Imagining Himalayan Glacial Futures

Within India, the possibility of creating space for diverse glacial futures comes most clearly to the fore in the scholarship presented by a select number of Indian geologists and glaciologists. Rather than projecting future Himalayan glacial retreat based on ‘before and after’ images of glacier recession, several Indian glaciologists prefer to think with the long march of geological time and point to the significant gaps in glaciological research, which they contend puts the ‘alarmism’ around glacial retreat into a more balanced light. It is these longue durée perspectives on glacial resilience, and the complexity of glaciological knowledge production, that this article creates space to understand. At stake is an effort to hold up, for social science audiences, the disparate knowings, between and among disciplines, that impact how Himalayan glaciers are imagined. This exploration adds to our understanding of how ice melt has come to represent the ‘most tangible manifestations of anthropogenic climate change’ (Jackson 2015: 479–480; see also Crate 2008; Gagné 2018; Gagné et al 2014; Orlove et al 2008) and why, despite our concerns over glacial change, we should not assume inevitable catastrophic impacts lest we fall into the trap of climate determinism (Carey et al 2017; Hulme 2011; Jasanoff 2010) that can foreclose alternative imaginaries and futures (Sherpa 2021).

The discussion is important to the anthropology of climate science and climate activism, which are wary of singular visions of climate futures and call for closer engagements with difference, including – as we argue here – within climate science research. We demonstrate how extrapolating perspectives on system changes based on select encounters of glacial retreat is, in fact, much like the challenge of trying to understand climate change based on encounters with a significant flood, or a drought, because we experience the ‘specific effects of the crisis but not the whole phenomenon’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 221). And yet, despite the difficulty of seeing the whole, the changes we observe ‘produce anxieties precisely around futures that we cannot visualise’ (2009: 211). In doing so, we argue that there is an underattended tension in climate debates – which, for this article, is the potentially limited ways that social scientists working in the Himalayas engage with the gamut of geological and glaciological research that pertains to glacial melt. This omission is curious because a disciplinary modus operandi is to take points of difference as a focus of study and to attempt to understand the unfamiliar. Why, then, would this open-minded orientation not also apply to social science efforts to understand competing scientific claims on the impending ‘death’ of Himalayan glaciers – the Third Pole's ice reserves?

What is missed by omitting work that suggests a divergent knowledge of how glaciers are behaving and how they might behave in the future? One key answer is that we are missing out on a more well-rounded sense of the possibilities for glacial vitality. This vitality includes (a) the potential for Himalayan glacial mass to remain resilient, even while retreating to a significant degree and (b) a widened scope for understanding the vitality of the cryospheric and meteorological systems of which glaciers are a part. This latter point is especially significant because, as indicated, there is often a conflation between the loss of Himalayan glaciers and the loss of the freshwater supplies that nourish hundreds of millions of people. Recent scholarship indicates that while snowmelt and glacier melt contribute substantially to river and groundwater, this varies significantly from ‘sub-catchments to river basin scales and from daily to seasonal and decadal time scales’ (ICIMOD 2023: xii; Thayyen and Gergan 2010).

Even if there is a significant amount of glacial retreat in the Himalayas, climate modelling shows that, in the future, there will be more rainfall overall and that the decreased streamflow due to ‘reduced glacier volume and snowfall’ will be compensated by this increased rainfall contribution (Kulkarni et al 2021: 6). This demonstrates that while glaciers might be ‘vital material’ entities with semiotic significance (Bennett 2010), they may not, in fact, be ‘vital’ to human flourishing in downstream regions relative to the ‘vitality’ of the seasonal and monsoonal rains that are overwhelmingly responsible for replenishing river systems. While there are concerning – even devastating – impacts of glacier loss on mountain populations living in the Himalayas (Gagné 2018; ICIMOD 2023; Orlove 2016; Qui 2013), including the loss of spiritual and cultural lifeworlds (Allison 2015), our interest here is less on the localised implications of glacial melt and more on the environmental imaginaries that are extrapolated, and debated, based on the likely accumulative effect of Himalayan ice melt. Our aim is not to dismiss the high stakes of Himalayan glacial melt, but to enlarge the parameters through which changing glacial mass is disparately understood.

