“Climate Witness” is an interdisciplinary and community-based inquiry into the history and experience of climate change in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh, India. The goal of the project is to place the crisis of global warming in a particular geographical cultural context and to restore traditional and communal knowledge to the urgent discussion of what is to be done. For Ladakhis themselves, the stakes could not be higher. As in many mountain communities, declining snowfall and glacial recession together with reckless over-development and aquifer depletion have diminished Ladakh’s water reserves and created unprecedented conditions of agricultural scarcity. Unable any longer to support their families in rural villages, men especially are migrating to the principle town of Leh and finding casual work in the bourgeoning tourist and service industries. In many ways, Ladakh simply illustrates global trends in the age of climate change: weather disturbances, water scarcity, out-migration from rural communities, and the consequent erosion of traditional village life. But it is all happening much faster there. Mountain environments are particularly susceptible to climate change, and to spend time in Ladakh is to watch the Anthropocene unfold literally before one’s eyes. Ladakh, that is to say, is on the front lines of global warming and proves the immediate human dimension of a problem too often approached in abstract, distant, or scientific terms. Scientists study climate change; Ladakhis bear witness to it in their own daily lives and give voice to those who suffer from it now.

On an institutional level, any real community engagement project depends on the careful building and nurture of robust, creative, and sustainable partnerships with well-placed local partners, and here we were fortunate to be able draw on the experience of a colleague, Professor Nancy Chin, of the Departments of Public Health Sciences and Anthropology, who had been conducting field research in Ladakh since 2011 and had already developed long-standing relationships with Ladakhi agencies and authorities. In 2016, in fact, Chin had collaborated with a local photographer, Namgil Nawang, on a National Geographic Society-funded photo narrative of cloudburst flooding and adaptation to climate change in Ladakh. A year later, two of us (Stewart Weaver of the Department of History and Tatyana Bakhmetyeva of the Susan B. Anthony Institute of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) accompanied Chin on her summer field trip to Ladakh and spent a month meeting with and interviewing all kinds of concerned citizens affiliated with such groups as the Ladakh Ecological Development Group, the Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust, the Ladakh Nun’s Association, the Women’s Alliance of Ladakh, the Students’ Cultural and Educational Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), the Himalayan Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Central Institute for Buddhist Studies, and many more. By summer’s end, we had established the foundation of a global interdisciplinary collaboration with Namgil Nawang, photographer and long-time project coordinator for Professor Chin; Sonam Wangchuk, founding director of the Himalayan Cultural Heritage Foundation, and Geshe Konchok Wangdu, the director of the Central Institute for Buddhist Studies. Each one of us had our own particular compelling interest in climate change. Sonam Wangchuk, for instance, was most concerned about the threat to Ladakhi heritage (both tangible and intangible) and the cultural implications of resource scarcity, while the Geshe was most concerned about the spiritual and emotional toll of warmingand the threat of climate change to over-all mental well-being. These are variations on a theme. What brought us together was a shared commitment to collaborative research on the experience of climate change in this remote and resilient mountain region.

At the heart of the project are the voices of those many Ladakhis—farmers and artisans, monks and merchants, men and women, Buddhists and Muslims—who can speak from direct experience to climate change over time and to the challenge of adaptation to warming in a fragile mountain environment. Working at the intersection of oral history and environmental history, we are assembling a digital archive of human testimonies to response and resilience in this high trans-Himalayan land. At the same time, however, we are trying to resist a purely anthropocentric rendering of the Anthropocene. Nature too bears witness to climate change, and any effort to capture its history would be incomplete without somehow finding room for the “voices” of the glaciers, rivers, mountains, and fields that feel its effects even before people do. How to do so without succumbing fully to what the art critic John Ruskin long ago derided as “the pathetic fallacy”—that is, the false attribution of human emotion to the non-human elements of nature—is of course the question—one that environmental historians have long confronted without being able to resolve. We want to speak for the earth itself as much as the people who inhabit it, but here, as William Cronon pointed out in the same essay with which we began, “we can never finally be completely sure that we’ve gotten the story right,” that we haven’t taken environmental concern to the point of mystical absurdity. Even so, well aware of the eco-centric risks involved, the Climate Witness project aims to take the agency of nature seriously and let the land speak in the way that Ladakhis themselves do.