Another 'Garbage Hobbyist' Hits Everest

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.'

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