Volume 4, number 11, January 2003

Pakistan vs. Alaska: Environmental Concerns
© 2002 by Doug Kuzmiak

Doug Kuzmiak is a Maryland-based environmental advocate who won the state’s 2002 Governor’s Volunteer and Service Award for wetlands preservation. He has made numerous trips to Pakistan and Alaska over the last ten years.

Islamabad, Pakistan: A 16th-century fort called Rohtas lies about a two-and-a-half hour drive southeast of this capital city of Pakistan. This fort is a microcosm of the country’s environmental challenges and aspirations--including several similarities with Alaska.

Rohtas fort is situated where the 3,000-foot high Great Salt Range meets the Sub Continent’s northern plains, near the city of Jhelum, which Alexander the Great knew, and the fabled city of Lahore with its Moghul gardens, imposing palaces and association with Rudyard Kipling and the British Raj.

It is now a United Nations World Heritage Cultural Site. It is also close to a modern missile test firing range which has demonstrated this country’s ability to provide delivery systems for its costly nuclear deterrent to would-be aggressors.

And, it is near where joint U.S.-Pakistani military training maneuvers and policing operations have, and could, take place in the war against terrorism.

The help and guidance sought from Alaskan experts and interested parties can bring--have already brought--these two regions seemingly poles apart closer together.

Today Rohtas represents Pakistan’s pressing environmental needs for population control, water management, solid waste management, sustainable development and job creation, project implementation as well as conceptualization, greater grass-roots participation in the environment, more government revenue allocation, and the importation of expertise and technologies that can be adapted to local needs.

Pakistan is the ninth most populous country in the world and ranks thirty-four in terms of area. According to estimates by the Census of Population, 1998, the annual growth rate of the population is 2.7 percent. The urban population comprises 30 percent of the total population but it is continuing to grow rapidly, with permanent migrations from the countryside, and seasonal migrations for work. Add to that the pressure of millions of Afghan refugees who, after twenty years, are only now beginning to return to their own country.

Pakistan is an Islamic republic whose people are aware of the injunction from the Koran that people should look after animals and tread the earth softly.

But it is easy to observe the little value placed on animal life. And there is, among other things, poaching on a wide scale, a history of clear cutting forests before--and allegedly after--laws banning the practice, the existence of a timber mafia, irresponsible strip mining, and a population which openly and without concern dumps trash into streams, along roads and behind homes.

A wide gap between environmental awareness and action exists in Pakistan, where newspapers say that the air pollution in the country’s two largest cities, Lahore and Karachi, is estimated to be twenty times higher than the World Health Organization standard. Deforestation and timber theft have been rife, leading to intense soil erosion, and the waterborne disease gastroenteritis is widely considered to be the leading cause of death.

According to a report prepared by the international non-government organization Actionaid for its Asia Poverty Research Project, Pakistani males complete an average of only three years of schooling and females only .7 years.

But not too long ago Pakistan received a large amount of American foreign aid, and is doing so again. It has bright development prospects and an advanced nuclear program. It was a strong partner and ally in America’s war on communism. Its armed forces are sophisticated, well trained and disciplined.

There is also a burgeoning environmental concern, a highly educated segment of the Pakistani intelligentsia dedicated to environmental integrity who come armed with master’s degrees and doctorates from the best American and European universities. It is a place where international class conferences isolating environmental problems take place, where the usage of natural gas in automobiles is the third highest in the world and where sound environmental policy initiatives await implementation.

Meanwhile, the two square miles covered by Rohtas fort have historically been at the crossroads of culture, history and innovation and perhaps they are again. Its massive battlements strode the ancient Indian East-West highway.

It was a Muslim stronghold at the foot of an ancient Hindu monastery at the top of the Great Salt Range, attracting devotees from all around. It was a model of military architecture that quickly became superfluous, and represented both a crowning achievement and a dismal failure.

"The first most pressing need at Rohtas is for a viable solid waste management program. When we heard that people in Alaska have had more experience than most with outhouses--basic as it may sound--we leapt at the opportunity to contact them," said Dr. Anis ur Rahman, a well-known Islamabad dentist and coordinator for the non-profit Himalayan Wildlife Foundation (HWF).

When not preoccupied by Pakistani environmental concerns, Rahman has often expressed his desire to visit the Brooks Range and Denali National Park, among other places in Alaska.

Originally dedicated to preserving wildlife in the Northern Areas of Pakistan, the HWF is increasingly devoting itself to helping disadvantaged sectors of Pakistan’s society by providing social services and infrastructures where none have previously existed.

Helping the population of Rohtas, seasonally numbering between about 300 and 500 inhabitants, is its first project outside of the Northern Areas.