Thus, while we recognise the possible ‘thing-power’ of glaciers, which includes their potential to be ‘quasi-agents’ (Bennett 2010: vii) that are materially and even spiritually or metaphysically important to mountain communities (Drew 2012; Craig et al 2012; Gagné 2018), we base our discussion in the exploration of different knowledge practices among and between disciplines.¹ Engaging with glaciology as a discipline with its own fieldwork methodologies, debates, disagreements and orientations to time and scale invites us to examine our biases – a crucial practice for those interested in collaborating meaningfully across disciplines. In so doing, we aim to explore the possibilities of pluralism in our responses to, and in our understandings of, the ‘vibrant matter’ in question (Bennett 2010). Since ‘inhuman nature and geologic capacities’ also force change over time (Yusoff 2013: 779–780), we risk hubris in attaching all agency for environmental change to human actors (Clark 2011; Tsing 2015).

Glaciers are useful to think with in this respect because they are prone to behaving in ways that defy expectations (Cruikshank 2005, 2012; Drew 2012; O'Reilly 2016) and because our knowledge base on how Himalayan glaciers function is still evolving (Carey et al 2017). Moreover, following recent scalar critiques of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which certain humans have become ‘geological agents’ (Crutzen and Stefen 2003; Davis and Todd 2017) – we are wary of how ice ‘gets de-linked from the social histories of its origins and is made to serve as evidence of a shared global crisis’ (Smith 2021: 162). Such a framing puts the glacier-as-ruins framework on unstable ground; while worrying, glacial retreat tells only a small fraction of a much larger story.

In what follows, we chronologically revisit a series of disagreements about Himalayan glacial melt that were prominent from 2007 to 2021 and that will continue to resurface.² The intention in reviewing the data is to highlight the anxieties and uncertainties associated with climate change knowledge production and dissemination (Crate 2011; Head 2016; Head and Harada 2017; Hulme 2011; Norgaard 2011). In particular, we investigate varied imaginations of glacial melt in the Himalayas with special attention to how the region's ice formations are used to envision disparate futures. These imaginings of ‘icy vitality’ (or its lack) are multivocal in that environmental futures can be conveyed in numerous ways (Chowdhury 2016; Cruikshank 2012; Mathews and Barnes 2016: 11). In addition to debates in the published scholarship, we draw from the first author's research experience observing social scientists and natural scientists in live debate in scholarly meetings and international conferences over a decade and a half. These encounters have involved participation in several workshops and conferences about climate change impacts on the Himalayas that have taken place in Kathmandu, Nepal (in 2010, 2012, 2016 and 2019) and in New Delhi, India (in 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2015). We are also influenced by the second author's research on hazards and hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas and many years of discussion with her father, Dr Joseph Thsetan Gergan, who offered his discipline-based perception of the issues as an Indian glaciologist retired from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology. The resulting investigation reveals the contested nature of scientific knowledge production – glaciology, in this case – and invites reflection, particularly from the interpretive social sciences, on how we engage with the ‘facts’ of climate ruination in our sites.

Knowing Ice Retreat in the Indian Himalayas

Before speaking to some of the competing science on Himalayan glacial movements that we have flagged, it is important to situate how social scientists typically come to know, and discuss, the urgency of glacial retreat. For many, including ourselves, it has been the close encounters with retreating Himalayan glaciers – paired with the consumption of images of ice loss and ethnographically recorded stories of despair over ice retreat – that have fuelled understandings of glacial endangerment. Allow us to take, as an example, the first author's multiple experiences of encounter with a specific glacier in the Uttarakhand Himalayas to demonstrate what has fuelled her anxieties, and imaginings, of Himalayan glacial futures. This glacier, which is known as the Gangotri-Gaumukh glacier, is religiously revered by Hindus at its ‘terminus’ point because it feeds the Bhagirathi tributary that flows into the sacred River Ganga. The glacier has received a significant amount of attention over the last several decades as it is easily accessible by foot, and because there is a significant amount of glaciological and satellite data associated with its movements (Singh et al 2017).

