They Are Already
on Ventilator

Session 4 of the Glacier Dialogues was unlike what had come before it. There were no hazard models, no policy frameworks, no satellite datasets. What three voices from the Uttarakhand Himalaya brought instead was harder to quantify — and harder to forget. They brought photographs. They brought memory. They brought sixty years of watching something they love, disappear.

Jaimitra Singh Bisht, Anup Sah, and Dr. Shekhar Pathak spoke not to argue a position but to show what they had seen. And what they had seen — framed, carried across decades, some of it still on film — was enough.

What a Photographer Cannot Un-see

Jaimitra Singh Bisht began with a photograph taken in 1999. On the screen appeared a scene from Kartik Purnima — the full moon rising over the Kumaon peaks, Api in the distance, pristine snowfields in the foreground. "The kind of moment that the Himalayas give you," he said, "or the light that the glaciers reflect in the evening time — that kind of moment you may not be able to see anywhere else." He was not being nostalgic. He was establishing a before.

Api, Dhaulcheena, Almora, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Jaimitra Singh Bisht  ·  Used with permission

Then he showed what those same landscapes look like today. The window from which the Himalayan range is visible from Almora — a window that once stretched four to five months of the year — now lasts barely 15 to 20 days. The reason is not cloud cover. It is smog. Pollution from the Indo-Gangetic plains does not stop at the foothills. It travels upward: to Nainital, to Almora, to Bhatkot, and higher still, towards snowlines that were never meant to receive it. Jaimitra Singh Bisht had photographed it from Bhatkot, 9,000 feet above sea level, the highest point in Almora district — going up before dawn to capture the morning light on the peaks, and finding instead a visible band of haze sitting below the snowline. "I thought it was mist," he said. "Later I realised it was smog."

Trishul & Nanda Devi from Bhatkot, Almora, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Jaimitra Singh Bisht  ·  Used with permission  ·  The haze band below the snowline is smog, not cloud

There is no wall between Haldwani and the Himalaya. There is no altitude at which the valley's air stops and the mountain's begins. What rises in Delhi's morning traffic descends, eventually, on the glaciers.

He showed the Kafni hanging glacier — a photograph taken roughly 25 years ago, from the Salgwara top above Pindar Valley. The glacier fills the frame. It is enormous, vivid, unmistakably alive. "Now I don't think we will be able to see this mesmerising view," he said, "and the snow which actually fascinates you to go there."

Nandakot & Kafni Glacier, Bageshwar, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Jaimitra Singh Bisht  ·  Used with permission  ·  Photographed on film. "Now I don't think we will be able to see this mesmerising view."

Then came December 2024. Standing near Vinayak in Pindar Valley, Bisht photographed Nandakot — one of the most celebrated peaks of the Uttarakhand Himalaya. What he saw, and what appeared on the screen, was bare rock. Black face. No snow. "The part of the Himalayas that you probably never want to see as a photographer. But you always want to see it covered in snow."

For two consecutive winters — 2023–24 and 2024–25 — snowfall across the Himalayan region had been dramatically reduced. The dry spell had persisted. "We yearned for snow on the Himalayas. We yearned for a lot of snow."

Nandakot, Bageshwar, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Jaimitra Singh Bisht  ·  Used with permission  ·  "The part of the Himalaya that you probably never want to see as a photographer — you always want it covered in snow."

Panwali Dwar, Bageshwar, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Jaimitra Singh Bisht  ·  Used with permission  ·  "Such photographs, we never wanted to show the world. But now, as a photographer, I feel it is very important."

He said it three times across the session, each time with the quiet certainty of someone who has been watching long enough to know: "They are already on ventilator, the glaciers and the Himalayas."

And then: "When we can put a lockdown to save ourselves in COVID, then we cannot put a lockdown to save the Himalayas?"

His final argument was the one that reframes the glacier conversation for anyone still treating this as a distant environmental problem. The Himalayan economy — guesthouses, trekking operators, pilgrimage services, helicopter tourism, the entire infrastructure of mountain hospitality — depends entirely on what people come to experience. Take away the glaciers, take away the snowfields and the clear air and the peaks draped in white, and you remove the reason anyone makes the journey. "All the infrastructure that people are building to attract tourists," he said, "will be all in vain if there are no glaciers." The economic cost of glacier loss will not fall on distant cities. It will fall on the people who built their livelihoods around what the glaciers make possible.

The Archive a Man Carries

In 1964, Anup Sah was given a camera by his father. He was sent with a group to Pindari Glacier. It was his first time seeing a glacier. He was, by his own description, shocked.

Last year, he went back — to mark sixty years at that site.

The glacier had receded more than one kilometre.

Pindari Glacier — Archive photograph  ·  Copyright unknown

Pindari Glacier, Pindar Valley, Uttarakhand — 2024  ·  Used with permission  ·  "The glacier, I think, receded more than one kilometre. I have all records of that area." — Anup Sah

Anup Sah has visited Pindari nine times across those decades. He crossed Trails Pass — the demanding high-altitude route at the head of the glacier, linking the Pindari and Kafni valleys — in his earlier mountaineering years, and returned to it most recently after a gap of 53 years. What he found was a route that had become nearly unrecognisable. They had to fix ropes in places that had been freely passable before. Porters abandoned the group in the upper catchment, refusing to risk the unstable terrain. Where solid ice had been, glacial pools had formed — the glacier's surface hollowing from within. "If you go to a place one year," he said, "you will not know from where you are going the next." The upper catchment of Pindari, he told the session plainly, is now dangerous.

