Nobody is responsible for the Himalayas

Around 400 BCE, Hippocrates wrote a treatise called Airs, Waters, Places. It is one of the oldest surviving arguments that landscape is not a backdrop: that winds, waters, soils, and the orientation of a settlement to the sun are constitutive of health, character, and civilisation itself. The physician, he argued, cannot understand disease without first understanding place. The body and the territory it inhabits are not separable. You cannot treat one while ignoring the other.

We have had 2,400 years to absorb this. The Himalayas in their current state suggest we have not tried very hard.

I have been thinking about the mountains less as a landscape recently, and more as a mirror. Not in the poetic sense. In the diagnostic one. They reflect back what we value, what we ignore, and what we have quietly normalized into reasonableness. We call them sacred, then treat them like a consumption zone. We call them fragile, then build as if they are endlessly forgiving. We arrive in convoys of entitlement and leave behind plastic, fumes, noise, and impatience. The mirror does not flatter. We keep choosing not to look.

The Translation Problem

Every framework we apply to the Himalayas translates them into something it can manage. A forest becomes a carbon sink. A river becomes megawatts. A slope becomes road alignment. A village becomes a beneficiary group. A sacred geography becomes a tourism circuit. And local knowledge, gathered over centuries, embedded in practice, built into the bodies that actually live there, becomes "traditional knowledge," which is then invited politely into a workshop, given ten minutes to speak, and thanked before the real PowerPoint begins.

This translation is not neutral. It is a worldview, deeply Western in origin even if we have all internalised it, that believes to know something is to classify it, to manage something is to dominate it, and to value something is to price it. Even the language of the solution carries the same disease. Sustainability asks: how do we keep taking without running out? That is a fundamentally different question from what mountain knowledge systems actually ask, which is closer to: what does this place need on its own terms, and how do we fit ourselves to that? The word has smuggled in the extractive premise it pretends to question.

Amitav Ghosh's argument in The Great Derangement runs deeper than its popular summary. He is not simply saying we have failed to imagine the climate crisis. He is saying our dominant narrative forms (the policy brief, the impact report, the theory of change, the investment thesis) are structurally designed to normalise the everyday and push the catastrophic to the margins. The Himalayas have always been a system where catastrophe is latent in every slope, every monsoon, every glacier retreating a little further each year. They resist the grammar of the normal. So, we apply it anyway and wonder why the documents keep failing to match the ground.

The result is a proliferation of responses that together produce the appearance of systemic action while leaving the system largely intact. Each initiative is real. Each report is earnest. What they accumulate into is something more troubling: an institutional alibi. A way of remaining active without being accountable, of being present without being responsible. The workshops keep meeting. The impact and outcome reports of donor and public programmes keep churning out. The mountain keeps bleeding.

What a Spring Actually Is

Take a spring.

A spring is not a water point. It is geology, forest cover, women's time, local governance, rainfall, maintenance, and belief. It is the memory of who dug the channel and who has kept it clear. It is the negotiation between uphill and downhill users across three generations. It is what allows a family to stay in a village rather than migrate to a city that does not want them. Map it as a water source, assign it a budget line, and it will dry. Not because the money ran out, but because the thing managing it was never the money.

In the Andes, the Quechua concept of Ayni describes this kind of relationship with more precision than most modern governance frameworks. Ayni is reciprocity, but not the transactional kind that keeps a ledger. It is the understanding that your relationship with the mountain is one of mutual obligation. You give; it gives. You neglect; it withdraws. The mountain is not a resource you draw from. It is an entity you are in relationship with. The Apu, the sacred mountain presence in Andean cosmology, is not a metaphor for this relationship. It is the relationship, made visible.

This is not primitive animism. It is a relational ontology, a way of understanding the world in which agency and subjectivity are not exclusively human properties. Modern governance finds this inconvenient because it cannot be audited. But the Andean communities that sustained highland agriculture for centuries in some of the most demanding terrain on earth were not operating on sentiment. They were operating on a sophisticated understanding of what Hippocrates grasped at the beginning of Western medicine and Western medicine has since abandoned: that you are inside the system, not above it. The only question is whether you know it.

Sunderlal Bahuguna's line, ecology is permanent economy, belongs to this tradition. It is not a slogan. It is an epistemological claim: that ecology is not a constraint on the economy, a cost to be internalised and managed away. It is the ground condition of any economy that intends to last.

Uncivilized

I felt the distance between these two understandings viscerally on a recent trip to Manali.