Simple as it may sound, viable sanitation options are a pressing need not just in Rohtas but throughout Pakistan. Even according to U.S. government statistics (as compiled by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the Department of the Army), in 1987 only about 6 percent of rural residents and 51 percent of urban residents had access to sanitary facilities. In 1990 97.6 million Pakistanis, approximately 80 percent of the population, had no access to flush toilets.

Although these statistics are slightly dated they provide an indication of the state of affairs in Pakistan. Dr. Abid A. Burki, professor of economics at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences, underscored them when he wrote in 2000:

"Water supply, sewage, solid waste disposal and transportation are also in bad shape…contaminated sewage is often used for irrigation in the environs of many towns, causing serious health hazards. The contaminated water finds its way also into streams, canals and rivers, and into the sea, posing serious environmental threats throughout."

Again focusing on Rohtas and referring specifically to the examples and problems found in that one area, Rahman commented:

"Until now, and for perhaps hundreds of years, the only way of disposing of human waste by the growing population within the walls of Rohtas has been night soil removal, and disposing of it in various ways including drying it and spreading it on fields or even dumping it in the nearby Kahan River. This is environmentally untenable and has to be changed."

He said that attempts to dig tube wells to provide irrigation and potable water supplies for the people of Rohtas revealed that the potentially deadly E. coli bacteria were found in water at depths where they didn’t think it was possible.

"This is obviously the results of years and years of ignorance, mismanagement, growing populations, and indifference. But we have the ability to change this," Rahman said.

Farrukh Khan, an influential government supporter with deep political associations whose ancestors were some of the "maliks" or rulers of Rohtas, echoed his sentiments. She considers the fort her ancestral home.

"The problems encountered at Rohtas were overlooked in the past but that cannot continue. If this is going to be a forward looking country these social and development issues have to be addressed quickly and in a way good for the people, the land and the country.

"The benefits to the people of Rohtas that can be accrued by simply starting to improve the living conditions are remarkable, both for them and, indirectly, the country," Khan said.

In fact, the villagers are already seeing benefits from the attention the fort is attracting. To heighten awareness of the need to renovate the fort and help the people, a big benefit dinner and light show production was staged on a massive parade ground inside the walls last November.

It attracted about 450 affluent people from Islamabad and some remnants of the foreign community still here after the post 9/11 evacuations. Many of the local people were successfully employed as "extras" in the production and as staff.

Then, in a daytime sequel in early December locals were again employed, boosting local revenues and earning abilities, and providing hope for the future.

Further elaborating, Rahman said: "By creating a decent, sanitary place for people to live we can bring the fort back to life, help the people, provide for a decent future and preserve our cultural past. It can be a model of how to environmentally engineer positive aspects of its future.

"By cleaning up the fort we can start to bring in greater number of tourists, first from Pakistan and in time when the current international crisis is over then from around the world. And it all begins with outhouses and people taking an interest in our need for help."

Rahman seeks help from Alaska in the form of studies that have been done assessing the possibility of groundwater contamination from outhouses and how it can be prevented. He is also interested in supporting materials that will help him convince authorities that people, somewhere, actually like using outhouses and that it should not be a case of flush toilets or nothing.

There have been certain local initiatives within Pakistan to manage sanitation issues. For example, in the southern port city of Karachi the now twenty-year-old Orangi project in the poorest sections of the city brought an outhouse-type arrangement that has been used in conjunction with other, minimalist waterborne systems. This, however, has only been a temporary fix in a city of a burgeoning population where cross-contamination is rife.

Meanwhile, even in the capital, Islamabad, a crisis exists. According to a 2000 study by LEAD Pakistan, a Rockefeller Foundation-backed environmental training institute, in this city of about 652,000 people less than five million gallons of the thirty million gallons of liquid waste generated per day are treated, and that only partially.

The untreated and partially treated waste goes into area streams, which impacts the entire watershed for hundreds of square miles. And this is from a "model, planned city" only about thirty-five years old. Effluent management is far worse in other parts of the country and becoming more severe due to population growth.

These figures can be compared with those from a study on sewage sludge and gold mine tailings prepared by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks. The study found that at Fairbanks’ sewage treatment plant, wastewater from such sources as toilets, showers, sinks and the occasional draining of a city swimming pool enters via a huge pipe at the rate of about 7,000 gallons a minute at midday. Fairbanks has a population of about 32,000.

"Incoming sewage is screened and aerated with oxygen to stimulate waste-eating bacteria. Heavier solids settle to the bottom of large tanks, and, after as much water as possible is squeezed out on a conveyor belt, sludge happens. Every day the Fairbanks plant generates twenty-five cubic yards, about two and a half dump truck loads, of the black, clumpy, pungent substance. In the past, the sludge had been piled outside the plant. Now it’s hauled off and burned," the study said.

