WE KILL THE THINGS WE LOVE

“Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness.”

- Aldo Leopold

As I climbed the Khumbu Icefall up from Everest Base Camp to Camp One and then on to Camp Two, I was blown away by the natural beauty of the mountain, the pure white of the ice and snow, and the sheer scale and majesty of the landscape around me.

So I was shocked when I arrived at Camp Two and found it absolutely littered with rubbish. From large dumps of equipment and tents left behind from previous years’ expeditions in the hope that they could re-use it in the future (but then so ravaged and scattered by weather and the movements of the glacier that it was now useless) to endless bits of plastic waste and packaging discarded on the ground and mixed up amongst the rocks, it looked like a rubbish dump. As I walked around the camp my eye was constantly drawn to the rubbish and detritus littered among the rocks. Some was relatively recent and some had clearly been there for several years, most distressingly some was well on the way to gradually breaking down into microplastics, to travel slowly down the icefall, continue down the Khumbu glacier into the river, and end up in the sea decades from now.

It’s such a tragedy that, in their single minded pursuit of the goal of a successful summit, climbers and the companies that support them allow this stunning wilderness to be tarnished and polluted.