"Akin to charismatic, endangered megafauna, the Himalayan region occupies a central place within disastrous forecasts of a “warmer and wetter climate” with melting glaciers, erratic monsoons, forest fires, and flash floods that are only set to worsen with rising temperatures. Such grim tales of apocalyptic futures are not unique to climate hotspots like the Himalayan region but are now firmly entrenched in contemporary scientific and popular discourse on the climate crisis. While the biophysical reality of climate change is undeniable, critical scholars have long been wary of how representations of ecological crisis and vulnerability overdetermine analytical frameworks, possible solutions, and our visions of the future. And surely these are not the only stories worth telling about our shared regional and planetary futures?

 

This talk builds on my long-term ethnographic research in Sikkim, which like many Indian Himalayan states has been grappling with catastrophic disasters exacerbated by the surge in large infrastructural development like hydropower, national highways, and railway lines. Since 2006, the Dzongu valley in Sikkim has been the site of a vibrant anti-dam movement led by the Lepcha (Mutanchi Rongkup) community. Dzongu also known as Nye Mayal Lyang or the hidden land, is revered as the birthplace of the first Lepchas ancestors, is home to a secret paradise and other secret places believed to house sacred scriptures, relics, and religious teachings, to be revealed in times of great need. One such sacred treasure is a pot filled to the brim with grains and seeds meant to help Lepcha people build anew in the event of an apocalypse. Drawing on critical geographic and Indigenous theorizations on geopoetics, storytelling, and prophecy, I theorize an Indigenous geopoetics – both as praxis and theory that interprets the earth and its signs in ways that maintain hope in uncertain times. I also draw into the conversation recent humanistic scholarship on geology’s history as an imperial science and diverse forms of geological thought and practice, to consider how Himalayan geology and geologists counter universalist narratives of climate crisis. In staging this conversation, my talk invites us to consider stories and theories from the Himalaya that provide a window into the reality of living with precarity but in doing so, do not arrive at anxiety-ridden prophecies of future ruination."