In 2009, the first author arrived at the Gangotri-Gaumukh glacier – located at a height of 4255 metres – for what would be the third and final time. On reaching the glacial ‘snout’, which is said to resemble the open mouth of a cow (also a sacred entity in Hindu belief), there were notable differences from her previous summits in 2004 and 2006. The ice was greyer than before and had retreated a distinct but indeterminate number of metres. As was done on previous visits, she took copious images of the now visibly altered glacier. Returning to the Himalayan town where she was living at the time, she presented these images to her interlocutors. Her images of glacial change from 2004, 2006 and 2009 were met with expressions of deep concern. After rummaging in cupboards for images of their own trips to the same glacier in the 1990s, 1980s and even the 1970s, mountain residents sat in awe of the significant transformations they saw in the glacier's appearance. As the years passed, friends and former interlocutors continued to send her updated images of the glacier. Some of these were posted on social media and received expressions of dismay shared in English and Hindi. As observers, it felt as if the contributors to this image bank were collectively reading the story of climate change in vivid relief (Figure 1). The resulting photo series foreshadowed what many feared would be an eventual loss of the glacier itself – a loss that would be echoed in glacial decline across the Himalayas.

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Images of glacial retreat at the Gangotri-Gaumukh glacier, 2009 to 2017

Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320107

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Little did the first author know that, in sharing in a collective alarm based on first-hand knowledge of an iconic glacier's retreat, she was engaging in an activity many Indian glaciologists find highly circumspect. In fact, this type of site-based extrapolation of climate impacts feeds into the kind of work that becomes easy to dismiss for two main reasons.

First, and as is discussed throughout this article, the visible changes to specific glaciers are not representative of the health of the larger glacial system. As Dr Gergan stated in an interview in 2022, the public discourse focuses on ‘recession, recession . . ., recession’, but glaciers are part of much larger hydrological and meteorological cycles, and changes over time must consider ‘system’ fluctuations. When people imagine iceless Himalayas, he cautioned, glacial melt risks being conflated with uninhabitable mountain futures even though a high proportion of the freshwater that mountain residents rely on is rain-fed. From his perspective, more possibilities for human resilience are made evident when this realisation is appreciated. The exception, he added, is for the mountain regions reliant on permafrost as these areas, such as high mountain Ladakh (see also Gagné, this issue), do not benefit from the rainfall patterns of the mountains that feed the river systems of the Gangetic plains.

The exception was important to note because it is a reminder that not only will glaciological movements vary by region but so, too, will the human responses and the livelihood opportunities that result. The comments were also a reminder to recognise the ‘uncertainty on a Himalayan scale’ that persists due to the heterogeneity and ‘rich plurality’ (topographical, ecological, social-political and cultural) that is seen across the region (Thompson and Warburton 1985). A recent report – ‘Water, ice, society, and ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalaya’ – echoes the glaciological aspects of this observation on plurality while also cautioning that even though considerable advances have been made in glacier monitoring, which shows that glacier mass balance has become increasingly negative, uncertainty still exists as there are very few studies on the effects of these changes on ecosystems and livelihoods (ICIMOD 2023).

Second, the concern for the ‘collapse’ of Himalayan ecosystems due to glacial retreat has echoes of past scholarship – predominantly championed by foreign researchers – that came to be known as the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation (THED) (Guthman 1997). This highly criticised ‘crisis narrative’ (Mathur 2015) simplified the causes of apparent socio-ecological deterioration in the Himalayas to identify spaces of ‘optimal intervention’ (Chakraborty et al 2020: 498). Anthropologists and cultural geographers have outright refuted THED in scathing commentary that labels it a damaging ‘metanarrative created by Euro-Western academics and development planners in the 1970s’ which, regardless of scholarly rebuttals, went on to influence scholarship and development policies enacted in the region (Chakraborty et al 2021: 43; Guthman 1997).

In response to recent biodiversity loss, and now glacial retreat, some caution that the THED crisis narrative has ‘been fortified with the specter of climate change’ (Chakraborty et al 2020: 498). This is worrisome as THED narratives often support practices that remove humans from sensitive mountain locations in the name of environmental conservation. Here, the echoes of Malthusian, neo-colonial attitudes flow into the prescription of depopulation in the name of conservation, creating a ‘compelling polemic’ (Guthman 1997: 47) that does not always appreciate the ways that human habitation can go hand in hand with conservation goals. In the Nepali Himalayas, for instance, scholars pointed out that ‘(neo)colonial’ efforts were enacted to promote ‘fortress conservation’ that privileged the saving of rare plant species to the detriment of local livelihoods (Blakie and Muldavin 2004: 531).

