Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas by Karine Gagné (review)

Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 258 pp.

Karine Gagné's book, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas, is a unique integrative account of generational and climate resiliency in the Himalayas that integrates local perspectives and memories of regional geopolitical history and environment, with reflections on loss. Gagné's study explores contemporary life in what science organizations, including NASA, refer to as "High Mountain Asia." This is a region of much interest to glaciologists and climate scientists as it is home to the world's largest reservoir of glaciers and snow outside the earth's polar ice sheets. Yet this is a story unlike the others focusing on the High Mountain Himalayas, where receding glaciers often overshadow the lives and values of people living there.

Gagné's ethnography invites the reader into the lives of Tibetan Buddhists of Ladakh and especially into the perspectives of elderly residents. The book offers a rare window into their struggles and feelings. The political territory in which Tibetan Buddhists live is a sensitive border region between India, Pakistan, and China. Their homeland lies between the predominantly Muslim regions of the Kashmir Valley and Kargil on the one side and the disputed "Line of Actual Control," bordering the Aksai Chin glacial area of China on the other. The book's portrayal of Ladakhis, and specifically the Shamma or inhabitants of lower Ladakh, unfolds through a series of intimate accounts of the challenges elderly farmers and herders face, through their memories, stories, and adaptations to resource changes over the last 70 years. Like Kim Gutschow's (2004) book on the Buddhist nuns of Ladakh, Gagné offers us a way to meet a neglected community through sustained participation in their way of life.

Gagné collected the views and stories of Ladakhis while living in the region intermittently over several years. She takes us through their memories of military interventions of the past half-century and their responses to the recent out-migrations of Ladakhi youth. She describes the mounting challenges with animal herding and caretaking and agricultural sustenance as the elderly community members survive the harsh winters alone. In these stories, the elderly Shamma define ethics through reciprocity and think of reciprocal relations among family members as well as with animals and the non-human environment. Gagné refers to their approach as an ethics of care. Care frames their relations with the land, which is like a mother looking after her children. It frames their relations with their animals that provide farming assistance and knowledge of the landscape, and with glaciers that produce the water that sustains all.

In the opening of the book, Gagné introduces her research assistant, Nyamgal, with a heap of respect. She tells the reader about the crucial role he played as a youth member of the community in opening up the communication pathways with elderly Ladakhis. She makes it clear that research is co-produced with others, and especially with research assistants. Nyamgal was able to elicit their emotional responses with his humanism and vulnerability. Gagné also brings in her own struggles adapting with Nyamgal to the high altitudes and frigid winters, huddled around the bokhari (wood stove) with limited food supplies. In the concluding chapter, she takes the reader on her own trek to see Father Glacier, where the high altitude makes breathing a life or death struggle.

Gagné tacks between stories of the trauma of war, the harsh winters, and the stresses on elderly family members abandoned by migrating youth. In the midst of their struggles, we get an acute sense of their feelings of loneliness and loss. Elderly family members, alone in the long, harsh winters, are barely able to manage the agricultural work as they struggle to care for the animals they love so much. Desires to escape the pressures of autocratic regimes, the growing debt to outsiders, and confrontations with...