Covered by sandbagged emplacements surrounding weapons looking like heavy-caliber machine guns, and helmeted soldiers standing at the ready, Pakistan’s annual Shandur Polo Festival not only again took place in July but was dominated by the quintessentially civilian activity of environmental activism to “Save Shandur.”

The country-wide unrest that Pakistan has been experiencing lately, which includes the threat of suicide bombings, could not prevent the Shandur Polo Festival from taking place, or deter about 12,000 people from attending, including an estimated record number of foreign visitors.

It also could not impair the determination of dozens of concerned people, ubiquitous in eye-catching vests, and their almost weeklong demonstration of environmental dedication and ethic, which kept 4.6159 tons of refuse from being strewn across an ecologically sensitive region.

Until last year Shandur was the highest polo ground in the world at 12,263 feet. That distinction now goes to Babusar at almost 13,599 feet, still in Pakistan.

In addition to the polo, what took place at Shandur, officially from July 7 to 9, was essentially an environmental clean-up drive to keep Shandur beautiful. In spirit and activism it was reminiscent of the environmental campaigns that were started in America 30 to 40 years ago.

But it was the first time in the history of the Shandur Polo Festival that a fully coordinated attempt at solid-waste management, halting the polluting of the nearby Shandur Lake complex and environmental consciousness-raising in general was undertaken to save Shandur.

“This remarkable effort marks the first time that federal and local government departments and agencies, along with the military and police, and in addition to nonprofit organizations as well as individuals, came together at Shandur to help save this very special, high-altitude, wetlands ecosystem from dying,” said Dr. Humaira.

Khan, a graduate of Oxford University’s Somerville College and a Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. in environmental sciences with work experience at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the University of Maryland. She was the wetlands consultant.

“Because of volunteer numbers, material availability, carrying capacity and financial considerations only a portion of the area that could have been covered, indeed, was. But that is significant in itself. Remember this was the first fully coordinated, integrated multi-organizational attempt in the festival’s history. This will be expanded next year,” Khan said.

Shandur is on a spur of the old Silk Routes. It has been the site of a fierce rivalry between the polo teams from the old fortress town of Chitral in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the ancient caravanserai and now modern city of Gilgit in the Northern Areas.

This year Chitral won the free-style, nochukker polo tournament by two goals and the match had to go into spirited, hardplaying extra time on a ground wider, longer and higher than usually found elsewhere. It was not without altercations, disagreements, some wildly flying balls and perhaps a rumored fist or two both during the final match as well as during the run-up days when the C and B teams competed.

The Save Shandur campaign was spearheaded by the year-and-a-half-old Pakistan Wetlands Program, an initiative of the country’s Ministry of Environment.

Financed in part by the UNDP and Royal Dutch government, the PWP is being implemented in conjunction with the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Pakistan. This is the same organization known in America as the World Wildlife Fund or WWF.

Environmentally, the Shandur plateau is a very sensitive place. It is alleged that the event, which lasts about a week overall, including the three-day official period, is causing increasing barrenness as well as a pollution crisis in what geographically is already a remote place of dusty alluvial soil.

The Shandur plateau is usually the haunt of grazing sheep, goats and yaks. These occasionally become the prey of brown bear, wolf and even the rare and endangered snow leopard. There is a complex of extremely shallow, snowmelt-fed lakes, which are only about 10 feet deep. The complex constitutes one of South Asia’s great bird-migration flyways, and they play a major role in the propagation of species found nowhere else.

The lakes themselves are breeding grounds for species of frogs, toads, snails and plant life in addition to attracting the passing birds.

Concerned about the problems Shandur faces following a 2006 report by Oxford University scholar David Johnson, the PWP set about alleviating the situation and encouraging others to do so.

Johnson’s study revealed that the highest concentrations of solid waste along the streams and lake edges were found in close proximity to the festival grounds, the practice polo field and particularly the camping sites. He found that the toilet facilities were only one for every 270 people, if each toilet was working and 10,000 people attended, and only eight of those were for the general public.

His detailed investigations also showed that traditionally horses that died during a match would be hauled to the lake and left to rot. Even when that didn’t happen, his report disclosed that, for example, during the 2006 festival a simple analysis of the water and sanitation situation showed that it fell well below even the minimum standards for humanitarian emergencies.

Meanwhile, there is a well-established tradition of the event having a bazaar with its accompanying sellers or wallas hawking food, drink, clothes, face masks for the dust, indeterminable items, providing lodging and more.

In the past sellers and their customers left behind mountains of garbage, which were then blown across the plateau by strong winds. It presented a solid-waste and environmental nightmare for the people of the region. They somehow put up with the detritus and disposed of it as best they could on an ad hoc basis. The garbage had a serious impact on livestock, which ate it indiscriminately and often died as a result. Other environmental nightmares left by a history of polo players and fans included ground-cover destruction and soil erosion.

Expressing a personal perspective, Rehmet Nabi, a man in his late 30s and president of the Tour Guide Association in Gilgit, said he remembered as a boy standing on the hills overlooking the Shandur plateau, and the area was lush with grasslands, while the now-algae-ridden lake complex then sparkled azure-colored.

“Look at it now,” he said with an arm sweeping the western horizon from one of those same hills. “You can hardly see the place for the dust and air pollution. And the lake can’t flush itself clean. Trash goes everywhere. People don’t realize how just a little impact can do a lot of damage.” But he said that the event and the environment could co-exist if properly managed.

Polo at Shandur goes back a long way and is somewhat colorfully clouded in embellishment. But originally, the polo match at Shandur was a clash between the region’s ruling classes with the princely methars of Chitral and the equally princely rajas from what is now the Northern Areas.