While the first author did not imagine that she was flirting with the ills of THED-influenced thought when fearing an iceless future in the Himalayas based on her encounters with glacial loss, the danger became apparent when similar concerns fed into a conservation narrative supporting drastic ‘Eco-zone’ measures in the region – even though the underlying systemic problems primarily existed at a global scale. Notably, the urgency of the conservation narrative at that time was compounded by a widely discussed 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which raised a major alarm by giving a ‘very high’ probability that the Himalayan glaciers might ‘disappear’ by the year 2035 (IPCC 2007: 493). Initially, the prediction sent shock waves worldwide, particularly in environmental circles. The 2035 prediction for glacial disappearance, however, was soon widely disputed in an episode that some have called ‘Himalayagate’ and/or ‘Glaciergate’ (Mahony 2014; Mathur 2015; Thakur 2020). Several Indian glaciologists were some of the most adamant in their efforts to refute the prediction. As Martin Mahony notes, ‘the figure (of 2035) caused some unease in both political and glaciological communities in India and elsewhere’ (2014: 111).

At first, the IPCC defended their claims. They pointed to the peer-reviewed work of the thousands of scientists that their 2007 publication cited. After review, however, they later conceded that the 2035 date was dubious. As it turned out, the estimate for glacial retreat was based on the comments of one lone scientist, extrapolated from one unnamed glacier after a single fieldwork visit, and not a peer-reviewed publication. Eventually, IPCC officials revoked the 2035 date as erroneous in light of this news. Recent critical commentary on the IPCC notes how the controversy revealed the ‘nomination of certain subjects, worldviews, and scales as more important than others’, and how despite challenges to their credibility, the IPCC remains the ‘foremost arbitrator of climate futures’ in the region (Chakraborty and Sherpa 2021: 9). In the years since the contested report, others have suggested that the IPCC's predictions were part of ‘attempts to grab attention’ that have led to ‘a long trail of failed predictions that risk damaging the cause of climate action’ because they overstated the case (Thakur 2020: 53). In the end, the IPCC's ‘Glaciergate’ controversy forced a shift to the ‘middle ground’ of glacial retreat predictions (Qui 2012).

Although there is still talk of the impending ‘death’ of the world's glaciers, and while some glaciers have indeed perished in Iceland and elsewhere (Howe and Boyer, this issue; Schmidt 2021), when it comes to Himalayan glaciers a problem to confront is that the dataset used to create predictions of retreat has until recently been focused on the largest and most accessible glacial terminus points. Whereas the records for glacial movements in North America, Europe and the Arctic are extensive, the data on glaciers in the Himalayas extend back only a few decades (Dhobal 2009). Scant funding and the difficulty of accessing glaciers higher than 2500 metres have been a part of the problem (Dhobal 2009). As some scientists explain, ‘Due to the difficulties involved with the direct monitoring of glaciers, only a few Himalayan glaciers have been studied in the end of the past [twentieth] century by in-situ method . . . Even now, data is very sparse and discontinuous for the region’ (Soheb et al 2015: 29). The dearth of information has significantly complicated the ‘prognostic’ politics relating to the potential future movements of Himalayan glaciers (Matthews and Barnes 2016).

Another problem with some of the data on the movement of Himalayan glaciers is that the existing data set is not only limited in the number of glaciers studied but also in the kinds of data points analysed. Whereas a range of metrics are used to convey the risks of melt for the North and South Poles (O'Reilly 2016), it is typically the status of glacial terminus points – the lowest reaching section of ice that protrudes from a larger mass – that is invoked in many prominent Himalayan climate change discussions. These terminus points are often presented as barometers of ecological transformation that can be used to predict environmental futures. Yet, while many glaciers are retreating, a select number of high-altitude glaciers have expanded beyond their previously recorded terminus points (Kulkarni et al 2021; Saini et al 2016; Sharma and Chand 2015).

