Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed below represent the opinions of the article’s author. The following work does not necessarily represent the views of the Synergy: Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies.
“It was horrible, stressful, dangerous – it was like waiting in a queue in a small messy airport. You move in tiny increments”
Reading these words conjures memories of being stuck in rush hour or lining up to a sales counter one day before Christmas. What is striking then is that they were spoken by Fatima Deryan, the first Lebanese woman to successfully summit Mount Everest on May 22nd 2019, as she described her experience of being stuck in a traffic jam, minutes away from the peak of Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.[1] Her story was accompanied by a now-infamous image of 250 to 300 people packed together in a single file, clogging the route to the peak of a mountain that has long carried with it the aura of an insurmountable challenge, pure, protected and unattainable.
First confronted by this image in the headlines that appeared in my notifications one summer morning, my mind instantly wandered to a recent trip home, to Dehradun and Landour, small hill-towns in the foothills of the Himalayas. As a child, driving up to an old vantage point for a view of the pristine, snow-covered peaks, towering in the distance, sage-like in their wisdom, I’d always love to turn back from the backseat and look behind at the valley we were leaving behind. A pink morning hue slowly making the valley-town of Dehra blush was an indelible sight. This time, as I returned to that drive nearly 6 years later and turned around, searching for that familiar view, I was confronted instead by a series of small hotels, street food vendors, guest houses and car washes, each loudly calling for tourists to stop by, and most terrifyingly, leaving dense rivers of plastic garbage that trailed down the slopes of the hill. A disheartened and angry rant about how all tourism should be banned and about how commercialization was destroying the Himalayas found itself bubbling in me, both then and as I was confronted with the ‘Everest Traffic Jam.’
This anger was echoed by many as the image of the Mount Everest congestion went viral, prompting stark criticism of the thriving tourism industry of the Himalayan Region, particularly in Nepal and India, and calling for the need to protect these mountains, the “water towers of Asia,” home to an immense diversity of wildlife and critical to the health of Planet Earth, from the evident degradation caused by an ever-expanding tourism industry.[2] While Nepalese government was frequently referred to as “hungry for every climbing dollar it can get”, calls for cancelling the summer tourist season all together swept through social media as similar images of traffic jams in numerous Indian hill-stations began to surface, and a surge in critical discourse on measuring the precise environmental costs levied by increasing tourist activity in the region was evident.[3] It’s important to pause here, however, and note that seeking to protect the Himalayas isn’t as simple as a blanket criticism of the tourism industry. An investigation into the scholarly discourse reveals that the relationship between tourist activity and these mighty mountains is a lot more complex.
The environmental costs of tourism in the Himalayas have been immense and ever rising including “landscape degradation; garbage pollution, increased extraction of valuable resources such as fuelwood and timber,” melting glaciers, irregular weather patterns, ecosystem shifts, and a rise in heat-related and vector-borne diseases.[4] Simultaneously, however, research, including studies conducted across numerous parts of the Himalayan belt in Nepal, reveals an immense rise in living standards, employment opportunities, reduction in crime rates, rising participation of women in planning processes and political and economic systems, increased self-reliance, and lower precarity across all social strata that find direct roots in the business brought by the tourism industry.[5] One respondent to interviews conducted in the Khumbu region of Nepal states, “There are both good and bad things that it [tourism] can bring, mostly good, because they are helping education, helping health, and provide more benefits…[tourism] helps [poor] people for their education and health.”[6]
Most interesting however is the immense discourse that seeks to highlight ways in which certain developments in the tourism industry have in fact resulted in better environmental conservation and protection practices in Himalayan regions. Reports claim that tourism has enabled the development of village-level community conservation projects by incentivising the need to protect the very natural beauty that drives the livelihoods of most local people, increasing local awareness of changing environmental conditions in the context of global climate change and, most significantly, enabling the generation of substantial revenues for governments to invest towards protecting local ecosystems from the mal effects of global warming and climate change.[7] The importance of striking a balance between protecting the same glorious natural beauty that draws tourist business and mitigating any consequent external costs is said to have incentivised countries like Bhutan to adopt national policy and tourism regulations predicated on the necessity of sustainability.[8] Therefore, it is evident that the impact of tourist activity on the Himalayan regions, particularly those that have become tourist hotspots, is complex, multi-layered and not easily definable through opposition to the tourism industry as a whole.
An emerging and increasingly prevalent approach to navigating this complex balance is the rise of forms of sustainable tourism in the Himalayas. For example, homestays or “community-based ecotourism is being promoted as a low-impact, environmentally sensitive way to travel” that allows the generation of supplementary income of local populations such as the Changpa in Korzok while reducing external costs on, and in some cases, actively working to protect critical ecosystems such as Lake Tsomoriri.[9] Confronted by the realities of unregulated tourism resulting in a degradation of local pasturelands, extensive water pollution and accumulation of non-biodegradable waste in regions such as Korzok, it has been found that “economic incentives for conservation are particularly essential” for the success and sustainability of any initiatives undertaken to mitigate and prevent such costs.[10] The Korzok homestay initiative offers to tourists the unique opportunity to stay with participating local families, experiencing life as it is in difficult Himalayan terrains while engaging in local conservation projects operated by WWF-India.[11] Not without their challenges, such approaches must be attempted with clearly defined sustainability goals and in constant consultation with local communities for any hope at success.[12] However, the Korzok homestay initiative, a remarkable economic success that has efficiently reduced environmental degradation around Lake Tsomoriri, represents the potential viability of successfully navigating this fine line between mitigating environmental damage while supporting local social and economic growth.
