The line of figures trudging along beside their firewood-laden bicycles stretches to the the horizon on this dusty Nepalese back road.
It's 2.30 in the afternoon. Twenty-year-old Bhairab Prasad Gupta left home at 5am, riding his old bicycle from his village to the Char Koshe Jhadi forest 10 kilometres away to gather firewood for the week. It will take him another three hours to reach home again.
Behind Mr Gupta are hundreds of men and boys, stretching for kilometres, all pushing their wood-laden bikes home. "Only the poor people go," Mr Gupta said. "I have always had to go for the wood, but now we have to go further and further."
Locals say the Char Koshe Jhadi forest has shrunk by two-thirds in the past 40 years.
In Nepal, 42 per cent of people live below the poverty line and wood is their primary heating and cooking fuel. The combination of tree clearing for farming, collection for firewood and illegal logging is hurting a country already struggling to survive. Between 1990 and 2005, according to environmental website Mongabay.com, Nepal lost 24.5 per cent of its forest cover, or almost 2 million hectares.
Every week, Mr Gupta and almost every other man in his poor farming village of Motisar in Kalaiya District scour the forest floor for dead wood. Then with the seat turned sideways and the frame of his bicycle precariously jammed with logs, he makes the long dusty trudge back, pushing the bike.
"We pay the village committee five rupees (Nepalese) for one trip. The village committee owns the forest," he said through a translator. "But there is rampant logging."
In Piluwa village, on the edge of the forest, Indra Prasad Siwakoti, 50, a member of the Halkhoriya Collaborative Forest Management Committee, stands in the middle of the road, checking that collectors have permits and have not taken any non-seasoned wood.
"Last Saturday we had 1500 through our entry point to the forest," Mr Siwakoti said, adding that there were six other official entry points.
With deforestation comes soil erosion and serious flooding in the monsoonal season. From the air, you can see scores of 100-metre-wide dry river beds cutting across Nepal's lowlands. Jesper Saxgrend, of the Danish Earth Education academy, whose organisation is working with Care Nepal in water preservation and awareness, said the key lay in teaching villagers why it mattered to prevent soil erosion.
"At the moment they point to the sky and say it is sent from God. Don't they realise that by cutting down the timber in the hills they create the environment for the floods?" he said.
"The people have short memories. They think the way it is now is how it always was. One villager recalled when he was young the streams were so narrow you could almost jump across them," Mr Saxgrend said.
There are some positive signs. For the past six months, Char Koshe Jhadi forest has been run by a collaborative forest management committee from 25 villages on its perimeter. Mr Siwakoti said that since the village management committee was formed "the deforestation has stopped. We have planted 130 hectares of saplings."
However, he remains concerned. "The forest has shrunk by two-thirds in my lifetime. I am worried, because we cannot live without it. It's the main source of what we produce: fodder for our cattle, fertiliser for our land, wood for cooking and heating.
"If the jungle is cut, the floods will come to our village."The Age