To know ice retreat in the Himalayas through the science of glaciology then requires fidelity to certain methods and inquiries that bring up questions of data collection, data points, access to fieldwork sites and regional particularities, all of which shape glaciological knowledge just as in the social sciences. The complexity of, and challenges to, glaciological research in the Himalayan region then presents a compelling argument for why social science engagement with difference in our field sites must also extend to the process of scientific knowledge production. As the following section shows, these conflicting data sets are heatedly debated in academic venues, and public discourse, in ways that speak to disparate imaginings of Himalayan glacial futures.

Knowledge Rifts and Disciplinary Debates

A November 2015 conference in New Delhi illustrates the competing visions of the future that circulate among experts who work on Himalayan glacial melt. In fact, the title of that conference acknowledged the disagreements that were made evident during the programme. The organisers chose to put the ‘controversy’ of glacial movements front and centre by calling the event ‘Global environmental change in the Himalayan region: Controversies/impacts/futures’. The three-day conference involved the typical all-day series of panels expected of an academic conference. There was, however, one exception to the standard academic conference format. On the second day of programming, the organisers included an optional trip to a parallel photography exhibit. During an afternoon break, about twelve conference participants walked to a small gallery at the corner of the sprawling India Habitat Centre. The guide for this encounter was a prominent European academic who helped to create the exhibit, which featured glaciated landscapes. Speaking passionately about the significance of each image, he led us through a series of photographs documenting the change of Himalayan glaciers over the past 150 years – several of which he had taken, and subsequently published (Nüsser and Schmidt 2021).

The series of panoramic landscapes entailed a juxtaposition of recent photos with images taken in roughly the same locations many decades previous by a range of photographers and scholars. The prominent feature we were encouraged to focus on was the degree to which snow lines and glacial terminus points had changed. In most cases, they had moved backwards and/or upwards. In other cases, the terminus points were roughly similar, but the overall girth of the glacial snout had thinned considerably. The message was that the glaciers appear to be in poor health – even to the naked eye. Such juxtapositions of the seemingly obvious were ostensibly meant to provide shock value, regardless of whether the person viewing the images was aware of the science behind the study of glacial melt. Indeed, as we walked around the gallery, both conference participants and public patrons murmured sounds of astonishment and concern.

Later, the first author came to realise that not everyone looking at those images was thinking of catastrophic retreat. Or, to put it another way, we were not all looking at the same changes in snowpack and ice with the same interpretations of what that retreat means for regional ecologies and populations. As was evident when the conference presentations resumed, disagreement on the state of Himalayan glaciers persisted despite the ‘evidence’ that many of us felt we had observed through those juxtaposed images. Two panellists, in fact, were unified in arguing that the science on climate change in the Himalayas was not yet pointing towards ice-melt catastrophe. One presenter, a glaciologist housed in a geology department at an Indian university, even mocked those concerned with the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. To emphasise his point, he moved his hands close together to indicate that people can only make such claims when looking at a small portion of the data. As he moved his hands much farther apart, he emphatically stated that glaciologists look at a significantly larger part of the picture before drawing assessments. And from his vantage – which takes into consideration hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of glacial movements – the Himalayan glaciers appear to be rather stable. The scientist's statement, accompanied as they were by emphatic gestures and a derisive laugh, demonstrated a marked perspectival difference – one that was centred within the great lengths of geological time. And as Richard Irvine might remind us, for many – including anthropologists – ‘the conceptual challenge of (understanding) time on a geological scale is a major one’ (2014: 167).³

As the glaciologist continued his commentary at the podium, he further chastised the previous conference presenters – several of whom had declared the pending loss of mountain glaciers and the risk of an iceless Himalayan future. In the process, it became apparent that he was thoroughly unsatisfied by their PowerPoint images of once- or twice-off visits to high Himalayan glaciers. He also dismissed their ‘sound-bite’ reporting of concerns from villagers who worry about the future of regional glaciers. This demonstrated that another point of disagreement had to do with the diminished value the glaciologist assigned to the spatially limited and geographically particular data that ethnographers and fieldworkers compile, which is often based on a small number of observations. With these sharp comments, he underscored how, within his discipline, ‘to be local is to be subjective and anecdotal’ (O'Reilly 2016: 29).⁴ The glaciologist's concerns are echoed even in the broader Hindu Kush Himalaya region, which is understood to be ‘a data-deficit region, where long-term research that considers spatial and temporal scales remains lacking’ (ICIMOD 2023: xviii).

