Two decades after crash, Nepal still searching for new generation of conservation visionaries

Twenty years after a helicopter crash killed some of Nepal’s most prominent environmental figures, the nation is celebrating ecological gains while grappling with a void in visionary leadership, reports Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi. On Sept. 23, 2006, a Russian-built Mi-8 helicopter crashed near the high-altitude mountain village of Ghunsa, killing all 20 passengers and four crew members. The victims included Gopal Rai, the minister of forests and soil conservation; other senior government officials; a Finnish diplomat; a USAID official; and key WWF staff. They had traveled to Ghunsa to hand over management of the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area, in the northeastern corner of Nepal, to local communities.  The crash occurred the next day as the group was taking off from Ghunsa. “For the community, this was the beginning,” said Ghana Shyam Gurung, now country representative for WWF Nepal. Seven WWF staff died in the crash, the single greatest loss of life in the history of the organization. Among them were Harka Gurung, Chandra Gurung, and Mingma Norbu Sherpa, and their loss left an institutional vacuum. “We didn’t just lose people that day. We lost the pace we were moving at,” said Sarita Jnawali, a former conservationist with the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC). Shiv Raj Bhatta, an ecologist at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, who lost key supervisors in the crash, recalled the immediate aftershock. “I wondered how we would ever produce people of that height again,” Bhatta said. The community-based conservation framework championed by that generation…This article was originally published on Mongabay