Three years ago, on September 24, 2006, as the weather turned dark, a helicopter went down in the hills of eastern Nepal, killing all 24 people on board. Nepal lost most of its leading conservationists. Among them was Chandra Gurung, the head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Nepal. A Boy from Siklis is a warm portrait of Nepal’s most charismatic advocate of community participation in conservation and a chronicle of its not-so-old conservation history.

A day before the crash, Chandra had overseen the Nepal government’s handover of the Kangchanjunga area to its people. Before this, Chandra had pioneered the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) that integrated development and conservation and involved the community in its implementation. The Kangchanjunga project went a step further, giving people full ownership of their forests.

“Well before the janajati rights movement took hold, well before decentralisation and federalisation became popularised as slogans, Chandra set about effecting local autonomy through the ACAP, making people’s participation the organisation’s rallying cry,” writes Manjushree Thapa, who worked briefly with Chandra.

He was an accidental environmentalist but once he signed up, Chandra was committed for life. The son of a mukhiya (head) of Siklis village, he started out life with privileges, but as a Gurung—one of the janajatis or indigenous people of Nepal — he remained an outsider in the Kathmandu circle dominated by upper castes.

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