Indian Hindu mythology teaches that we are in the Age of Kali; the terrible dark age. Kali is a time of environmental destruction, as well as the destruction of community and family groups. This idea loomed over my time in India last summer as I contemplated global warming, the prospect of over 300 million environmental refugees in the world by 2020 and the way in which human 'progress' and development has scarred this planet.

My summer journey was not a usual holiday jaunt. I set off to the Indian Himalayas with an old school friend called Rachel to research the Great Himalayan National Park. The Park was formed in 1984, and the local people received a final notice of the Park's formation in 1999. It is still a relatively new creation with inevitable teething problems. Indigenous people were moved from the park area into lands surrounding the park boundary. That land is now called the Ecozone and is home to 160 small villages, containing approximately 2200 households. We spent two weeks trekking through the Ecozone interviewing villagers about their feelings towards the park and the effect that it's formation has upon their lives. Our findings were far more dramatic and compelling than I ever imagined and taught me a great deal about development issues.

As neither Rachel nor myself can speak Hindi or the local Kullu dialect of the region, we needed an interpreter to accompany us on our travels and help us to interview the local people. Before travelling to the park, we stopped in Kullu and found an Indian student called Ved who spoke excellent English. He was free to travel and so within a day we set off for the mountains with our new friend. Ved was to stay with us for two weeks, trekking with us to villages in the Ecozone and fielding our questions to local people. Ved also took the opportunity to buy cheap pot in most villages on our way and was stoned for the majority of our travels.

The Park has been formed to protect the biodiversity of a region of the Himalayas from people causing damage to the environment. My time in India gave me an illuminating insight into the murky questions that are leading environmental debates today. How can any government tell rural villagers in India not to use the land that they have lived on for centuries? How can people and their environment coexist sustainably? I cannot answer these mammoth problems, I can only tell you a story as I received it and hope that wider lessons can be drawn from my experience.

Local people are no longer allowed to enter the boundaries of the park to graze or collect fodder for their cattle, to collect plants or to poach. This greatly affects the rural people high in the mountains who live from the land. Most families received no compensation for loss of livelihood from the park's formation as only 314 families were offered any form of compensation and many of them had long moved away from the area. A major source of income was lost from the ban on picking medicinal herbs. We met a bamboo basket weaver who bemoaned the threat the park posed to his ancestral practise, as that was his purpose and livelihood. He still entered the park illegally to find bamboo but soon that too would have to stop. Anyone found taking from the park can be taken to court and fined. It is an effective deterrent as villagers who knew people that had been caught no longer entered the park. Legal costs pose far too great a risk for incredibly poor people. That said, without support or economic benefits local people will have to keep entering the park because they will fall into a poverty trap whereby they are increasingly dependent on natural resources for survival.

We interviewed a local Non-Governmental Organisation called SAHARA (Society for the Scientific Advancement of Hills and Rural Peoples). SAHARA is working with villagers in the Ecozone to try and provide alternative income generating activities. They have set up women's savings and credit groups in which every village woman tries to save one rupee a day. SAHARA teach the women to make handicrafts to sell. They also train the men in ecotourism as guides or porters. These alternative livelihood opportunities are designed to lower peoples' dependence on the land and give them a vested interest in the park. SAHARA also set up medicinal herb plantations outside of the park to enable people to profit from the herbs in a sustainable way. All these good ideas meet a mixture of success and failure, and face a myriad of problems and challenges.

The women's savings and credit groups are a great step forward in empowering women. Surprisingly the women do most of the manual labour in the village; they rise early to collect fodder, they return hours later to cook for the family, they go out in the afternoon to collect wood and graze their cattle, and they return in the evening to cook, do the cleaning and so forth. Meanwhile, the men laze around chatting and smoking cannabis. It's a very odd set-up. In addition to this the men have all the power and would often speak for the women. Most of the women we met were extremely shy and giggly and would hide their faces from us playfully like children. It was both endearing and worrying to see how little confidence they had and how voiceless they were. Savings empower these women who are traditionally the poorest members of the community. With money, these women can now make choices about their children's health care but progress is limited until women are better informed as to how best to spend their savings.

The handicraft market is already over saturated in tourist towns and so handicrafts return very little money and make villagers increasingly dependent upon tourism as a sole source of income. In the medicinal herb plantations it takes two to five years before the plants are mature enough to sell. Women are understandably frustrated with this length of time and the lack of financial return. These people are incredibly poor and so getting nothing back for years of tending and toil can seem unreasonable. Equally, the ecotourism business in the Great Himalayan National Park is quiet and cannot sufficiently employ the available men struggling without their usual livelihoods.

The key problem that I observed during my time in India was the lack of education. Understandably these people think short-term and desperately seek wealth to replace their threatened subsistence lifestyles. Resultantly SAHARA push their ideas for alternative income on a business basis so as to address the peoples' prime concern of making money. SAHARA don't use the opportunity to educate these people about the larger picture of protecting their environment for a sustainable future and protecting their sources of food. Thus the whole project becomes fragile and reversible. If a more profitable offer comes along then villagers will jump for that unless they are enlightened by education. They need to appreciate the value of their environment.