His relationship with Gangotri began in 1969, during his basic mountaineering course. He estimates the glacier has receded close to half a kilometre in his direct experience of that region. He spoke about these numbers not as statistics but as the difference between the landscape he learned in and the one that exists now. What Anup Sah brings to this conversation is not a dataset. It is something rarer and more specific: sixty years of first-hand observation of the same places, by the same person, across a single lifetime. He is a human archive of a glacier that is retreating faster than he can document.

The Road That Broke the Limit

Dr. Shekhar Pathak looked at the photographs on screen — the empty snowfields, the bare rock — and said what many in the room were thinking: "Isn't this the last beautiful picture we are seeing?"

He was not asking rhetorically. He was naming something that economists call bequest value — the worth of a landscape not only to those alive today but to every generation that will come after. These glaciers, these views, these ecosystems: they do not belong only to us. They are held in trust. The question of whether we are discharging that trust honestly is, he argued, what glacier conservation is ultimately about.

His own contribution to the session was a historical argument that reframes why access management matters. For thousands of years, he explained, the pilgrimage routes of the Himalaya operated with a naturally embedded ecological limit: the physical effort required to reach a sacred site was the limit on how many people could be there. High-altitude passes, glacier-adjacent temples, remote shrines — all demanded genuine endurance. That endurance was not incidental. It was the ecosystem's own defence. It kept footfall manageable. It kept the glacier intact. The journey itself was the filter.

What road-building has done is remove that constraint without replacing it with any other. Roads now reach Kedarnath. Four-lane highways run through terrain that was never designed for that kind of load. The consequence was named explicitly, and it came with a number. On 16–17 June 2013, when the Kedarnath disaster struck, the safe carrying capacity of the shrine was approximately 7,500 people. There were 25,000 present. "How many thousands of people died there? We don't have a certain figure."

He pointed to Gangotri — the most historically documented glacier in India. In 1808, when the Survey of India first reached Gangotri, the glacier was approximately three miles from the town. Today it is more than 20 kilometres away. In just over two centuries, it has lost more than 15 kilometres of length. Its total length, once exceeding 50 kilometres, is now around 30. The Chaturangi tributary, he said, will soon separate entirely from the Gangotri Glacier. "This can be said about other glaciers." It is not an exception. It is a pattern.

He ended with something quieter. Traditional mountain communities — pilgrims, traders, high-altitude porters — carried with them a relationship to these landscapes that included restraint. Tibetan traders passing through the high routes would stop at certain points, offer rice from their own homes, and join their hands before the glacier. Not as ceremony. As recognition. "They consider the glacier to be a supreme temple," Bisht added, "and the paths leading to it no less sacred." Among the generation of trekkers he came up with — Anup Sah's generation — the same ethic held: nothing was left behind on the mountain. A chocolate wrapper brought up came back down in a pocket. Not as discipline enforced from outside. As the natural expression of belonging to a place.

Does Showing the World Actually Change It?

Harshit Rautela put the question plainly: does the photography, the documentation, the sessions like this one — do they actually change how people behave? Or is it awareness without action?

Jaimitra Singh Bisht's answer was honest, and it resisted easy comfort. The challenge is not whether the photographs are powerful. It is whether the person viewing them feels something. And feeling something requires a prior relationship with the place. Those who have spent their lives in these mountains — trekking the same routes, returning to the same glaciers season after season — speak about the Himalaya the way others speak about family. With reverence, with grief, with a sense of personal responsibility. That quality of relationship, Bisht argued, is what makes their photography different. They are not documenting a subject. They are bearing witness to a loss they feel in their own bodies.

The case for documentation, then, is not that a powerful photograph automatically changes behaviour. It is that photography — when it comes from genuine witness — builds the emotional foundations from which change becomes possible. A photograph taken in grief and reverence carries something a tourist snapshot does not. It carries testimony. And testimony, when it reaches someone ready to receive it, becomes an invitation to act.

That is the thread that ran through everything Session 4 offered: the only thing that has ever genuinely moved people to protect something is the feeling that it is theirs to lose. The three voices on screen — Jaimitra Singh Bisht, Anup Sah, and Dr. Shekhar Pathak — have that feeling. Sixty years of returning. Sixty years of watching. They came to this session not as experts presenting findings, but as witnesses asking the rest of us whether we are paying attention.

Dr. Pathak closed with an inventory — the things that depend on the glacier's survival. River flow for billions of people downstream. Biodiversity across the high Himalayan belt. Perennial water for agriculture. And then the landscape itself: the peaks, the glaciers, the valleys that form a single integrated visual and ecological world. These elements do not exist independently. Without the ice, the peaks become bare rock; the valleys lose their rivers; the landscape that has anchored Himalayan culture, spirituality, and economy for thousands of years becomes something else entirely. What is at stake is not only an ecosystem. It is a world — and what kind of world the next generation inherits.

Satopanth & Bhagirath Kharak Glacier · Origin of Alaknanda · Chamoli, Uttarakhand  ·  Photo: Harshit Rautela  ·  Used with permission