ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of perceptions of environmental change among ‘development practitioners’ in Nepal for the past 40 years, and how this compares with the perceptions of forests among the Yakkha of Tamaphok, East Nepal. Its central argument is that to understand people’s perceptions of the environment, one has to understand the social and cultural contexts which frame and give substance to these perceptions. It is based on fieldwork with the Yakkha, a relatively small Tibeto-Burman-speaking group found primarily in the middle hills of the Koshi zone of East Nepal, conducted between January 1989 and October 1990, and supplemented by a short return visit to the village in October 1996.
