The latest in a long line of expeditions to 'clean up' Mount
Everest is underway as - and we quote the Guardian here - 'An ace
Japanese climber and his team headed for Mount Everest on Friday to
clean up the world's highest mountain and dig up bodies buried under
ice.'
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Everest Base Camp - littered
with
unsightly mushrooms and Czeck girls...
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Apparently the team, led by Ken Noguchi aims to bring down debris
left by previous expeditions at the South Col and according to the
Guardian's report, will also attempt to recover dead bodies 'buried
under the ice', though it seems he actually intends to push them into
crevasses. See this
report.
On the surface, it all seems very laudable, but Noguchi is just
the latest in the long line of what one Kathmandu journalist has
reportedly dubbed 'garbage hobbyists', who use the ecological
bandwagon to raise collosal sums to finance their trips.
According to British journalist and Everest author Ed Douglas
writing in last month's Trail, an expedition led by Noguchi last year
raised a colossal $430,000 from Western sponsors to 'clean up an
already tidy mountain'.
As anyone who's trekked the Everst base camp trail will realise,
the real problem in the area isn't the mountain itself, which is
exposed to a relatively low number of climbers and has been
repeatedly 'cleaned up' over the last ten years, but the trekking
route into the area.
Everest Base Camp itself is, when not occupied, a pristine area of
featureless rubble, but the approach from Namche is over-run with
trekkers creating huge ecological problems ranging from human waste
to the disposal of plastic drinks bottles. When I was there in 1999,
I saw at first hand smouldering waste dumps tucked away just off the
trail above Namche and witness porters using the endangered local
wood for cooking.
Sadly cleaning dead bodies off the world's highest mountain
attracts a lot more media hype, coverage and ultimately sponsorship
than the more mundane, but ultimately far more pressing problems of
managing the approaches.
Guardian
Report
MSNBC
South and Central Asia
Ananova
