LAHORE, Nov 22: The scale of the devastation caused by the Oct 8 earthquake tells a lot about the effects of irresponsible human activity resulting in the destruction of environment and consequences of tempering with the Nature.

This was observed by members of the Forum of Environment Journalists Pakistan during a visit to Muzaffarabad on Saturday. Arranged by WWF-P in league with the Forum, the purpose of the visit was to assess the impact of earthquake on the environment.

After a briefing at the Muzaffarabad office of WWF-P, the Lahore-based journalists toured the affected parts of the Azad Kashmir capital, met environmentalists and people from different walks of life.

At the briefing, a WWF official said: “Throughout the affected zone, people had encroached upon forest habitats in high-altitude areas, putting at risk the ecology of fragile watersheds. This made the forest landscape more vulnerable to erosion and land slides on the one hand while, on the other, made it difficult for the government to rescue settlers stuck in the rubble.

“The current earthquake, being natural (tectonic) in origin, was unavoidable to happen. However, the extent of damage could also be attributed to socio-ecological reasons having roots in anti-conservation policies and actions related to human uses of mountains and its natural resources.

“A mountain landscape, though generally strong and tough or at least appearing so, has a natural makeup and capacity that needs to be fully understood before it is put to certain uses. The underlying rocks and their structure determine the degree of vulnerability of the landscape to sliding down because of any movement within the earth. The geology of a particular site determines if the landscape is resistant to any activity, road making for example. The availability of natural cover of plants determines the level of stability of the landscape and potential security against floods and land slides of people living downstream.

“The mountain landscape in the affected zone, as seen in most of its parts, had been seriously abused through certain irrational actions like encroachment of the entire chain of watersheds, construction of houses, chopping of trees, overgrazing of ground flora and conversion of slopes into agricultural fields.

“As indicated by a few observers, some villages did escape the disaster. Besides other reasons like more stable underlying rocks, most of such places had better vegetation cover.

“This supports the notion that if the landscape had not been abused, the magnitude of the disaster could have been much lesser than what we experienced,” the official concluded. —IMRAN SHEIKH