In memoriam: Jack D Ives, 1931–2024

To Prof Jack Ives, who died on 15 September, goes much of the credit for putting the world’s mountains (including the Himalaya) on the global agenda of scientific and environmental concerns. 

His career as a geographer and geomorphologist began even as a high schooler, and as early as 1954 was able to record in Iceland what is today called Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) but for which he first used the Icelandic term jökulhlaup. 

He broadened his research from glaciers to mountains from where they originate when he joined the  University of Colorado in 1967. His achievements in founding and running mountain-related organisations started with the Commission on High Altitude Geoecology under International Geophysical Union (1968) as well as International Mountain Society (1980) and its flagship journal Mountain Research and Development (1981). 

It was his participation in the first UNESCO Man and Biosphere Program (1973) and his chairing its International Working Group that eventually led to the founding of International Centre for Mountain Research and Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal in 1983.

My own interaction with him started with the May 1986 Mohonk Mountain conference in upstate New York organised by him and other towering mountain scholars, in particular Prof Bruno Messerli of the University of Berne, Prof Larry Hamilton of the East-West Center, Hawaii, Corneille Jest of CNRS Paris, as well as Michael Thompson and colleagues at IIASA/Vienna. 

If ever a conference could be credited with precipitating a major paradigm shift, it was Mohonk which scientifically debunked the then dominant Theory of Himalayan Degradation (THED). It had argued that it was population explosion of poor farmers that cut more trees that deforested the Himalaya, leading to rapid runoff and sedimentation that aggravated flooding in the Ganga plains of India and Bangladesh.

Researchers after researchers at Mohonk showed that ‘even if all of Nepal was a canopy of trees with no one living there’ Himalayan mass wasting would be just about the same, primarily because the underlying causes were heavy monsoon precipitation and fragile geology of steep slopes made more unstable by active seismicity along the Himalaya chain. 

Bad engineering (especially mountain roads), stone quarrying, sand mining and river bank encroachment would only exacerbate the underlying instability as was seen in the 27-28 September flood in central Nepal. They also described how poor, uneducated and fecund Nepali peasants did not go uphill to cut more forests for subsistence farming and fuelwood: they migrated downhill to the cities of the plains to eke out a living.

The Mohonk conference resulted in several landmark articles in Mountain Research and Development as well as the Ives and Messerli 1989 book The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation. 

The most important result of Mohonk was its impact on the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that passed Agenda 21 including the adoption of Chapter 13 on Sustainable Mountain Development. Ives, Messerli and colleagues were greatly helped in getting this mountain agenda on the UN sustainable development map by Maurice Strong, who had been the honorary chair of Mohonk-2 in 1986) as Under-Secretary General of the UN as well as by senior figures of the United Nations University.

I last met Jack Ives in November 2003 at the Bergen conference on Himalayan Fragility organised by the LOS Center and Michael Thompson who was the main driving force behind that line of research.

About the time Mohonk-1 was held in 1982, Mike and colleagues at IIASA were working on social conflicts and the dynamics of institutional competition that are built around strongly held scientific myths from their experience (as mountaineers besides being researchers) in the Himalaya. 

It resulted in their 1986 book Uncertainly on a Himalayan Scale, which has subsequently been re-published in 2007 by Kathmandu’s Himal Books (together with IIASA and Oxford University’s James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization) with a 36-page new introduction by Mike and me. 

It showed how the Theory of Himalayan Degradation’s untenable orthodoxy held sway over Eric Ekholm (Losing Ground, 1976), BBC’s David Attenborough (1984) and Britain’s Overseas Development Agency (1997), making them each predict a dozen years apart that Nepal would have no forest left by 2000. Community forestry since the 1980s has contributed to Nepal doubling its forest cover to 45% of its area in the past 25 years. 

The Bergen conference was almost Mohonk-3. By this time, Jack’s new book Himalayan Perceptions (2004, Routledge) was already in the press. It saw him increasingly worried about the continuing hold of the simplistic ‘poor and fecund mountain farmers cutting trees’ alarm over policies of governments, university departments, think tanks and international development agencies. 

The bigger threat to the well-being of mountain people came from the fact that most mountains were marginalised borders where hostile armies faced each other, where national urban centres ruthlessly exploited the highland peripheries, and where elite business-led bad development practices made matters worse.

He also saw the real danger of climate change (a scientific reality with wide and long-term consequences) being hijacked by vested interest groups to push bad policies, making it the new THED. If he had not passed away in mid-September and lived to see the end-September flood havoc across Nepal, he would have been alarmed to see how bad engineering and land encroachment policies that made the natural event a major disaster are so easily covered up by blaming climate change. 

Two of Jack Ives’s books, Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale and Himalayan Perceptions, have been published in their Nepali edition by Himalayan Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006. There is little excuse for Nepali policy makers, journalists, donor agencies and academics in hiding mal-development behind the debunked theory of Himalayan Degradation, old or newly minted.

Dipak Gyawali is an academician at the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology.

Read Jack Ives’ review in Nepali Times of Alton Byer’s book Khumbu Since 1950.