ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Any attempt to sum up the preceding chapters would necessarily include the following. The large literature that depicts the imminence of environmental catastrophe in the Himalayan region has tended to confuse cause and effect, has largely missed the essential historical depth, and has assumed the existence of dramatic upstream-downstream inter-relationships without requiring rigorous factual substantiation. The subsistence mountain farmer has frequently been perceived as a large part of the problem, rarely as part of the solution. The 'development' agency responses have tended to be a search for widely applicable panaceas, while the extreme complexity, and especially the uncertainty, that pervade our region at all levels, have not been taken into account.