Glaciological Visions of ‘Icy Vitalities’

The controversies over the state of Himalayan glaciers continue, and they evolve as new datasets emerge. The work of Pritam Chand and Milap Chand Sharma is particularly instructive of the continued disagreements of opinion. Chand, in fact, was one of the two glaciologists who downplayed fears of Himalayan glacial disappearance at the 2015 New Delhi conference. In recent years, these scholars published several articles questioning the latest scholarship on glacial melt. Of these, three articles are worthy of specific mention. One contribution (2015) examines the frontal changes of two glaciers – the Manimahesh and the Tal – from 1971 to 2013. Looking at the data, they claim that much of the information on these and other glaciers drew from cartographic work by the Survey of India, but that recent studies have shown inaccuracies in those maps (see also Bhambri and Bolch 2009). For their study, they instead used declassified high-resolution satellite images from the 1970s ‘to widen the time span for monitoring’ of the glacier while relying on what they argue to be more precise data (Sharma and Chand 2015: 4099). They combined the data with high-resolution images from Google Earth as well as another software program known as Bhuvan-2D/3D.⁵ Several other high-resolution images served as additional reference points along with some of the information acquired from site visits. They used this dataset to argue that, although the two glaciers in question had retreated, the rate of retreat previously claimed when using Survey of India topographic maps was ‘highly erroneous’ and led to an overestimation of glacial change (2015: 4108–4109).

In another contribution (Sharma and Chand 2016), the authors studied the scholarship on ‘glaciations’ in India from 2010 to 2016 to assess the state of knowledge. What they found was a high degree of variation in glacial retreat within India that reflects temporal and spatial variability.⁶ Their work echoed other publications that indicate the Himalayan glaciers are not acting in a uniform way (Armstrong et al 2019; Immerzeel et al 2012). A third article that Sharma published with additional co-authors (Saini et al 2016) cast further doubt onto past studies by stating that glaciers such as the Tharang in the Lahul Himalayas, India, were either in their current position or even ‘further up-valley’ during the Little Ice Age (circa 1300–1800). This claim allowed them to additionally question, and potentially undermine, the predominant narrative about runaway glacial melt in the contemporary Himalayas.

It is important to note that a surfeit of coterminous data and publications contradict the above claims – and they add to the latest debates and controversies on Himalayan endangerment. One report indicates that the increasingly variable timings of the annual monsoons, which may grow warmer, will negatively impact the balance of many mountain glaciers, especially as snowfall is replaced with rainfall (Stefan et al 2022). Others have pointed out that the increase in snowmelt and rainfall will not be even across the region, which indicates that some downstream regions may indeed face water stress or scarcity in the future (Singh et al 2021). Also worrisome are the data on the rise of overall temperatures in Himalayan regions. The projected temperature increase is estimated to be a staggering .06 degrees centigrade annually from 2000 to 2100 (ICIMOD 2023; Immerzeel et al 2012; Qui 2013). Interestingly, however, the Indian glaciologists who seek to reassure the world that the Himalayan glaciers are resilient argue that this is further evidence of relative stability – especially in light of these warming trends. As recently as 2022, for instance, Sharma and colleagues summarised the aggregate data and argued that the impact of human action on increased glacial recession ‘is extremely difficult to establish’ because several high-altitude Himalayan glaciers ‘show sheer disregard [for the predictions of retreat] by standing still and tall’ (2022: 58).

Two observations emerge in this more recent scholarship. The first is, once again, the nature of knowledge production and the apparent limitations of disciplinary silos. The second is the insight that distinct understandings of glacial vitality are used to project futures of potential resilience onto the bodies of select glaciers. What is most important for the scientists who wish to complicate the picture of Himalayan glacial futures is the long-term appreciation of the material ebbs and flows of the entities they study. Said more specifically within the study of icy materiality, and by extension vitality, Jessica O'Reilly (2016) argues that interacting with the nature of one's scientific inquiry is a world-making project in addition to a knowledge-making one. As she contends, ‘To live in a glaciological world, in comparison to a world populated by glaciers, is to feel and read specific signs, to speak a particular specialised language, and to forge comparisons with distant places and forms’ (2016: 42). In this way, science becomes a way of knowing as well as a way of being; an ontological effort that is relational and practical with regard to the objects of inquiry (Kohn 2013; O'Reilly 2016).

