Climate Change and India’s Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh is a province in northern India, populated by the gentlest people.
They live among hills and mountains, amid sights and sounds of streams rushing from snow-capped peaks to rivers and rivers merging with rivers. Conifer pines and deodars cover the mountains, which, in some ranges, are brown and black and bare and rugged in the extreme. Everywhere are deep, wide valleys and sheer high cliffs.
Himachalis grow apples, pears, apricots, berries, orchids and such. But the more visible economic activity is tourism: bikers and climbers and paragliders, people seeking peace of mind and salvation in Hindu temples and remote Buddhist monasteries on mountaintops.
So mountains are sliced straight down to create more roads; tiny lodges, hotels and resorts proliferate without oversight. When storms hit last month, landslides on man-made cliffs heaped boulders on highways. Flooding rivers swept aside buildings that stood in their way. Hundreds died.
The scourging lasted six weeks.
I’ve arrived in Himachal in sunny weather. Yesterday, taking pictures in the marketplace in Kinnaur — of narrow streets, of colourful tiny shops and homes, of people in rough-woven clothes of many hues, and kids playing volleyball in a schoolyard — I read on red-cheeked faces of innocent children, their dwindling, poisoned inheritance. The usual impotent thoughts—of what’s to be done, and how we’re not doing it — came to mind and went.
Dennett directed me to this poignant post by Christine Morris Ph.D. on the same issue.
