What Hath Man Wrought?

Starting in 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to summit Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain was on its way to becoming the world’s highest garbage dump. Since that time, over four thousand climbers have followed, leaving behind fifty tons of trash, including empty oxygen bottles, discarded gear, wreckage of a helicopter, human waste, and an estimated 120 corpses. In the thin, dry air and freezing

temperatures, garbage simply does not decompose. To compound the problem, climate change is causing the glaciers to recede, uncovering trash from Hillary’s time that had been buried under the snow. It is ironic and tragic that in this remote region of the earth, inaccessible except to a miniscule fraction of the world’s population, trash has become a pressing problem. On both the Nepalese and Tibetan sides, there are ongoing annual expeditions whose goal is to remove the refuse left behind by climbers and trekkers. The Nepalese government recently required a substantial deposit in addition to climbing fees in order to compel tourists to pack out what they pack in so that the mountain sacred to the local people can remain a pristine symbol of the wonder that is the natural world.

What hath God wrought? The highest mountain in the world. What hath man wrought? The world’s highest garbage dump.

To see what kind of mess foreign trekkers and climbers have made of Mount Everest, go to extremeeverest.wordpress.com , the blog of one of the cleanup missions. On a related note, the late Sir Edmund Hillary set up the Himalayan Trust, a charity that benefits the Sherpas of Nepal. The trust’s website is www.himalayantrust.co.uk.