Guest Blog

This is some blog description about this site

Adapt or Abandon? Hard Choices in the Himalayas

Anthropologists are documenting how global warming is transforming Asia’s water tower and threatening the livelihoods of farmers and herders. On a cold evening in 2012, anthropologist Jiban Mani Poudel sat sharing tea and snacks with mountain herders huddled around a cattle pen in Nepal’s Nhāson Valley. A wizened 63-year-old herder, Gunjaman Gurung, exclaimed, “Norusaiba has almost begun,” referring to the seasonal arrival of cold winds and dewfall, when the meadows slowly turn brown and die, and herders bring their cattle down the Himalayan slopes. For the next six years, over many cups of tea in the mountains, Poudel, who teaches at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, discovered how attuned mountain herding communities are to nature’s cues. Nepal’s traditional herders, for example, set their lives according to nature’s cues, such as ngosho, the season tied to flowering plants. Climate change is reshaping the Himalayas in many ways: While the Upper Mustang region becomes more arid, other areas,...
Read more...
  1128 Hits
  0 Comments
1128 Hits
0 Comments

Newsletter subscription

Login