlot that was actively managed by the water company. We learned about different forest treatments that are applied to the forest to meet the needs of the community as well as to ensure the health of the forest. After the termination of the field trip in late afternoon, many of us settled in the church-like bowers auditorium in the forestry school waiting to have a discussion with Dr. Bill Burch.
A Frederick C. Hixon Professor of natural resource management emeritus of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Dr. Burch has a wealth of experience in community forestry from his years and years of practice in Asia, especially Nepal, Bhutan and other parts of the world. He was also instrumental in establishing the Urban Resource Initiative. Sponsored by various student interest groups such as Africa, and Asia at the forestry school, the Forestry club, the tropical resource institute, the Global institute of sustainable forestry and the New Haven urban resource initiative, the event was enriched with the presence of Dr. Burch himself, faculty members from the forestry school and enthusiast students and drinks and pizza.
During his talk, Dr. Burch gave a vivid description of villages in Nepal where during the daytime, groups of women gather around water faucet to fill their “gagris” and during the moment manage to gossip about people and situations, in another water faucet in another community, women gather to gossip and fill their “gagris”, groups of people gather in small tea houses and participate in discussions over “chiya”. By helping us envision these scenarios, he was instilling in us the importance of community and the diversity of individuals in terms of caste, gender, income, social status within the community. He started out with the history of centralized bureaucratic forestry that started out decades ago and then highlighted the present situation where community forestry in Nepal has proven to be a successful compared to the government-owned forests in terms of forest health and providing benefits to the local people. He emphasized on the quality of community forestry that helps to meet the needs of the people and thus secure people’s values. During the Maoist insurgency, while the capital was in the state of confusion and turmoil, the community forest users group in the rural village where he was present during that time was instrumental in taking care of the local government effectively. He gave an example of the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area for being a pioneer in community conservation and for being the first successful example where the authority of protecting the forests was handed over to the community by the government of Nepal with support from World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Campaign. He concluded with the remark that “every human has to be steward of our environment. We have to show the people who are unaware of this responsibility that being stewards of our environment really pays off and there exists a mutual benefit in sustaining forest resources”. After his talk and the stimulating question and answer session, the students including myself got an opportunity to meet and talk to him in person.