OLD WAY OF LIFE A THREAT TO FORESTS

Loggers encouraged to develop new businesses as trees protected.

Dachong and Peng Yining report in Tibet

For centuries, when boys turned 17 in Nyingchi prefecture, the Tibet autonomous region, they were asked to cut down a giant spruce tree to prove their manhood.

Dawa, a 40-year-old Nyingchi resident, said the murky virgin forests were the most profitable resource in mountainous Nyingchi, so a man's logging skills determined whether he could make a living and feed a family.

Dawa got his first axe at 17 after spending three hours felling a spruce "which was so thick that two adults could barely encircle it with their arms".

Dawa continued in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. "The only money I have ever made was in logging", but his 11-year-old son might not have the same opportunity, he said.

Large-scale commercial logging in Nyingchi prefecture, which holds the richest store of timber in Tibet, was banned last year. But the industry has been in decline since 2000 when the government initiated conservation measures.

Tibetan loggers had to wave goodbye to a centuries-old lifestyle based on lumbering and look forward.

All his work

Every piece of wood of Dawa's house was cut by Dawa himself from the surrounding leafy hillsides. It took him nearly two years and more than 30 big Picea (spruce) trees to build his family of four a two-story shelter near a river at the foot of an immense verdant hill.

FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY

Dawa, who earned his first ax 23 years ago, will use this spruce to repair the house he built. Tibetans in Nyingchi prefecture are allowed to fell five trees annually for that purpose, but commercial logging is banned.

Bark and branches, the family's main fuel, are piled in the yard. Inside, the furniture was all made from timbers, and Dawa carved out the wooden bowls and spoons from scraps. He said more than 600 shingles, made from five 100-year-old trees, were needed for the roof alone.

Dawa's family keeps 30 yaks and dozens of sheep but only for butter and meat. Most of their income used to come from lumbering and selling logs.

Slow, but strong

Solemn emptiness and the desolate southern edge of the Gobi Desert dominate the landscape of the Tibetan plateau. But for thousands of years, warm moist air flowing south has been stopped by the Himalayas and has nurtured boundless virgin forests in southern Tibet's mountains.

According to official reports, 51 percent of Nyingchi prefecture is covered by forest. The trees blanket 1.2 billion cubic meters and total 10 percent of the nation's supply, ranking fourth behind Heilongjiang, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

Dawa said trees grow very slowly here at 3,000 meters elevation, but very straight and thick. The price of Tibetan spruce increased from 80 yuan ($12) per cubic meter in the 1990s to 200 yuan in the 2000s. He could make more than 20,000 yuan a year from lumbering, plus 3,000 yuan by farming.

While the government has banned commercial logging, local Tibetans are still allowed to cut five spruces a year to repair their houses.

An apology

"Good-quality timber has straight lines on its bark," Dawa said as he climbed through a thick forest, looking for a straight spruce to renew parts of his roof. He quickly spotted a tree more than 80 centimeters in diameter. "I was taught how to cut wood even before I was able to lift an ax."

Before the ban, Dawa and other men in the village cut wood from autumn through spring. Summer was the season for herding.

Trees were shaved into logs by removing the limbs, and cut into optimal length, usually 1.5 meters. Boards were cut from the timbers and carried downhill on loggers' backs after four or five months of air-drying.

With axes, a group of four loggers could cut down three spruces a day. When diesel-fueled saws came in during the '90s, a single logger could easily lay down 10 trees a day.

With a great noise from his power saw and a spray of wood chips, Dawa cut down the spruce. Translucent sap oozed from the stump, and the smell of fresh-cut wood pervaded the air.

Dawa touched the tree's growth rings - the dense circles indicated the tree probably had lived more than 100 years - and said he was sorry for cutting down this beautiful plant.

"Our religion requires us to respect all kinds of lives, but we need wood for building shelters," he said. "For visitors, it might be exotic, even romantic to live in tents, but we want to live in a safe house without a leaking roof."

"But even without official protection, every Tibetan village has a holy area (usually a mountain or a lake) where locals can't log or hunt."

One hour, two ...

"Tibet's environment is quite fragile. The clear-cut hillsides won't have recovered in 100 years. That's why we must forbid large-scale lumbering," said Tsewang Jigme, director of the Nyingchi forestry bureau.

He said lumbering was Nyingchi's pillar industry in the '90s, contributing 80 percent of the prefecture's gross domestic product. Sixty-three logging mills, each working three shifts, cut and transported timbers to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and to other provinces.

Tsewang said only about 60 percent of each log, the best part of the stem, was used. The rest of the tree, its limbs and branches, was wasted.

Fallen timbers lay everywhere on the mountains, covered by thick yellow moss and fungus. Tsewang said that when mills cut more trees than they could handle or found the quality too low, they left the wood to decay.

"After 20 years of logging, Tibet's forest area rapidly shrunk," the official said. "Many places that used to be leafy are now attacked by sandstorms. Some rural areas have been never more raw."

Ngawang, a local Tibetan who worked with his ax since the early '80s, said many verdant slopes were shaved and it became harder and harder to find old trees, so by the end of the '90s, they had to go deeper into the forests. "At first we could find a good tree in an hour, and then two hours, three hours. In the end we needed a whole day if our luck was good."

'My only skill'

Once the government began to discourage commercial logging in Nyingchi, the lumber mill operations were felled, too. Where once there were 63, there is now one. The prefecture's logging allowance is 200,000 cubic meters a year, which covers the five trees each family can take plus a bit for government needs.

Almost all of the 186,000 or so people in Nyingchi were affected by the conservation policy. Some lost their jobs at the mill, others lost their income from selling logs or boards to the mills.

But few of these ethnic Tibetans went to big cities to be migrant workers because of their religious traditions and the huge differences between their lifestyle and that of Han Chinese.

"Even if I went to Beijing, what else could I do?" Dawa said. "My only skill is cutting trees down."

The farthest he has ever gone from home is Lhasa, 400 kilometers away. Every three years he makes a pilgrimage to Potala Palace, a sacred site to Buddhists.

No reason now

While the local government seeks ways to rejuvenate its economy, some of the people who once sought the oldest, tallest evergreens are now making goods from wood byproducts such as limbs and coarse, woody debris.

Unemployed loggers are looking for work planting trees in the clear-cut areas, a task on which the Tibet autonomous region has spent 600 million yuan since 2006.

"The point is to make sure the local Tibetan can make a long-term living off the forest without cutting it down," said Liu Rongkun, a project manager for the Pendeba Society of Qomolangma National Nature Preserve. "People living under the Himalaya range gave up their traditional lifestyle to save the disappearing forests, and we can't just cut off their income and provide no alternative industry."