In talking to the villagers I did realise the problem of justifying the formation of the park. The surrounding mountains are their natural environment and traditional source of sustenance. They can't understand why it needs to be protected. From their mountain viewpoint there are trees and crops everywhere in abundance sprouting from a lush plentiful valley. Conceptually, I had no way of explaining the privilege of that vision. Most of these people had never seen a city or pollution. The smog of Delhi is a world away to them. Without pictures to hand, I realised that I had no way to communicate the pitfalls of industrialisation or provide them with a global perspective. My words were redundant. I decided to focus on smaller things first, and was lucky enough to meet a woman who inspired me on the topic of education.

Sonia Kundi has been living in the Ecozone for the past few years trying to get her venture 'Fruits of the Himalayas' off the ground. Sonia discovered fantastic mushrooms growing locally that far beat any mushrooms she'd ever seen for sale. It transpired that the local people picked the mushrooms out by the roots, because that meant they weighed a little more and so brought more money. This method meant that the mushrooms didn't grow back. Sonia has since spent years going from village to village teaching the women to cut the mushrooms so that they grow back. The women were interested in her advice because it made sense to them. They had noticed a dramatic decrease in mushroom crop and when they understood the reason they did change their methods. They want the mushrooms to be there for their children to pick. Sonia's mushrooms illustrate the importance of education and small breakthroughs. Sonia's other stories also provide interesting insights into the complications that India throws up. Sonia is trying to sell her mushrooms as Fairtrade and Organic. To be classified Fairtrade she offered local people 10% above the going rate for mushroom picking. Instead of being chuffed the locals decided that she was barking mad because she wasn't conforming to the usual rules of bargaining (which is to offer 10% less, not more). Thinking her to be mad, the villagers started to ask for more money until the whole idea turned on its head and the people refused to work for less despite her offering more. Sonia is also struggling to obtain her organic certificate from the Indian Agriculture Department and believes that they are awaiting a bribe. Organic food is not in the department's interests as they promote pesticides to make money.

Corruption is rife and a major problem on all levels. In one village the women said that they had received no money from their group savings because their Group Organiser had taken all their savings as a wage. We also heard that half of SAHARA staff did not receive their pay last year whilst the Director of SAHARA bought a new house, mobile phone and motorbike. The director of SAHARA is called Rajinda and is himself a village man, selected for his charisma and enthusiasm to learn, who has been put in a position of incredible difficulty and responsibility. He is popular but it is not really fair on him either. Without professional guidance, his leadership is poorly organised. He turns up in villages to speak to women without notifying them ahead of time and finds that they're all out collecting fodder for hours.

The good news is that there are good people working amidst this quagmire of problems making things better. We met with ex-NASA scientist and advisor to the UN on development and climate change, Payson R Stevens. Payson and his wife are currently immunising hundreds of children in the valley from basic diseases like measles which these people die from. They are also educating local people about nutrition and good food as 70% of the children suffer from malnutrition. I persistently underestimated children's ages by about five years; they look so small for their age. These children walk for up to six hours a day travelling to and from school as the hilltop children are taught at the river base below. Sadly, malnutrition is caused by children eating western packaged food like crisps and biscuits, instead of filling up on their traditional diet of pulses, vegetables and rice that would provide what they need.

Payson has made the personal decision to work at a grassroots level and watch real results. He spoke compellingly about the problems the area and the world face. He said that he needs young people to retain some idealism. "Every individual needs to ask 'what is enough'? We all face a choice. Do we say 'fuck it' and make a buck? Do we make a buck and then decide how best to spend it, which leads to a whole host of other ethical questions? These are not new dilemmas but they are currently exacerbated by intensified awareness of global problems and the increasing smallness and interconnectedness of the world".

Ecodevelopment is also under threat from national development. A hydroelectric dam project had totally degraded the Jiwa Nala and Sainj valleys in the Ecozone that should have looked identical to Tirthan valley. Dynamite was blasting the mountains to make way for new roads and the whole environment had become an industrial nightmare. The valley was shrouded in a monstrous dust cloud, and locals had lost acres of land from the blasts and ensuing landslides. One woman with tears in her eyes was pointing at the dust in incomprehension; her dismay required no translation. Again, the local people have not been compensated. Jobs for the dam have been outsourced to city workers, as many people die working on the development and the government prefer to send body bags away rather than provoke protests from the locals. This means that local people have lost their land, their livelihoods and can receive no alternate work. The energy from the dam will not even provide for local people but will be pumped back to the cities.

Every day that I trekked in those beautiful valleys I felt a profound and increasing responsibility to protect such rare areas of natural beauty. We need to work to do this without punishing the poorest and most fragile people. The village people we met were good, hospitable and generous. They allowed us to sleep in their homes and in their schools for nothing, without any warning of our arrival. We need to work with and for these people, fighting small battles and detailed problems, if we are to have a hope of preserving this planet for future generations.