During the days of the British Raj, when Shandur was almost but not quite the farthest and most remote point north in South Asia where the Union Jack flew, polo rivalry was shared by the Chitral Scouts and the equally competitive Gilgit Scouts military regiments.

Even though the existing polo pavilion and seating area were established, some say, as far back as the 1930s, Shandur’s remoteness was its environmental savior. And when Partition of India and Pakistan took place, there appears to have been a break in the activities, with perhaps elements of the two regiments or sons of the methars and rajas meeting to play.

That was until the 1980s, when the federal government started supporting polo at Shandur on a large scale, and things began growing from there. Nevertheless, things still were, and are, kutcha at best. Players and mounts live in and around tents with the Chitral team on one side of the border, the Northern Areas team on the other. Players and their mounts are still made up of the region’s elite, some of whom are the best players in the country and perhaps the world.

The 1990s saw prime ministers, including the late Benazir Bhutto, flying in by helicopter for the last day’s main event and during the early 2000s the road between Gilgit and Shandur was paved and from Chitral to Shandur partially paved.

People then began loving Shandur to death. The now-comparative ease of access saw an increase in numbers of both spectators and wallas, and also an increase in indifference to the environment. Solid-waste management, water pollution and erosion problems manifested themselves in a very big way. Vehicles, horses, clothes, crockery and cutlery, and people were all being washed in the fragile lake complex. The mountain of trash and difficulties managing it grew.

By the time of Johnson’s report in 2006, things had reached crisis proportions. It had taken less than 30 years of what officially is a three-day event. He made three simple recommendations to help save shandur and keep Shandur beautiful: Establish refuse collection and removal, create riparian buffer zones and appropriate facilities for sanitation and laundry.

Going on the environmental offensive, the PWP encouraged support from the army and police, whose duties this year included cordoning off and guarding access to the lake and other environmentally sensitive areas.

The PWP got the Environmental Protection Agency along with Tourist and Environment departments from both the NWFP and NAs, and non-government organizations involved in the effort. Officials of the NA’s Forest Department along with their counterparts at the NWFP Wildlife Department agreed to assign four rangers to environmental check posts on the road at the two entrances to Shandur.

At the same time, the PWP drew together village organizations from both sides of the polo match’s competing regions to work together for a common cause.

These village organizations this year provided more than 40 unpaid volunteers, which constituted a small army in itself. These “soldiers” were attired in highvisibility, iridescent and reflective striped vests on the back of which was printed “Wetland Warrior,” while the front carried the PWP wetlands logo. They wore these over T shirts with a photograph of a pristine Lake Shandur and the catch line “Save Shandur.” At least a dozen foreign visitors to the festival volunteered as well.

The local volunteers and some of the foreigners camped out at the PWP’s assigned compound. They stayed in tents, used facilities provided by the program and took their meals in the PWP’s mess tent. Each day they set out in five PWP vehicles, two of which had open tow trailers, to perform environmental protection tasks.

Particularly special help and consideration to the environmental effort was given by the colonel, officers and men of the Northern Areas Scouts, a comparatively new military regiment made up from the corps of the old Gilgit Scouts and who were camped next to the PWP. They provided material, logistical and tactical assistance to the program’s staff and volunteers, helped with the maintenance of the PWP vehicles in the demanding conditions, operated a snack stall and dining room open to all and provided evening traditional folk dancing and musical events. The Scouts had a fully equipped medical unit that was prepared to aid, and did aid, in any way it could. Its presence was considered to be a major contributor to the environmental initiative’s success.

And while the polo players battled it out on the polo ground day after day, the volunteers maintained high-profile, periodic clean-ups of the polo ground area and marches on it, including a grand finale on the last day. Repeated announcements were made over the public address system encouraging spectators to be environmentally sensitive.

Thirty visually friendly, blue, plastic trash bins were provided by the Northern Areas EPA and strategically positioned by the volunteers in the bazaar as it began taking shape and when trash hotspots were becoming apparent.

The bins were lined with locally made, heavy-duty polyurethane bags, which had the PWP logo printed on them. For security reasons only the liner bags were allowed to be placed in the polo ground area.

Thanks in part to the public-relations blitz, the corps of environmental volunteers achieved some notable successes. Officially, 550 bags of trash averaging 16.5 pounds each, totaling about 9,232 pounds, or 4.6159 tons, were systematically collected from the bins by the volunteers, weighed and contents of selected bags analyzed.

The analyses showed that 70 per cent of what was collected was non-biodegradable material amounting to 6,462.4 pounds, or 3.2312 tons of things that won’t decompose. More bags were filled by volunteers just going around and picking up trash.

After the event the bins went into storage by the village organizations for use again next year. The liner bags were put into a landfill specifically created for this purpose, 12 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 8 feet deep, and buried in an EPA acceptable manner on the Northern Areas side of the event, and a few miles from it. Because of the dry, sandy nature of the soil the landfill may in the future be opened and bags disposed of in another manner.

But this year’s Save Shandur campaign showed that coordinated, multi-faceted environmental initiatives could be achieved even in a remote and difficult place. It prevented access to the main and most-used lake, curbed water pollution, managed solid waste, raised environmental awareness and brought together in a common cause government agencies and NGOs from both sides of the tournament, which had not been done in the past.

“This year’s Save Shandur showed that with the right dedication and will, things that were in the past considered difficult or impossible can be achieved. And if it can be done at Shandur, it can be done anywhere. It is already envisioned that for next year the cleanup and conscious-raising campaigns will be expanded to include more volunteers, organizations, and cover the entire area of the event. Good fun and good environmental practices can coexist,” Dr. Humaira Khan said.