Emily Yeh, a CU Boulder professor associated with the Center for Asian Studies and the Tibet-Himalaya Initiative disusses some of the implications of the disappearance of the fungus in an article in The Atlantic.
“Its role in contemporary Tibetan lives and livelihoods is really very difficult to overstate,” says Emily Yeh of the University of Colorado at Boulder. “In many rural areas, it is the single most important source of cash income.” People have rearranged their lives around the harvest. Some have fought violently over access to fungus zones. Certain schools schedule vacations so that students can go collecting.
Read the full article here.