I saw this picture in the Guardian this morning. Yes, that is the queue to the top of Everest.
This is staggering. And it's deeply selfish. Call it neoliberal consumption gone mad, if you wish.
And it's about as antithetical to the Green New Deal as it gets.
We need to live in a very different world now. And this picture makes clear why. We have literally pushed the world to its limits. And it can take no more.
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It’s completely insane, isn’t it? Especially when you consider that the route that these wealthy consumers have paid to be dragged up involves trudging past the visible dead bodies of previous climbers who died on the mountain. If that isn’t a metaphor for unsustainable consumption then I don’t know what is.
Pete Harrison says:
“It’s completely insane, isn’t it? ”
I think so: joining a queue to have a unique experience…….. (?) Go figure, as the cousins say.
While excessive consumer consumption looks awful, fundamentally it only costs energy. Something we CAN solve with investment.
The trashing of the planet is fundamentally from feeding humans. The rape of the planet is to grow food, ( energy and fibre and other crops are of marginal significance).
Available actions
1) Make the planet totally dedicated to feeding humans and sacrifice high animals
2) Ration food, to ensure a “fair” and meagre distribution. A “Grains and Beans” diet
3) Limit human population
or of course a mix of the above.
Note that 1 and 2 eventually fail due to human population, if it still grows
My Exoshock world model, indicates that the sustainable limit of 1 and 2 is around 12B people,
If current food consumption norms are maintained then the limit is 6B people
If we leave some land to support other species, than the limit is nearer 3B people.
Oh and the time frame for getting to a sustainable population is less than 20 years!
Enjoy your weekend
Excessive consumption also destroys environments – it is not just carbon
And it’s not just food
What makes this worse is that the base camps on Everest and other peaks are apparently like rubbish tips now – not pristine environments. And it gives climbing a bad name – even the alpine style.
But I agree – the picture is a environmental metaphor – the human race queuing in the death zone.
Something similar happened on K2 a number of years ago and there was a break off a glacier nearby which cause considerable casualties. And these trips are not cheap either.
Peak Neoliberalism. Literally.
That queue of climbers on Everest?..but I’m note quite sure how it is caused by ‘neo-liberalism’, except perhaps that it has so fantastically enriched Western society that large numbers of people now have the leisure time to train and climb Everest.
Let’s get these people back into a life of soul destroying drudgery, where they belong!
My point is that this is all about individual consumption without consideration of consequence. That is neoliberal
Don’t be silly Louis. What you’re seeing is the selling of “the” achievement.
“I’ve been up Everest”
I can tell you as a mountaineer (on hiatus) that “whoop de fucking do”
I mean, it’s a considerable achievement, don’t get me wrong, but its now so comercialised. I don’t believe it’s really mountaineering any more, or not the way I know it.
The point is, once money can buy the achievement, it’s not an achievement. It’s hard,yes, but so fucking what? If I had a spare 50000 or so, I’d be off into the Himalayas, and not up Everest by that route…
The period of my life with least drudgery was when I lived in the Lake District and could do this kind of stuff full time. I just knew my brain wasn’t being used to it’s full potential and eventually that overcame my desire to remain in the outdoor life.
I know this has been a bit rambling but Richard is correct. Anyone who knows the lakes and then has been up cat bells of a weekend knows exactly how neoliberalism is involved.
It’s the sale of a dream or an image. everyone’s been told they need this to be worthy. Well guess what? That image doesn’t make you worthy. The very opposite. Go do something else. Engage your brain. Jump off the bandwagon and fucking look around. These sound like slogans but they’re not. They’re hard to do. And you can’t fake them
So no, don’t send people to a life of drudgery, but call them out when their imagination is gone and they can only achieve “the” goal. The queue of people up Everest is the perfect metaphor, and I hope it stops.
1996 anybody?
Great post Johan – ‘agree with all of it – thanx for stopping by.
The thing I like about climbing is it is about problem solving element that taxes the brain – thinking about moves, ropes, escape routes, knots, safety – all things that you and a few others should be thinking about and addressing to climb successfully
Quite right – when I see all those people and look at the cost of these trips, I wonder ‘ Where did you get your money from?’. Offshore perhaps? Tax breaks (again?). It makes you speculate.
If you have the money you can get to the top of Everest and not even be a professional climber.
But meanwhile, inequality is growing in the West, we can’t even look after the population nor the planet and in the UK the NHS is struggling and the UN is saying that the Government has deliberately made people’s lives worse.
What you see in that picture is one of the perils of free enterprise – an over supply chasing a disposable income and therefore chaos. Yet elsewhere being go hungry, public services deteriorate. More deaths have resulted too on this particular trip. You are meant to get to the top of Everest and then get off ASAP and get down.
It seems nothing has been learnt from the awful events of May 1996 when three simultaneous ‘expeditions’ tried to work together to reach the summit and back with disastrous results.
You get it …
All the typical ‘horrified’ reactions. Nobody asks why?
Nepal is a typical example of capitalist madness, too many permits issued, no serious alternative activity except tourism. What does that say about equality?
Oh, the participants will say they are contributing to the Nepalese economy…. at what cost and do the common people of Nepal benefit?
Inequality is what is wrong with the world. Tell that to your socialists…. and act to deal with it.
Do you think socialists do not know it?
“Do you think socialists do not know it?”
Of course they do. They both know. 🙂
And next , the moon
Extraordinary to think that the summit was unsullied by human presence since the birth of time in my lifetime.
In a world with other values, other ways of seeing and being, this place would be respected, revered and remain untouched. As it is it just looks like a thousand blokes who’ve spent 20K on kit to visit IKEA on Bank Holiday Monday with added corpse and sewage in sub zero temperatures.
We deserve all that’s coming to us .
Can I suggest three papers:-
“Enough” – Where should people stop their consumption
“Less” – Where could they stop their consumption.
“Excess” – Where too much becomes a burden, to the individual as well as society
Climbing Everest was, at the start of the last century, an individual’s achievement to …I’m not quite sure what, those people who did it might be able to tell you.
Long ago, when no sign of climate crisis was yet apparent, is was a individual’s achievement anyway, apparently.
But now? What is it but an individual’s selfish desire to prove that you’ve done it, whatever for it is. You’ve done it because you could, at any cost, sometimes it costs lives…I struggle to sympathise, except for the families of those individuals.
At best, you give yourself good conscience because your excess cash has helped the tourist industry in the region. That cash you don’t know how to spend, you know, the one that could have made a real positive difference elsewhere.
And just look at that photo! Zoom in and you’ll see litter all along.
Do those people feel ‘more alive’ while they contributing to the destruction of nature?
What a sorry sight.
Others who also struggle to find a way of spending their cash buy ridiculous objects or property. The making or building of these ridiculous things can also cost other people’s lives and damage the environment.
The excess of cash has to be stopped, or at the very least, curbed.
It is harming the earth and the vast majority of those who live on it.
Having been bitten by the climbing bug I know why people want to do it and why. I know mountaineers/alpinists who wouldn’t think of hammering a piton into a mountain side because they’d want to leave the mountain as they found it and would rather go back down again. Others will diligently take their gear with them when they go.
But what we are seeing here on Everest (and K2) is ‘industrialised’ climbing built around the siege method where the route and ropes are put up for you. It is no longer an individual endeavour at this level – part of the appeal I see in ‘proper’ alpine climbing is that people do it to express their individualism, independence self reliance but also close team work with partners and adventure. You are competing with the mountain, your own psychology and the elements.
All they are doing in this picture is competing for time, space and revenue in an environment the human body is not designed for. Me – I’d want my money back.