Word: lamas
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Every year, thousands of Tibetans make pilgrimages to Dharamsala, India, to hear the Dalai Lama's Kalachara teachings. Last year, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader struck an unusually secular note, warning against the exploitation of endangered species. Tibetans are among Asia's largest consumers of tiger pelts and leopard skins. They use the fur to trim their robes, in rituals and as rugs; tiger claws and dried leopard organs are also used in traditional medicine, and Tibetans dominate the illicit trade in animal parts between India and China. The Dalai Lama's word traveled fast. Buddhists in Lhasa, the Tibetan...
...Much of the credit goes not to the Dalai Lama but to an environmentalist named Tsering Dorje. After the holy man spoke, Tsering Dorje and a small group of volunteers made sure those in attendance were given pamphlets detailing the destruction of Asia's wildlife, so that Tibetans who made the pilgrimage could take the message home. The effort was part of a program that Tsering Dorje, a consultant with the Wildlife Trust of India, launched in 2005 to educate Tibetan refugees about endangered wildlife. What's remarkable is that this 32-year-old native Tibetan is making a difference...
...Tsering Dorje grew up in a tiny Tibetan village not far from the Dalai Lama's birthplace. As a child making pilgrimages with his family to seek blessings from faraway monks, he discovered Tibet's forests, mountains, rivers and wetlands. "I fell in love with these natural beauties," he says. "I wanted to stay lost in the forests forever." But in Tibet, where activism is viewed with suspicion by the Chinese government, his dreams of becoming a conservationist would not easily be realized. His early work documenting the negative environmental impact of a World Bank-funded project to relocate farmers...
...dollars per kilogram. Neighboring Tibet has become a virtual shopping mall for tigers. In an undercover visit in 2005, conservationist Wright filmed vendors in Lhasa hawking dozens of pelts and swatches in the back rooms of stores and on street corners-an exposé that led the Dalai Lama to condemn the trade...
...goes a long way to support those who claim that, when a rail link between Lhasa and Golmud, in China, is completed some time this year, Tibet as we know it will be gone forever. Already Lhasa is at least six times more populous than when the Dalai Lama knew it, and covers an area 20 times larger than the one square mile of old. A replica of a 40-meter-high mountain stands across from the Potala Palace, and the blue-glass shopping centers around Friendship Street, Happiness Street and Liberation Street would not look out of place...