Development – Pamir Institute

Tackling Trash Atop Mountains: Sustainable Mountain Tourism

December 11, 2021 observed as International Day of Mountains has the theme of Sustainable Mountain Tourism in the first year of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Most of our hill-top tourist hot-spots, mountaineering sites as well as hill hiking and trekking routes suffer from littering and a resultant waste management issue. Inevitably these tiny towns have a larger proportion of tourists visiting than the number of people living there and the inaccessibility of hill and mountain roads adds to the trash troubles. Not to mention the problems of resource scarcity, inflation and traffic.

The Everest is not spared from the plastic menace and littering. Many humans may not have conquered the world’s highest peak but their trash sure has dominated the previously pristine and sacred peak. That’s the case of most peaks that are being scaled.

Karakoram Highway, a prototype of the new Silk Roads?

The Chinese “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), also known as the “New Silk Roads”, is a work in progress that raises many questions. Yet in Pakistan, the Karakoram Highway, commissioned in 1979, may provide us with some answers. Parallel to the challenged sovereignty of the country, it could be observed, until these last months, a religio-patriotic discourse with a questionable consistency and an expensive open or latent state of war seeming to assure a form of national cohesion.

What place for Zoodkhun into the global world?

Zoodkhun in Chapursan Valley, due to its difficult condition of access, preserved most of its authenticity and its community values until today. Expected improvement of communications, development of a Pakistani middle class, increase in foreign visitors might lead to deep changes which should be monitored to contain a cultural and patrimonial alienation.