{"id":60020,"date":"2021-10-21T06:32:18","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T11:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60020"},"modified":"2021-10-21T06:32:18","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T11:32:18","slug":"climate-change-viewed-from-the-attic-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60020","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Viewed From the Attic of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Climate Change Viewed From the Attic of the World<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photograph Source: NASA, Janderk Jan Derk \u2013 Public Domain<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Thirteen thousand feet high on the far side of the Himalaya mountains, we have entered the past and the future at the same time. We are a medical expedition and also a pilgrimage, consisting of doctors, nurses, Buddhist clerics, supernumeraries like me, and a large staff of guides, muleteers, and camp tenders. We are bound for the isolated villages of Upper Dolpo, a remote region of northwestern Nepal, land of the snow leopard \u2014 both the actual animal and\u00a0The Snow Leopard<\/em><\/a>, Peter Matthiessen\u2019s nonfiction classic. We are traveling the same trails Matthiessen walked in 1973.<\/p>\n

As a medical mission, our purpose is to provide primary health care to people who rarely, if ever, see a clinician. As pilgrims, our purposes are as varied as our individual identities. Mine is to make peace with the anger and grief that have dogged me since finishing a pair of books, one on\u00a0climate change<\/a>, the other on\u00a0extinction<\/a>. They left me heartsick. My delight in the beauty of the world had been joined to sorrow at its destruction, and the two emotions were like cellmates who refused to get along. Their ceaseless argument soured the taste of life. I hoped that a long walk \u2014 about 150 miles in this case \u2014 might cure the resultant moral ache. (The story of that walk provides the backbone of my new book,\u00a0The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The trails we followed led us into the past in the sense that the high Himalayan world \u2014 Sanskrit\u2019s \u201cabode of snow\u201d \u2014 is a relic of the Pleistocene, a land of glaciers, vast spaces, stony rubble, and frigid rivers…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Climate Change Viewed From the Attic of the World Photograph Source: NASA, Janderk Jan Derk \u2013 Public Domain Thirteen thousand feet high on the far side of the Himalaya mountains, we have entered the past and the future at the same time. We are a medical expedition and also a pilgrimage, consisting of doctors, nurses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,5493,8242],"class_list":["post-60020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-counterpunch","tag-william-debuys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60021,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60020\/revisions\/60021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}