Beyond Boundaries
“One reason Tibetans have never been active proponents of nature preserves as we know them is that it is hard for Tibetans to conceive of what would be different on the other side of the boundary” Galen Rowell, My Tibet – 1995 I first heard this statement while attending a talk given by Galen Rowel, an adventure photographer, who at the time, was working on his book My Tibet. The book is an amazing collection of photographs of Tibet which Rowell asked the Dalai Lama to comment and write on. The concept of the quote struck me then as an ambitious student. However, unlike the hundreds of other thought-provoking ideas that sparked robust dialog with my peers but faded into intellectual obscurity as I entered and acclimated to the “real” world, this one still haunts be. It just won’t go away. In fact, it has started screaming even louder. Here, we (developed countries) had come up with the fix to losing cherished natural resources by encapsulating them in a “preservation zone” where,