Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
they will need to migrate an estimated one hundred metres upslope for every 0.5°C of temperature rise.1 Clearly this is easier for animals than plants, but they too are moving – European vascular plants have shifted an average 2.7 metres uphill in the past seven years, for example.2 Other species have been marooned on peaks because their previous ranges have been occupied by human settlements or become farmland. Once at the top, though, there’s nowhere further to go, and thousands of species risk extinction, particularly those living on tropical mountains. Conservationists are now carrying out ‘managed relocation’ of species to places with a more a suitable climate, in the hope of saving them. In some cases, climate migrations have been beneficial, allowing people to cultivate fruit and vegetables higher up a mountain. But elsewhere, disease-carrying mosquitoes are now living at higher elevations where people with no immunity are being infected, with deadly consequences.
Of most concern to humans is the loss of ice. On average, glaciers have become fourteen metres thinner since 1970.3 Almost every single glacier looked at by the World Glacier Monitoring Service since 2000 has retreated, including all of the European ones, most of the tropical ones from the Himalayas through Africa to the Andes, and south to the mountains of New Zealand.
Humans have always worshipped mountains as gods or the home of gods, they have built temples high on their slopes and made pilgrimages to their peaks. In the Anthropocene, we are subjugating these geological marvels, turning them darker, drier and more homogeneous, stripping them of their unique flora and fauna, even decapitating them for the minerals inside. We are changing the shapes of Earth’s mountains – when they lose their protective snow, the exposed parts crumble away. Mountains including the Matterhorn in Switzerland are disintegrating.
Humans are still enthralled by the highest peaks, but the trails they make now to these heavenly reaches are more likely to be marked by litter than prayer stones. Nevertheless, even as we desecrate them, we depend more than ever on mountains for our fresh water.
In this chapter, I look at how the changes we are making to our mountains are affecting the people who live on them, and how humans are trying to recreate Holocene mountain conditions in the Anthropocene.
Temples rise above mudbrick houses and castles. Prayer flags flutter from every roof and woollen cloaked men and women with brightly coloured waist-sashes stand in the street gossiping. I’m in northern India’s remote Trans-Himalaya, in the the ancient kingdom of Ladakh. Consisting entirely of mountains, this, the highest inhabited region on Earth, is home to an 80% Tantric Buddhist population, settled by pilgrims and traders travelling the ancient Silk Route between Tibet and India or Iran.
In Stakmo village, farmers are preparing for harvest. Two men sit, chatting in sing-song tones against a dry-stone wall, sharpening their scythes with a blade pressed between their knees. An old woman with long, ribbon-woven plaits leads a donkey and calf over to her whitewashed mud-brick house. In the field behind, a yak munches alfalfa and swishes its horse-like tail. Bright marigolds nod crazily around a single apricot tree, and there is a barely perceptible tinkle of wind chimes. The scene feels timeless.
And yet, much has changed, the villagers tell me. ‘By mid-September, we would wake up with completely frozen moustaches,’ says Tashi, a 76-year-old farmer, who wears a woollen hat and large, pink-tinted sunglasses. Buddhist prayer beads hang around his neck and his dark sun-crinkled face is cleanish-shaven. I’m above 4,000 metres (13,000 feet), but nevertheless, it is not cold enough to freeze moustaches – from the clear, cloudless sky, the sun beams down intensely, as it does for more than 300 days of the year, and it’s burning my European face. The roof of the world is heating up.
Wedged between Pakistan, Afghanistan and China (or, more accurately, Tibet), Ladakh was a latecomer to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and remains a contested territory. At night the Indian and Pakistani border patrols take potshots at each other; the Chinese come and paint Indian rocks red and the Indians respond by painting Chinese boulders green. But Stakmo feels very far from such nationalistic posturing. The villagers are more concerned with the ancient and essential task of coaxing food from the mountains’ mustard-coloured desert soils. Global warming is at play here, disrupting Ladakhi lives more effectively than any international land squabbles. Humanity is heating the region so fast that the mountains are changing colour before people’s eyes: from white to tobacco as the glaciers disappear. And with them, Ladakh’s only reliable water source.
In his lifetime, Tashi has seen two big glaciers vanish in this valley alone – he points out their locations to me and I see only the same dry, sandy and pink rocks that fill the eye between valley and sky. Just the very top peaks are white, and the only glaciers I spot are at least 5,500 metres up. The warmer climate is not the villagers’ biggest concern, though. In fact, they rather like not having to be confined to their houses so early in the year. The most painful change is the new unpredictability in precipitation. A catastrophic pattern is developing for moisture at the wrong time of year.
This part of the Trans-Himalaya, after the Rohtang Pass, is in a precipitation shadow. It’s drier than the Sahara, with no rain for months on end. The westerly winds don’t reach here and the monsoon from the east doesn’t surmount the high pass. The snows used to arrive after October and build during the winter. Then, in March, the snowpack would begin melting, providing vital and timely irrigation for the sowing of the area’s barley crop. But the past decade has seen a gradual reduction in snowfall – the winters of 2012–13 were particularly dry, with serious consequences. Harvests are failing, drinking water is trucked in by government tanker, traditional self-sustained communities are breaking up as young people migrate to the cities or plains for work. Worse, when the precipitation does come, it arrives as rain during the harvest season, ruining what few crops the villagers have in the fields, before disappearing to lower elevations.
The changes have also reduced the sparse natural vegetation. Thupstan, another Stakmo farmer, tells me that he used to let his livestock roam the mountains eating wild grasses. Now, though, he has to give over some of his valuable planting fields to grow alfalfa for the yaks and goats. And wild creatures too are feeling the pinch. Last week, Thupstan found fifty ibex in his field eating his vegetables. The ibex attract wolves, which eat his goats. And the ibex and wild yaks are destroying his stone walls, knocking them over and blocking the irrigation channels with boulders.
Nearby, in Ladakh’s principal town of Leh, the rainfall is also causing problems. This is a region that had never experienced rain before the past decade. Houses are built from unfired mud bricks, and the roofs are sticks bound with mud and yak dung, with a hole to let the fire smoke escape. These homes are built for snow, which covers and insulates them in winter. The new rain is literally washing them away. The more wealthy people are starting to concrete their houses.
A little rain at the end of summer is no substitute for snowfall during winter. It is quickly drained away in the rivers and there is little replenishment of the groundwater. The springs in Leh have been dry for months now, as more and more people pump out the groundwater. Wells sit dry and unused. Some of this is the result of a booming tourism industry. New hotels and guest houses are fitted with flushing toilets, twenty-four-hour showers and washing machines. It is completely unsustainable. The guest house I stay in has a traditional Ladakhi composting toilet, but few others still do. My landlady nevertheless gets all the water we use from a hundred feet below ground with a generator-driven electric pump.
The explosion of tourism, and a ruinous government policy on subsidies, are partly to blame for the new water shortages, but much of the problem is down to climate change, owing to rising global greenhouse gas emissions and the regionally produced brown haze. Data are pretty much impossible to obtain – the military jealously guards all such information – but the locals are unanimous in their conclusion: the glaciers here are disappearing – and fast.
People here are especially vulnerable, because they have such a brief summer. If farmers don’t sow their single crop of barley, peas or wheat in March, it won’t have time to mature for harvesting in September before the harsh winter sets in, with temperatures that drop below -30°C. The problem is, the glaciers that remain are too high at above 5,000 metres, and don’t fill the irrigation channels until June – too late for the sowing season.