The mountains were beautiful, as they always are, even when we are busy injuring them. But the carrying capacity overshoot was impossible to miss. In some stretches the development model was legible from the road: cut the trees, widen the road, invite more vehicles, then replace the roadside with garbage. A brisk and efficient system, if your aim is to produce a ruin.

The painful part was not poverty. Poverty would require a different kind of response. The painful part was entitlement. The littering was not coming from people with nothing. It was coming from people with education, income, and options: people driving cars from outside mountain states, windows down, while someone casually threw a packet of chips, a plastic bottle, a bag of snack wrappers into someone else's home. The small gesture that says everything: I came here for pleasure. The landscape can absorb my waste. Someone else will clean this. Either way, I will not face the consequence.

I have been calling this behaviour uncivilised. Not underdeveloped. Not poorly managed. Uncivilised.

The word has a colonial history and I use it with that history in full view, because the civilisation causing the most damage here is precisely the one that historically reserved the word for others. It is the civilisation that learnt to see the world as inert material: a river as megawatts, a glacier as data, a sacred mountain as a portfolio of investable opportunities, and someone else's homeland as a long-weekend backdrop. Arriving with a Patagonia vest and a reusable bottle does not change the underlying transaction. It just makes it more comfortable to perform.

The tourist gaze that sees the Himalayas as a destination is not as innocent as it looks. You can only go to nature if you have already separated yourself from it. The Romantic tradition that invented wilderness as somewhere to visit is the same tradition that invented the factory. The mountain becomes scenery at the exact moment it stops being home.

The local people who watch this happen every day have already made a calculation that most visitors do not notice: that protest is not worth the risk. Their livelihoods depend on visitors. They run the homestays, dhabas, taxis, guides, and roadside stalls. They are asked to absorb not only the ecological cost of tourism, but the tantrums of people who arrive with money and depart with no accountability. Whether we call this hospitality or its opposite is, I think, a matter of who is writing the review.

The Convenient Wilderness

Somehow, the world remains more emotionally and financially prepared to fund the Arctic or Antarctica than the Himalayas.

The white wilderness. The lonely polar bear. The melting ice shelf. These fit neatly into the Western environmental imagination: distant, dramatic, and strangely clean. They come without voters, vendors, armies, border disputes, construction lobbies, caste politics, diesel taxis, or aunties bargaining over the price of maggi. They are easy to love because they do not require you to deal with anyone.

The deeper issue is structural. The idea of wilderness, as a sacred category of the non-human unspoiled and separate from culture, requires absence. It requires the landscape to be empty of history, politics, and people, so that its value can be experienced as pure. The Arctic accommodates this. The Himalayas do not. They are too populated, too political, too contested. They prove, simply by existing as they are, that humans and ecology are not separable, that there is no pristine baseline waiting to be restored if people would only get out of the way.

This is inconvenient not just practically but philosophically. The Himalayas disprove the founding premise of the dominant conservation tradition. So, they get admired, visited, photographed, invoked at conferences, then sorted into a governance category just sophisticated enough to be funded at scale, but not sophisticated enough to challenge the framework doing the funding.

What tends to get missed in all of this is what the mountains actually are. Not scenery, not ski terrain, not spiritual backdrop, a functioning system the modern world depends on in ways it has not fully admitted to itself. The Hindu Kush Himalaya is the largest repository of freshwater outside the polar regions. Its slopes hold crop varieties, adapted over millennia to altitude, cold, and drought, that global food systems will need as the climate shifts. Its communities speak languages that encode ecological knowledge found nowhere else, accumulated over centuries and losable in a generation. None of this is about hiking trails or adventure tourism. This is civilisational infrastructure, most of it invisible because it has always just worked.

What Finance Is Doing to the Conversation

Sustainability finance arrives in the mountains with its own grammar: bankability, blended capital, risk-return profiles, scalability, monetisation, pipeline. These words are not useless. But they carry a logic that quietly reorganises everything they touch. The mountain becomes a portfolio of assets. The community becomes a stakeholder group. Resilience becomes a product category. Local knowledge becomes an input, duly noted and duly ignored. The only questions asked are questions capital already knows how to answer.

The word "bankability" should be embarrassed to exist. It means: we will fund this once you have restructured your reality to resemble our spreadsheet. The Himalayas have declined this invitation, repeatedly, by landslide and flood and drought and spring failure, and we keep reissuing it.

Underlying the grammar of finance is the grammar of development, which is older and less examined. The Himalayas are not underdeveloped. They are differently organised, and the difference is being read as a deficit. The Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar spent decades arguing that development is not a neutral process some places have completed and others are catching up to. It is a historically specific project, born from Western industrialisation, exported through colonialism, and designed to make non-Western economies legible and useful to Western capital. The mountains have been resisting this legibility for decades. We keep calling it a governance problem.

