KOCHKOR KALDARBAEV REMEMBERS the forest of his childhood. It’s dense, with thickets of tall grass and brambles that make walking in a straight line impossible. Trees come in all shapes and sizes: spindly youngsters, stately elders, tiny seedlings peeking up through the forest floor. They come in all varieties, too, from hawthorn and maple to fruit-bearing trees like apple, pistachio, and plum. And everywhere you look, there’s the walnut: wide, smooth trunks branching off into bushy green canopies, with clusters of round fruits waiting to be cracked open to get at the creamy nut inside.

Kaldarbaev was born and raised in the village of Arslanbob in the mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation home to the world’s largest natural-growth walnut forest. Today the forest covers some 50 square miles of a fertile valley of the Tian Shan Mountain range, which stretches from Uzbekistan in the west to China and Mongolia in the east.

His father spent 40 years working for the then-Soviet government as a forestry officer tasked with keeping the forest healthy and managing how people used it — which then, as now, mostly involved harvesting walnuts, the region’s main source of income and a key ingredient of the local culture and traditions.

For centuries, every fall, the residents of Arslanbob and other villages dotting these mountains have left their homes and camped out in the dense forest, spending weeks shaking down the ripe nuts from the trees and collecting them by hand. Usually, this is an all-hands-on-deck job for entire families, including children. During harvest season, the walnuts make their way from local markets in the nearby city of Jalal-Abad to Europe and Asia, mostly along trade routes that once comprised the Silk Road.

Many of the widely loved fruits and nuts that we enjoy today originated from the wild species found in Central Asia.

But by 2012, Kaldarbaev could walk through the forest understory with relative ease. The thick undergrowth was mostly gone, as were the smaller, more immature trees, says the 51-year-old who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a government forester. Only the tall trunks of mature walnuts remained standing, spaced oddly far apart.

A similar fate afflicts much of Kyrgyzstan’s forests, which make up only about 6.2 percent of the country’s land area but are rich in biodiversity. Between 2001 and 2022, the mountainous nation lost 2,470 hectares (6,100 acres) of forest cover, mainly to deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification. In recent years, climate change and development have added to the pressures facing these forests, putting rare species like Malus niedzwetzkyana, or Niedzwetzky’s apple, and Pyrus korshinskyi, or Kazak plum, and Arslanbob’s iconic walnuts at risk.

This is bad news, not only for the villagers who depend on these natural fruit forests, but for the rest of the world as well. Many of the widely- loved varieties of fruits and nuts that we enjoy today — including apples, almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, plums, apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, and, walnuts — originated from the wild species found in Arslanbob and other temperate montane forests of this region of Central Asia. At a time when domesticated strains of many of these trees are becoming increasingly susceptible to disease, these forests of crop wild relatives are a valuable genetic resource that could be critical for food security in the future.

Kaldarbaev — who is now the director of the Dashman Nature Reserve, a 7,958 hectare-stretch of forestland that the Soviet government set aside in 1975 to protect wild fruit trees — works with international conservation nonprofits and community groups to conserve and restore Arslanbob’s walnut forest. This work, which is part of a larger global movement to preserve wild fruit and nut species and the forests that sustain them, includes encouraging sustainable economic development through limited fruit- and nut-gathering and ecotourism.

This shift — toward including the local population and considering their needs in conservation efforts — has not been easy given that the idea that forests need to be “protected” from humans is still prevalent in much of the conservation movement. But in Kyrgyzstan, as in other nations across the world, governments and nonprofits alike are realizing that in order to save forests, they have to find a way to support the communities that depend upon and live within them. And they are recognizing that protection will require letting go of the forests of the past — in order to usher in the more adaptable forests of the future.

THE WALNUT GROVES of southern Kyrgyzstan have been shaped by human hands since ancient times. Legend has it that Alexander the Great passed through this mountainous region on his way to conquer Persia in the fourth century BCE. When he tasted the common walnut (Juglans regia) he was so taken with it that he brought sackfuls back to Europe, where they flourished upon planting. (The Russian word for walnut is “Greek nut,” reflecting the pervasiveness of this story.)

