Scientific investigations can discover and harness a host of unusual ‘proxies’ – mountains and lakes, ice and snow, clouds and dew, birds and grasses – to address sustaining the environment
-Hildegard Diemberger
The everyday lives of the Porong people of southwestern Tibet are shaped by their mountain landscape. The condition of the snow-capped peaks is just as central to their age-old narratives and rituals as they are to their contemporary agricultural practices. The Tibetans consider that the ‘ancient spirits’ of these places control the weather, wildlife, fertility, resources and all that determines the wellbeing of the community; according to their songs, ‘The honour of the snow-mountains is the snow… may there not be any change, may prosperity prevail.’
Over the course of two decades of living and working in the region, Dr Hildegard Diemberger from the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit in Cambridge University's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology has frequently encountered the connection between the Tibetans and their Himalayan landscape.
“I noticed that as much as people were transforming the landscape in which they were making a living, the landscape – and the increasingly unpredictable weather, drying up of springs and receding snowline – was changing the lives of the people who were experiencing it. Anticipating nature has been essential to being able to adapt to its seasonal transformations, as well as to detect longer-term abnormalities.”
Increasingly, researchers like Diemberger are raising awareness of the value of such local knowledge of the natural environment as a proxy for gauging environmental change, and as a step towards understanding the role of humans in causing that change. Recently, she contributed to a research network led by Dr David Sneath and Dr Barbara Bodenhorn (both in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology) that examined the significance of natural proxies – ranging from the snow and ice of the Arctic to the songbirds of the Tibetan plateau and the ‘bog oaks’ of the East Anglian Fenlands – in communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change.
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Image: Shisha Pangma from Porong Pemo Choding Monastery
Credit: Hildegard Diemberger
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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