Farmers in the high Himalayas partner with a U.S.–based nonprofit to cultivate
medicinal plants — and the environmental and economic benefits they offer.
November 24, 2014 — On a trip to their childhood home in eastern Nepal in the early 2000s, Nepalese staff members of the Mountain Institute — an organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., that works to protect mountain environments and mountain communities — made a discouraging discovery. In talking to their families they learned that local people were now walking three to four hours to get access to the herbs and medicinal plants from the forest for use in traditional healing, a trip that had taken the staff members an hour or less when they were kids