Research by Swiss scientists, however, indicates that the extensive stands of walnut trees around Arslanbob were most likely planted about 1,000 years ago, supporting another local tale that an eleventh-century traveler named Arstanbap-Ata brought the walnuts to the area and founded the village in his name.

In the centuries that followed, local people continued to make their mark on the forest, while it in turn helped sustain a thriving community of mainly ethnic Uzbeks. For generations, they practiced a land-management system that has come to be known as agroforestry, farming crops such as potatoes and hay among the trees. The 27,000-acre forest, which grows in a biodiverse zone between about 5,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level, provided them with pistachios, cherries, plums, pears, and the quintessential walnuts. And livestock roamed freely throughout the trees, a practice that research suggests may have been beneficial with a limited number of animals, as their grazing helped reduce the fruit and nut trees’ competitors, allowing these species to flourish.

The area was conquered by the Russian Empire in the 1800s, and then the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. The latter sparked a flurry of development that led to widespread deforestation. It also led to the introduction of intensive livestock-production systems that disrupted traditional rotational grazing, driving further land degradation. Seeking to protect the ecosystem and manage its resources, the woods around Arslanbob were turned into state-administered forest land. The forest management agency, known as a leshoz, restricted logging but allowed grazing to continue mostly unchecked. The larger number of cows, goats, and sheep allowed in began to compact the soil and eat the tender shoots of new fruit and nut trees before they could mature. Nevertheless, nearby factories and collective farms provided employment, reducing pressure on the environment but also distancing local people from their traditional connection to the land.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991, however, accelerated the destruction of the forest. With the economy in free fall and the factory jobs gone, residents of Arslanbob and nearby villages began to rely more heavily on the forest to survive. The leshoz, operating on a shoestring budget after losing financial support from Moscow, leased out plots of forest land to locals, who in addition to gathering fruits and nuts, used them for collecting firewood, farming vegetables, foraging, and grazing their animals. Illegal logging ran rampant, Kaldarbaev said, with little funding available for enforcement.

“Every year in our park we explain to people how to preserve the forest and help the walnut trees multiply.”

As a result of these changes, about 90 percent of the walnut forest area has been lost in the last 50 years. With livestock numbers growing by 3 to 4 percent every year and fears about the impacts of overharvesting growing, Kaldarbaev knew something had to change. He pushed for the government to designate 8,000 acres of walnut forest near Arslanbob as a nature reserve, limiting who could enter and banning walnut gathering within its borders. His lobbying proved successful — in 2012, the Kyrgyz government designated the forest a “state nature reserve.” The initiative received support from international funders such as GIZ, the German development agency, which provided $12,000 that the forest service used to build an entry gate and step up its patrols of the reserve boundaries, Kaldarbaev said.

But pushback against the reserve from local communities was swift and forceful. Suddenly deprived of one of their main sources of income, villagers protested the designation. “We had many enemies; they wanted to destroy us,” Kaldarbaev said. “They threatened our employees, came to their homes at night and tried to tell them not to work in the reserve.” Even his own relatives were against it. In 2018, responding to sustained objections from the local communities, the government went back to the drawing board: Dashman Nature Reserve was downgraded to a “state natural park,” a designation that, among other things, would ultimately allow villagers to resume their seasonal walnut harvest in some parts of the forest.

“[Now] every year in our park we explain to people how to preserve the forest and help the walnut trees multiply,” Kaldarbaev told me during a recent visit to the reserve. “It’s not easy, our work … but people understand that they need forests.”

The forest of Kaldarbaev’s childhood may no longer exist, but he is proud that he’s helping to shape the woods his children and grandchildren will come to know.

THE MOVE TO reopen the reserve to walnut gathering was the first step in the leshoz’s new management approach, which involves upholding its commitment to conservation and preservation while balancing the economic needs of the local population. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, these two goals go hand in hand; its 2022 “State of the World’s Forests” report found that building resilient economies was key to fighting issues like climate change and biodiversity loss.