This is why HMF believes that if something as simple as help with an outhouse arrangement can be forthcoming, it would provide adequate sanitation facilities without polluting the groundwater.

Help from Alaska has been forthcoming in other projects in Pakistanalready. In 1996 two scientists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Drs. Sterling Miller and Chuck Schwartz, devoted unpaid weeks of their summer to studying the Himalayan brown bear in one of the remoter areas of Pakistan called the Deosai Plains.

Although both have gone on to successful careers "Outside," the time they spent in an area once known to explorers and adventurers as a wasteland is still greatly admired and appreciated by scientists and preservationists in Pakistan.

Looking remarkably like Alaska’s North Slope tundra but at a 13,000-foot high altitude, Deosai is one of the several jewels in the crown of Pakistan’s national parks. The experience the Alaskan team brought with it from "The Great Land" is still useful here for a whole new generation of researchers.

But even in this remote area, pressing environmental problems exist. The brown bear is constantly in danger of being poached. Biodiversity is threatened by challenges brought on by poverty, such as unchecked domestic animal grazing and uncontrolled harvesting of wildflowers for medicines by locals when the area is experiencing one of the worst droughts recorded. Finally, the ecology of the tundra-like environment cannot sustain increasing tourism on the part of Pakistanis and foreigners.

Pakistan and Alaskaare similar in other ways. Most recently there has been the controversy involving drilling for natural gas in the Kirthar National Park in the southern Sindh Province, one of the four state-like, political entities that make up Pakistan.

At issue are arguments, both pro and con, which are strikingly similar to the ones surrounding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Allegations of Federal lockup, violations of the local equivalent of States’ Rights, violation of environmental protection laws, the empowerment of local minorities to have a say in their area and welfare, sustainable development, job creation, resource exploitation, the heavy handedness of "big business" and environmentalist extremism are all issues.

Kirthar National Park is one of Pakistan’s largest protected areas, and is home to numerous threatened species. It also contains several important archaeological sites, and is considered essential for the water supply of the 14 million people in Karachi. Kirthar enjoyed strict protection under Pakistan’s wildlife laws, and the Sindh Wildlife Protection Ordinance clearly prohibited the "...clearing or breaking up of any land for cultivation, mining or for any other purpose" in the park."

However, over the past few years the relevant laws were amended. Key government officials were empowered to amend legislation without reference to Parliament. In addition, the Governor of Sindh Province, a former oil company director, amended the relevant wildlife law so that it would not apply: "...to any activity in a national park in connection with the exploration or production of oil and gas which is undertaken in accordance with an environmental impact assessment."

Unlike Alaska, one argument goes, Pakistan does not have the luxury of space to set aside certain areas for the total protection of wildlife. Also unlike Alaska, others counter, there is so little space that some wilderness has to be preserved no matter what. Similar to Alaska is the argument to create viable jobs that will give people hope for the future. Also similar to drilling in ANWR is that the controversy over Kirthar continues. And this is despite the release in mid-December 2002, of the Kirthar environmental impact assessment, which came out in favor of test drilling in the national park.

This, like problems at Rohtas, gets back to the fundamentals of Pakistani environmentalism: population control, water management, solid waste management, sustainable development and job creation, project implementation as well as conceptualization, greater grass-roots participation in the environment, more government revenue allocation, and the importation of expertise and technologies that can be adapted to local needs.

Is all this a recent phenomenon or have questions about good environmental stewardship in Pakistan been around for a long time? Wazir Khan, one of the "grand old men" of Pakistani forestry, an Oxford University graduate and a retired senior official with the government of the Northwest Frontier Province, another of Pakistan’s state-like political units, provided some answers.

"In the days when Pakistan and India were one country, when the British ruled, the emphasis was on species and resource protection, such as the Forest Act of 1927. This was a fine model of the conservation ethic of seventy-five years ago but is not a model for the kind of environmental participation needed for today.

"Pakistan inherited this point of view when it became independent in 1947 and adhered to it for years and years. There was government protection of forests and natural resources and that was for the government’s sake. Only hunters were interested in aspects of conservation and that was for their own sake. A concept of widespread people participation was nonexistent."

Khan said that this was the prevailing point of view in Pakistan for many decades but gradually things began to change. Now there is a great emphasis on people participating as well as protecting.

"The heightening of environmental consciousness is critical, particularly among school children. Even if they do something as small as taking part in tree planting campaigns--which may not be viably done, or even the right species for planting--the fact is they are now becoming aware of environmentalism through participation. Pakistan has a long, long way to go, but a first step has been taken," Khan said.

Key to this new approach was the 1992 National Conservation Strategy Report which, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, tried to identify the major issues facing the country’s environment. It drew on the expertise and experience of thousands of Pakistan’s scientists, politicians and concerned individuals.

The report was taken seriously and its findings were underscored and strengthened by the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act of 1997.