There is a lesson from the Alps that the Himalayas have not yet been allowed to apply. Elinor Ostrom, whose Nobel Prize-winning work drew heavily on Swiss Alpine commons governance, showed that communities can manage shared resources sustainably for centuries, without privatisation, without state control, when the rules are locally designed, locally enforced, and transparent. The Törbel commune in Valais had been doing exactly this since the thirteenth century. No tragedy of the commons. No outside consultants. Just governance with teeth, built by the people who had to live with the consequences. The fact that this required a Nobel Prize to be taken seriously is not a footnote. It is the argument. It took a Swedish committee in Stockholm to make legible what a village in the Alps had understood since the 1200s.

In Ecuador, the 2008 constitution drew on the Andean concept of Pachamama to give nature constitutional rights: the rights to exist, to be maintained, and to regenerate. The Sumak Kawsay tradition, often translated as Buen Vivir, proposes that flourishing is not individual accumulation but collective wellbeing within ecological limits. These are not romantic ideas from a simpler time. They are sophisticated responses to the same problem the Himalayas face, arrived at by people who had considerably more time to think about it than the average impact investor.

What happened to learning from what we already know?

Civilisation as a Question

Every civilisation is ultimately a set of answers to this question: what do we owe each other, and what do we owe the world we are inside?

The current answers are growth, extraction, mobility, consumption, convenience. They are producing consequences that are visible from space and apparently invisible to policy. The Himalayas have been giving the same answer for centuries, in springs and forests and terraced fields and sacred mountains that regulated behaviour more effectively than any enforcement notice: you are not above this system. You are inside it. Act accordingly.

There is a particular kind of loss that rarely makes it into any report. The young person who leaves a mountain village at eighteen for Delhi or Kathmandu or some European city, drawn by opportunity and the reasonable desire for a different life. They spend a decade navigating streets that do not know their name. And then somewhere in their thirties or forties, they find themselves unable to fully account for what they miss. It is not just the view. It is something about the way time moved there, the way neighbours knew each other across three generations, the way the mountain was always present as an orientation that reminded you where you were and therefore who you were. The village may have emptied by the time they know this. The knowledge that animated it may have gone with the people who held it. This is also a form of inheritance we are spending.

Hippocrates said the physician must understand the patient's territory before treating the patient. The Andean Apu says the mountain has agency; your relationship with it is a negotiation, not a transaction. The Alpine commons say governance works when the people facing the consequences are the ones making the rules. The Chipko movement said that ecology is not a variable to be managed; it is the condition of everything else. These are not competing traditions. They are the same observation, arrived at independently, across millennia, in mountains.

We have chosen not to hear them. Not because the knowledge wasn't there. Because hearing it would require changing what we are unwilling to change: the assumption that the world exists to be used, and that the obligation runs one way.

And yet the reasons for a different kind of attention are not hard to find. The Chipko women won. The Törbel commune is still governing its commons. Springs have been restored by communities who remembered how. Young people have returned to mountains they once left and found that what they came back to was worth more than what they had spent years chasing. These things happened. They are not exceptions. They are proof that a different relationship with the mountains is possible, because it already exists, in places where people chose it.

The Himalayas are still giving. Rivers, forests, glaciers, soils, climates, and cultures accumulated over centuries of close attention to a system that does not forgive carelessness.

Hippocrates had a principle for situations like this. You may know it. It applies here with uncomfortable precision: first, do no harm.

We have not managed even that. But the people who have are still there, still working, still holding the knowledge that makes a different future possible.

I am not under any illusion that an essay shifts a glacier. But there is a word that has been present throughout the making of this piece: kartavya. In Sanskrit it means duty, not in the way institutions use the word, but closer to what must be done, what one is called to by virtue of who one is and where one stands. Its root is the same as karma, action, but kartavya carries something karma alone does not: the sense that the action is not optional. It is owed. The Bhagavad Gita is precise on this: you have a right to your action, but not to the fruits of it. Do what you must. Release what you cannot control. Camus arrived at something similar from a different direction entirely: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because the boulder reaches the top. Because the pushing is his.

I wrote a thesis on these mountains once. I have been thinking about them since. Small contributions, incremental work, honest attention in an honest direction — this is both the least and the most any of us can offer. The mountains asked nothing of me when I first started paying attention to them. But somewhere between that moment and this one, the attention became an obligation.

Kartavya.