Concluding Remarks

The discussion demonstrates why there is a problem in presenting images of melting Himalayan glaciers as if they are definitive barometers of climate change. While glacial changes are visibly apparent, and thus seem to be self-explanatory of climate transitions, they are also only partial truths with limited ‘prognostic’ power (Matthews and Barnes 2016: 10). Any effort to allow changing glacial terminus points to solely inform one's imagination of Himalayan glacial futures can, therefore, lead to dissonance and even outright confrontation between actors who share a similar point of interest, as well as different ideas about what kind of ‘anticipatory knowledges’ (Ferry 2016: 184) are useful to informing climate policy (Carey et al 2017; Mahony 2014; O'Reilly 2016). A reminder of this observation is to retain some sympathy for the people who use different datasets and achieve different opinions because, as Timothy Morton argues, ‘You have more in common with them than you might think’ (2016: 28). The lack of data and long-term field observations on Indian Himalayan glaciers should also give social scientists pause to think with some of the outlying glaciological arguments, especially since ethnographic research and fieldwork has the capacity to be contextualised within the ‘deep time’ of planetary history (Irvine 2014: 164).

As knowledge controversies like THED and ‘Glaciergate’ show us, international bodies like the IPCC – based in the Global North – scale up environmental crisis, flattening regional diversity of knowledge and experience. Such hegemonic narratives of environmental crisis, when co-opted by Euro-American actors and institutions (Dodds and Smith 2022; Paprocki 2021), further neo-colonial policies and programmes that privilege techno-managerial and market-based responses to climate change (Chakraborty et al 2021). In the Himalayas, disciplines like scientific forestry and conservation biology greatly influenced climate change (mal)adaptation strategies, like ideas of fortress conservation in THED where local communities were seen as obstacles to the efficient and rational organisation of nature (Guthman 1997). As scholars who work in the Himalayan region and are aware of the material and socio-cultural consequences of climate alarmism, we hope our discussion shines a spotlight on the complexity of glaciological knowledge production, given the discipline's important role in determining future climate change adaptation strategies.

While we might experience indignation when hearing scientists dismiss the threats that many believe confront the Himalayan glaciers, the recognition of their divergent perspectives provides room for contemplation of the disciplinary groundings that inform their assertions (Carey et al 2017). For those of us who believe that the glaciers are endangered, it is important to recognise that the concern we feel for Himalayan glacial retreat is a powerful tool. This tool can be used to propel our climate mitigation efforts if we are able to carry our grief into hopeful environmental engagements. As Lesley Head writes, this involves ‘probing exactly what we are grieving for’ as there is no Edenic past that can easily be restored if it ever existed (2016: 41). An implication of this insight is to proceed with caution and concern, when engaging in debates around Himalayan glacial melt. We do not want to err on the side of ‘climate reductionism’ (Hulme 2009) or an apocalyptic imaginary (Dodds and Smith 2022; Swyngedouw 2010) that sees Himalayan glacial loss as a fait accompli because by inviting such foregone conclusions we risk losing ourselves entirely to our growing climate change anxieties while foreclosing the possibility for Himalayan glaciers to exhibit unexpected vitality. In addition to the emotional toll of the anxious ‘cultural imaginary’ of an iceless future (Jackson 2015: 489), such a position makes it harder to hear, and to examine, the data that might temper or expand our anthropological visions of environmental futures (O'Reilly et al 2020).

In short, our collective ability to sit with contradictory and potentially surprising data is needed of us as social scientists if we are to continue rigorous scholarly exploration and debate. The phenomenon of melting glaciers is, after all, linked to the ‘ecological variation’ of our changing climate (Irvine 2014: 169). To better understand climate change, academics must ‘rise above their disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 215). The ability to receive the evidence emerging from disparate disciplinary perspectives – and to consider it, even if marginally – is also needed to keep ourselves open to much-needed pockets of hope if and when they arise.