Aid organizations are part of this process, too. In recent years, international donors like GIZ have supported local initiatives to produce and market sustainable goods such as walnut oil, dried fruits, and honey from the region, which will bring in income for local businesses while providing incentives to preserve the forest ecosystem.

The Kyrgyz Association of Forest and Land Users, a local NGO, has organized agroforestry cooperatives that provide members with shared equipment they can use to process the fruits and nuts they gather. The resulting foods can then be sold in Europe, Turkey, and even the US, many with the coveted “organic” label because they are grown in natural conditions without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

But the administration is placing its biggest hopes on tourism. With a prime location in the mountains about two hours outside the city of Jalal-Abad, Arslanbob draws in visitors seeking to escape the summer heat of the Fergana Valley and bask in the natural splendor of waterfalls, rushing rivers, and the snow-capped peaks of the Baba Atash Mountains. Over the last few decades, it’s also built up an international reputation for agritourism, as a growing number of foreigners — mainly from Europe and the US — are drawn to the experience of walnut gathering itself. Every fall, local tours offer visitors the opportunity to camp out in the forests (outside the Dashman reserve), learn about the harvest, and even participate in the process.

Residents have capitalized on this rush of interest by opening guesthouses, homestays, and their own tour companies. Some are organized under the umbrella of Community-Based Tourism, a national organization that helps connect travelers with locals to try to encourage tourism dollars to go directly to the people living in ecotourism hubs, which also tend to be poorer and more rural. Research has shown that this system gives residents a stake in preserving an environment like Arslanbob, while also helping educate them about environmental topics like biodiversity and soil health.

For Arslanbob resident Husnidin Abdukhalilov, the choice to transition to the tourism business was an easy one. In 2015, the 55-year-old sold all of his livestock — 10 cows and 30 sheep — and used the proceeds to add a second floor to his house, which he began operating as a homestay three years later. The math works out in his favor, he said, as he no longer has to pay to feed his animals through the village’s harsh winters; in turn, he hopes to have an impact on the environment, which he has watched deteriorate in recent years.

“In the jailoos,” or summer pastures, “there is no more grass,” Abdukhalilov said during a visit to his guesthouse, sipping tea at his kitchen table. “Now we have started to explain to the people that opening guesthouses, working with tourists, will be good for the ecosystem, and the population also.”

WHILE SOME GOVERNMENT agencies and conservation groups are focusing their attention on encouraging sustainable economic activity in the Arslanbob region, hoping to stave off illegal logging and overuse, others are attempting to rescue the forest from another anthropogenic threat: climate change. Average temperatures in Kyrgyzstan have increased by about 1.3 degrees Celsius in the past 20 years, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. This has created a more variable and extreme climate in Arslanbob, with drier summers and colder winters, according to research from the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences. Earlier than normal snows and late spring frosts are killing off walnut seedlings and more vulnerable trees in the forests. And things could get worse: Under a high-emissions scenario, where humans fail to rein in the release of planet-warming gases, temperatures could rise by 6.1 degrees Celsius total by 2100.

In response, forestry officers and researchers are gathering wild specimens of walnuts and other local fruit and nut species to find those with desirable characteristics, like frost and drought tolerance, that can benefit these species in the future. A project supported by Flora and Fauna International is working with the leshoz to breed and propagate the most promising varieties, which could eventually be planted throughout the forest to encourage these more resilient plants to spread.

For now, the initiative is limited to a small greenhouse outside the leshoz office and a test plot in the Dashman Nature Reserve, which Bolotbek Tagaev, who works for Flora & Fauna International as a community representative and coordinator in Arslanbob, proudly showed off on a warm October day last year.

Without diversity, the plants we rely on for food — as well as the entire ecosystem that supports them — cannot survive.

Pushing through the dense undergrowth, he pointed to a relatively young tree with smooth branches and pointed oval leaves: Niedzwetzky’s apple, a rare variety of which only a little more than 100 specimens remain in the wild. Preserving and growing wild trees like this one, Tagaev said, is essential for supporting the genetic diversity that will help plant species survive threats like pests, infections, and extreme weather.

