Nepal, June 4 -- Every year on World Environment Day, 5 June, Nepali Times changes its masthead colour to green. This is not just a token gesture, it is to drive home the point that the economy and ecology are two sides of the same coin. Undermining one destroys the other.

Mahatma Gandhi said it best: "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed." Unsustainable natural resource extraction and irreversible damage to ecosystems in the name of infrastructure and 'progress' ultimately undermine the economy.

In the past three decades, kleptocratic plunder by Nepal's unaccountable leaders resulted in over-exploitation of fragile ecosystems like the Chure, illegal sand mining and quarries, pollution that killed rive...