For those of us who live in temperate northern countries, climate change can feel far away and somewhat abstract. We can talk casually about saving rainforests, coral reefs or glaciers as entities in themselves, without any understanding of what it means to depend on them.
For some audiences, this doesn’t resonate at all. Why the big urgency around ‘saving’ a glacier? It’s a block of ice. It has no feelings and no needs. From a distance, its existence or non-existence feels trivial, beyond the sentimental value of keeping things the same or thinking they’re beautiful.
Anyone who lives alongside a glacier would of course see it very differently. Communities in glacial regions – and wildlife too for that matter – experience it as part of the landscape and know intimately how it shapes their lives. Videos like this one help to illuminate those stories.
In this short documentary from National Geographic, we meet a family of apple farmers in Nepal. Their trees are watered by seasonal meltwater from a Himalayan glacier, but it has retreated and shrunk. The family is now divided. The younger generation has moved to another area where the water supplies are more reliable, and they are getting a whole new orchard established. The older generation remain on their traditional lands, and the father of the family spends six months of the year in each location.
Those left behind are surrounded by empty houses, left vacant by families migrating to seek better farming conditions. We see the closed and padlocked school, with not enough children to keep it open. The older couple don’t want to abandon their trees and the dwindling income they can still get from them, but it’s clear that there’s no future here. It’s harder to find help during busy periods. We see the most prosaic and easily overlooked aspects of living in a place that climate change is making unliveable: “In the earlier days we had 21 families altogether,” says the grandfather. “It’s boring and more difficult to pass the time now that there’s fewer people remaining.”
120 million people depend directly on the Himalayan glaciers for their water supplies and their livelihoods. If you’ve got ten minutes this weekend, here are some of them.
The Earthbound Report 