This is not to say that there was nothing in Pakistan until this point. In fact, in 1983 the Environmental Protection Ordinance was created and there have been numerous acts and edicts regarding specific aspects of Pakistan’s environment.

Over the years there were also individual attempts to clean up, conserve and even preserve aspects of Pakistan’s environment.

While not an environmental organization, the Edhi Foundation, the largest and most organized social welfare system in Pakistan, derives a substantial part of its income from its Hides Collection Campaign. It was the first organization to institutionalize and nationalize the collection of animal hides from consumers in this intensely goat and beef consuming country, keeping them out of the ubiquitous trash heaps and gaining the Foundation’s revenues from nation-wide tanners.

Other efforts included work by individuals to heighten environmental awareness. Examples include those of Brigadier Aslam Khan in the area of game conservation, Brigadier Jan Nadir Khan and his creation of the Adventure Foundation to teach the children of Pakistan’s upper middle class about nature and the environment, and individual attempts, among others, at protecting the country’s juniper forests in Baluchistan province.

There have also been individual efforts at protecting mangrove swamps off the southern coast, and extensive research to save the Indus River blind dolphin. The work of the Society for Torghar Environmental Protection (STEP) is the seventeen-year vision of one man, a Pakistani filmmaker, to improve living conditions in one area of Baluchistan by deriving revenues from the sustainable trophy hunting of the straight horned markhor, a wild, mountainous, goat-like animal.

This concept of wildlife as a resource for poverty alleviation in the mountain regions of Pakistan was endorsed and encouraged by Dr. Mohammad Mumtaz Malik, Conservator of Wildlife for the government of the Northwest Frontier Province, at an international symposium for the 2002 Year of the Mountains in Islamabad in December.

But, here again, echoing what Khan said, these initiatives tend to be more geared towards species or resource protection with locals benefiting from their input as a byproduct, rather than one of mass, popular participation.

In the search for a Pakistani equivalent of Alaska’s environmental campaigner Celia Hunter two persons have emerged who seem to approach Hunter’s stalwart and dynamic stance.

One is Dr. Rubina Rafiq, of the National Herbarium, who has traveled to the remotest parts of Pakistan, from deserts to mountain tops and much in between including urban areas. Her mission is to catalog the country’s plant life and achieve a current density and distribution baseline. She is working tirelessly to involve as many people as possible from all walks of life.

The other, Helga Ahmed, is originally from Germany, has been living in Pakistan for forty-seven years and is married to a Pakistani. A prime force behind environmental consciousness-raising, Ahmed advocates hands-on work in the field as well as attending conferences. Arguably Pakistan’s environmental gadfly, she challenges both government officials and non government organizations to do better for the people of her adopted country.

Since independence Pakistan has had a small but vibrant tradition of non-profit and non-governmental organizations (NGO). These proliferated during the 1990s to fill perceived gaps in environmental awareness. However, many of these were soon seen to be ways of siphoning off international funding for personal purposes rather than bona fide environmental causes.

The former chief financial officer of one of Pakistan’s multi-faceted industrial organizations who retired and became chief financial officer of a non-profit micro credit organization devoted to environmental and development issues said:

"There are probably 10,000 local organizations registered with the government as NGOs and of these probably about fifty are really reputable and worthy of consideration by foreign and local donors. But at least there are fifty of them overall, and the work they do is, for the most part, exemplary."

Among the local environmentally oriented organizations of note are: LEAD Pakistan, the Hunza Environmental Committee which operates in the Northern Areas, the Aga Khan Foundation, also a Northern Area-specific organization, and the Himalayan Wildlife Foundation. Among international environmental organizations with a presence in Pakistan is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), World Wildlife Fund and agencies of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani environmental and development think tank, the Sustainable Policy Development Institute, and Hagler Bailly Pakistan, the Pakistani subsidiary of the Virginia-based environmental engineering firm, also have an increasingly influential presence, along with the Environmental Section of the U.S. Department of State and the International Division of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Despite all the history, good intentions, local and international interest and envisioned programs for environmental participation as well as protection, the last word comes from Rahman who, while standing among the rubble of some of Rohtas’ walls, said with conviction:

"The environmental well being of Pakistan, like the welfare of the people living here at Rohtas, and even the walls of this fort, are going to be put together one stone at a time. It’s not going to be easy and it’s going to take a long time and we could use all the help we can get from our friends, but we are going to do it."

More information about Pakistan’s environmental issues can be found on google.com under such headings as "Pakistan’s national parks," "Kirthar National Park," "LEAD Pakistan" and the IUCN-Pakistan website www.iucn.org.pk. Information about Rohtas fort and photographs can be found also on the google.com site under "Rohtas fort." Basic information about Pakistan is obtainable through the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the Department of the Army for Pakistan.

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