Without diversity, the plants we rely on for food — as well as the entire ecosystem that supports them — cannot survive, he said. “Because if some kind of disease, or some kind of climate change” hits and the varieties that remain are too genetically similar, lacking the mutations needed to survive, “then we can lose the entire forest.”

These types of efforts are aided by nonprofits that set out to fill in the gaps in environmental research in Kyrgyzstan, long neglected due to a lack of funding. The Kyrgyz NGO CAMP Alatoo, for example, has worked to gather data on land degradation in Arslanbob, hoping that by tracking how much natural vegetation is being lost, scientists can understand how the ecosystem is changing over time, and officials and community groups can enact better policies on where to allow grazing or gathering of non-timber forest produce.

At first, these kinds of initiatives seem anathema to traditional, mainly European ideas of “conservation,” which tend to prioritize removing humans from the land and preserving the environment as it is. But Indigenous and community activists have long argued that this view is short-sighted, neglecting to recognize that humans are constantly making their mark on the forests they live in, and have for centuries. In the Amazon, for example, tribes that harvest Brazil nuts help to propagate their seeds while fertilizing the soil by burning their husks during the gathering period.

Breeding the forests of the future, then, is just one more way that people can have a positive impact on these essential ecosystems, researchers like Tagaev say. In turn, they can reap the rewards that come with preserving biodiversity and combating land degradation. Forests provide essential services like clean air, water, food, and even medicine — not just in Kyrgyzstan, but around the world. In Georgia and Armenia, also formerly part of the USSR, around 300 species of wild-growing fruits and nuts help supplement the incomes and diets of rural residents. This revenue was particularly important in the difficult post-independence years.

Still, reaching a balance can be difficult. Even as scientific research and economic development offer hope for Kyrgyzstan’s forests, the growing needs of forest-dwelling populations may end up straining these environments beyond the level they can support. Kyrgyzstan, like other countries in Central Asia, is experiencing a population boom; with more than 50,000 residents now living directly in the forest and thousands more nearby, villages like Arslanbob face pressure to expand, which means new development in forested areas.

Logging continues outside the boundaries of the Dashman Nature Reserve, Kaldarbaev said, while cattle grazing remains a contentious issue; cows and sheep continue to wander throughout the forest, including within the park, despite rangers’ best efforts to keep them out.

For all his pragmatism, though, Kaldarbaev remains hopeful that the work being done to save the forests will pay off. Sitting in his pastel-yellow office in the local leshoz headquarters, nestled in a thicket of trees 10 minutes down the road from Arslanbob, he smiled as he recalled the love for the environment passed on from his father, his normally impassive face lighting up.

“I want the forest to be as it was — biodiverse,” Kaldarbaev said. “I think it will be like this, it will just take time.”

LAST FALL, TWO sections of Dashman were opened to walnut harvesting. For the first time in over a decade, the sound of quaking leaves echoed through the forest as men climbed the trees’ smooth trunks to shake down the coveted nuts, and women and children gathered those that fell to the forest floor. On a walk through the reserve in October, the sound of Uzbek pop music echoed from phone speakers as couples and families gathered in makeshift tents set up under the trees.

The move reflects the forest service’s newfound openness to limited human use, while still taking steps to protect the area from the kind of unmitigated extraction that characterizes the rest of the leshoz territory. On a walk through the forest with Kadyrbek Sadabaev, a forest ranger tasked with enforcing the boundaries of the park and kicking out loggers, illegal gatherers, and stray cattle, the difference between this more strictly protected area and other parts of the forest was palpable. Sadabaev was soon pointing out a litany of plants included in Kyrgyzstan’s “red list” of threatened species, from Persian hawthorn to a local variety of rowan tree, Sorbus turkestanica.

“Our reserve is denser than the surrounding leshoz [area],” he said, as the sound of fallen leaves crunching beneath his heavy boots echoed in the otherwise quiet forest. With funding and a mandate to protect the ecosystem from hungry cattle and trampling feet, park staff like him are able to help the trees regenerate, he said. Sadabaev sees opening up parts of the forest to walnut gathering as a way to reduce the pressure of illegal harvesting on other areas. “When the seedlings come up,” he said, “we watch them, and we assist them.”