Majestic and invaluable, and consequently attractive to large and growing crowds of visitors every year, the Himalayan region, intertwining with tourist markets, represents a complex story of costs and benefits that are beyond a simplistic narrative of utter disaster caused by commercial activity. Walking the fine line of comprehending both the immense value of tourist businesses to local communities and the necessity to prevent and protect these ecosystems from further degradation, sustainable tourism offers a path that is still rather narrow but immensely promising towards protecting the might and glory of the Himalayan mountains.
Vamika Jain is in her second year of a specialist in International Relations and a minor in Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a contributor for the South Asia section of the Synergy journal.
References
Anand, Anupam. Pankaj Chandan, and Ram Babu Singh. “Homestays at Korzok: Supplementing Rural Livelihoods and Supporting Green Tourism in the Indian Himalayas.” Mountain Research and Development 32, no. 2 (2012): 126-36.
“Keeping the Himalayas Healthy.” World Wildlife Fund. 11 April 2011. https://wwf.panda.org/?199989/Keeping-the-Himalayas-healthy.
Nepal, S. K. “Tourism as a key to sustainable mountain development: the Nepalese Himalayas in retrospect.” Unasylva (2002): 38-45.
Nepal, Sanjay K. “Mountain Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Ecology, Economics, and Ethics.” Mountain Research and Development 22, no. 2 (2002): 104-09.
Nyaupane, Gyan P., Alan A. Lew and Kevin Tatsugawa. “Perceptions of trekking tourism and social and environmental change in Nepal’s Himalayas.” Tourism Geographies 16, no. 3 (May 2014): 415-437.
Schultz, Kai, Jeffrey Gettleman, Mujib Mashal and Bhadra Sharma. ‘It Was Like a Zoo’: Death on an Unruly, Overcrowded Everest.” New York Times. 26 May 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/world/asia/mount-everest-deaths.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
Toropov, Pavel. “Everest traffic jams: mountaineer gives first person account of the ‘horrible, stressful and dangerous’ queues.” South China Morning Post. 10 June 2019. https://www.scmp.com/sport/outdoor/extreme-sports/article/3013809/everest-traffic-jams-mountaineer-gives-first-person.
Tshering, Doma, and Brianna Craft. “Engaging Effectively in Climate Diplomacy: Policy Pointers from Bhutan,” International Institute for Environment and Development (October 2016).
Yadav, Medha Dutta. “India’s collapsing hill stations.” New Indian Express. 19 June 2019. https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/2019/jun/16/indias-collapsing-hill-stations-1990056.html.
[1] Pavel Toropov, “Everest traffic jams: mountaineer gives first person account of the ‘horrible, stressful and dangerous’ queues,” South China Morning Post, 10 June 2019. https://www.scmp.com/sport/outdoor/extreme-sports/article/3013809/everest-traffic-jams-mountaineer-gives-first-person.
[2] “Keeping the Himalayas Healthy,” World Wildlife Fund, 11 April 2011, https://wwf.panda.org/?199989/Keeping-the-Himalayas-healthy.
[3] Kai Schultz, Jeffrey Gettleman, Mujib Mashal and Bhadra Sharma, ‘It Was Like a Zoo’: Death on an Unruly, Overcrowded Everest,” New York Times, 26 May 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/world/asia/mount-everest-deaths.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article. Medha Dutta Yadav, “India’s collapsing hill stations” New Indian Express, 19 June 2019, https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/2019/jun/16/indias-collapsing-hill-stations-1990056.html.
[4] Gyan P. Nyaupane, Alan A. Lew and Kevin Tatsugawa, “Perceptions of trekking tourism and social and environmental change in Nepal’s Himalayas,” Tourism Geographies 16, no. 3 (May 2014): 430.; S.K. Nepal, “Tourism as a key to sustainable mountain development: the Nepalese Himalayas in retrospect.” Unasylva (2002): 38-45.
[5] S. K. Nepal, “Tourism as a key,” 42-43.
[6] Gyan P. Nyaupane, Alan A. Lew and Kevin Tatsugawa, “Perceptions of trekking tourism,” 425.
[7] S.K. Nepal, 43.; Anupam Anand, Pankaj Chandan, and Ram Babu Singh, “Homestays at Korzok: Supplementing Rural Livelihoods and Supporting Green Tourism in the Indian Himalayas,” Mountain Research and Development 32, no. 2 (2012): 126-36.
[8] Doma Tshering and Brianna Craft, “Engaging Effectively in Climate Diplomacy: Policy Pointers from Bhutan,” International Institute for Environment and Development (October 2016).
[9] Anupam Anand, Pankaj Chandan, and Ram Babu Singh, “Homestays at Korzok,” 126.
[10] Anupam Anand, Pankaj Chandan, and Ram Babu Singh, 128.
[11] Ibid, 126-36.
[12] Sanjay K. Nepal, “Mountain Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Ecology, Economics, and Ethics,” Mountain Research and Development 22, no. 2 (2002): 104-09.
Leave a Reply