Packs on back, hats on head, boots on feet. WanderingMan armed with sprung pole to aid balance whilst I (Rose) contented myself with a partially fashioned walking stick found on our walk from Mudhe to Dhunge. We were posing for photographs at the trailhead. Two village girls along with a family from the village were going to offer Puja atop the revered Sailung Peak. They were going our way. The girls had offered to carry our packs, an offer we declined.
We’d walked through the village offering hearty Namastes to the many folk young and old who had come to see us off or just to stare. Ahead of us a 600 metre climb. We were marching off to soar.
The ascent offers beautiful views of terraced pastoral land against the backdrop of the Himalayas, 47 million years spent reaching for the light has left them white capped and a little curmudgeonly when responding to the scratching of humans.
The path up to Sailung Peak was littered with goat pooh and other animal droppings; an indication that ‘as the goat trots’ rather than ‘as the crow flies’ is the preferred measure of distance and shortcut validation. Our guides would stop and wait for us, ask us to pose for pictures, giggle, offer us sweet biscuits and ask to carry our bags.
It was all very lovely, until they discarded the biscuit wrapper straight onto nature’s floor. In fact all the way up to the Peak there were discarded plastic bottles, crisp packets, the ubiquitous blue and pink plastic carrier bags and other assorted debris. It jarred.
We would visit two more revered peaks during this trek and observe the same thing. Where there was worship there was garbage.
Although constitutionally secular Nepal has a significant majority of Hindus (81.3% at the 2011 census), followed by Buddhists (9%). Both view nature as sacred. In 1986 The WWF instigated a meeting in Assisi between leaders of five of the worlds major religions. It resulted in the Assisi Declarations on Nature (https://goo.gl/6qCWau) that allowed each faith to highlight its approach to the environment. Hindus and Buddhists alike affirmed the need to protect the earth and all sentient and non-sentient things.
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Faith groups, secular NGO’s, Governments, the World Bank and others all engaged in dialogue, all agreeing that the planet needs protecting and yet here we are with garbage strewn about for animals to eat, to contaminate land and invading a consciousness that should be engaged with the natural world in wonder.
Leaving aside the issues of infrastructure, education and worry which we in the West have become so accustomed to in respect of garbage. Leaving aside the behaviour change stratedgies and taxes levied on the consumer to manage waste disposal so de rigueur in the West. There is not a one size fits all enviromental programme but I do believe there is something we all can do. Pick it up and send it back. The people who need to see this mess are the manufacturers and shareholders and they need to see it outside their front doors. It is their behaviour, their pursuit of profit which needs to be confronted.
So here is my suggestion for protest within the principles of ahimsa (non-violence). When you go trekking take a postcard or an envelope. Pick up a piece of this debris – attach to postcard or envelope and send it back to the manufacturer’s parent company or to an identified shareholder either individual or institutional. “This is yours – you deal with it. With love from…”.
If you are so minded, talk to villagers and get them to collect the stuff as I’m sure the wealth of some of the tour parties who visit could be combined to send maybe a Kilo of garbage back. Let those who know but do nothing deal with the problems caused by selling sugary sweets, fast food and other shit entirely unnecessarily to villagers, in the process slowly trashing old ways of life. It’s entirely inappropriate and harmful if we set it against the principle that the planet needs protecting. It is the multi nationals whose behaviour has to change. Let them have their environment rendered toxic.
“Rose…..Rose!” WMan shouted. “please shut up and look”. In the distance our guides had now gone onto perform their Puja carrying with them one hundred eggs as an offering. Behind them, scattered about, the unseemly mess of humans. All around us the unsurpassable majesty of the planet – “it must be worth a stamp’“I mused.
NB: rather gruesomely I would apply the same principle to shareholders in Munitions companies, although postage might be problematic.
