Following the Toilet Paper Trail
Strange, out-of-season pink blossoms sprinkle the rhododendron trail from Lukla to Mount Everest Base Camp. But, look again. What you see is, actually, toilet paper (!) mostly Chinese brands, festooning the trail side and marking the passage of the Western Tourist.
At rest stops, such as Pheriche, Lobuje and Gorakshep, accumulated garbage radiates outward like ripples in a grimy pond. At Base Camp itself, you are likely to find tents pitched atop or next to frozen landfills of discarded batteries, plastic boxes, food tins, gas cylinders and other 20th Century flotsam.
The trekking and climbing industry, which over the years has brought jobs, money and social benefits to rural Nepal, is now exacting an unsightly toll: A mass of litter, spreading relentlessly over the mountains like an uncontrolled oil slick. In 1985, a British paper quoted an American tour operator, about trekking north of Kathmandu, "Langtang? That's the toilet paper trail!"
Since then, according to veteran sardar Padam Singh Ghaley, the problem has become much worse. He says what little regulations there are, are flouted by the very people who would be extra scrupulous in the trails back in the American Rockies or the European Alps. Michael Yeager, who has climbed and led expeditions since 1976, agrees that the problem has reached unprecedented proportions. "This year, almost everyone I met remarked how bad the situation is along the trails, and in the campsites," he said. "It is disgusting – I've even seen feces on the mani stones at Tengpoche."
Garbage does not end at the base camp, of course, but climbs up in a trail of discarded canisters, ropes, ice screws and wastes, right up the mountains towards the summits. The South Col on Everest, of course, is legendary as the highest garbage dump on earth. In late 1987, then Minister of Tourism Ramesh Nath Pandey told an interviewer that things were so out of hand that the Government was considering closing all the peaks over 8,000 metres, until something could be done. That never happened. Meanwhile, an estimated 40,000 climbers and trekkers continue to add to the growing garbage pile, every year.
Enough Blame to Go Around
Yet, when it is asked just who is responsible, all fingers point in different directions, and there is a chorus of "Not I!" and "Mailay Haina!" Western trekking agency representatives generally pass the buck off to their sardars and porters, whose job it is, they say, to clean up after the sahabs and memsaabs leave camp. Respond the sardars: it is the Westerners who bring in tons of non-biodegradables and use tissue at the slightest excuse. Every sneeze, they say, harms the Himalayan environment. Out comes the Kleenex tissue, which is then discarded to the stiff mountain breeze. The paper takes much longer to biodegrade in the cold heights, say some well traveled Sherpas.
Blame is also placed on government liaison officers, who do not monitor littering by the expeditions they are attached to. Yet another problem is that half of the trekkers do not come in groups, and are thus, much more difficult to sensitise and monitor.
When foreigners first took to the hill trails in the1960s and1970s and discarded what they no longer needed, for a time, the porters and en route villagers gladly took home empty coffee tins, bottles and other castoffs. But the absorption capacity for such material reached the limit long ago. Now they are dumped into ice crevasses to be belched up at the glacial moraine in the next decade, or gathered in a pile at the corner of a campsite. At best, they are half heartedly buried into shallow pits.
Even on the rare occasion that refuse is actually carried back in dokos, aesthetic insensitivities can still intervene. Yeager recounts an Everest expedition he led, which brought back a large load to Jorsale, the entrance to the Sagarmatha National Park. The park rangers congratulated him for the effort and assured him that the trash would be burned. And what would they do with the bottles and cans? One ranger replied, "Oh, we'll just toss those in the river."
Meanwhile, so long as the dollars keep flowing from the trekking business, the Ministry of Tourism seems content to lecture on the need "to leave Nepal as you found it." According to sardars and tourists alike, the trekking agencies on the whole, continue to flout the basics of litter cleanup.
The Annapurna Example
In the middle of all this doom and gloom and garbage, the example of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project stands out. Since its inauguration in 1986, the ACAP has been conducting a three-day training on rubbish pits and latrine construction for lodge owners in Dhampus, Ghandruk, Ghorepani, and other villages in the region. Afterwards, they are encouraged to form lodge management committees, through which ACAP can provide loans for building latrines. "Our philosophy is to involve locals by showing them the tangible benefits of litter maintenance," says ACAP Director Mingma Norbu Sherpa. "A clean environment means more tourists, and better service (generates) more money."
Even though Annapurna draws three times as many trekkers as does Sagarmatha, Ghaley and others say it is far cleaner. Part of the reason is that, since, in Sagarmatha trekking is concentrated on the one route leading up from Lukla, the trekkers stay longer, and there are more expeditions with more porters and equipment. However, all agree that ACAP's efforts have made a significant difference, especially, by improving the hygienic standards in the villages. While ACAP has sponsored two annual cleanup expeditions similar to those conducted periodically in the Everest region, Mingma Norbu Sherpa does not see these as a solution. "The cleanup campaigns are useful to increase awareness about the problem. But, the only systematic way to reduce litter is by encouraging local residents to set up depots along the trail, and be empowered by the authorities to collect revenues for disposal of the refuse."
His suggestion makes sense, if all other options have been eliminated. The Government has already promulgated a host of anti-littering rules, to no great effect. The trek agencies by and large, continue to go their wayward way without picking up after themselves. The same is true of a significant number of tourists and climbers. The only way to keep a clean trail in the Himalaya might be to help the people who live on the trails to keep watch and pursue those whose actions leave the countryside dirtier than they found it.
~Michael Luhan is a writer who lives in Kathmandu.