Tourism, Capitalism, and the Vulnerability of the Sikkim Mountains

It was mid-September 2019, and my family and I were on our way to Gangtok for a family friend's wedding ceremony. We stayed there for a few days before planning to head to Yuksom for a relaxing weekend. I had hoped to see the monasteries and learn about the area's historical significance, but it began to rain heavily on the drive to Yuksom, and I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself much there. Little did I realise that something much worse was about to happen. There was a lengthy traffic congestion, and we were notified after a few hours that there had been a major landslide, and Yuksom had been cut off. Due to the long line of automobiles stalled in the congestion, our car was unable to turn around. People from the West Sikkim District administration took us down to nearby settlements till we could continue downward again. I got the opportunity to speak with the locals, who informed me about how the timing of seasonal events was altering owing to rising temperatures. Climate change is causing more frequent and severe rains, worsening landslides across Sikkim's mountains. The locals viewed tourism to be one of the key causes of hastened climate change, yet they are also largely reliant on tourists for livelihood. I realised how capitalism has resulted in this bittersweet connection with tourism.

These people have lived in Sikkim for centuries, and they rely on biodiversity and nature's provisioning services in the form of grazing pastures, medicinal, aromatic, or edible plants, and water sources for irrigation (Ingty and Bawa 278). To cope with the loss of biodiversity and other problems posed by climate change, they were either migrating or entering professions that aided the tourism industry. Glaciers are rapidly melting as a result of climate change. The grass in the grazing pastures is drying up as a result of less snow, shorter winters (when pastures are snow-covered), and unpredictable rainfall. The quality of grass in grazing pastures is obviously extremely important to pastoralists who rely on their cattle. Pastoralists feel that the low quality of grass has resulted in a substantial number of sheep deaths (Ingty and Bawa 283). There were a lot of mosquitoes bothering us in the temporary camp that had been set up, and the locals described how mosquitoes have rapidly increased in the region in the last few years due to their ability to adapt to higher elevations thanks to warmer temperatures. Further conversations with the locals there helped me grasp how tourism, as well as rapid modernisation in other sectors, was producing a variety of problems. I couldn't help but notice how the tourism industry is run and fed by capitalism.

This encounter with the mountains made me realise how vital it is to pursue the interests of non-humans as well, because not only humans, but nature as well, is suffering as a result of capitalism's greed, yet it has no formal representation anywhere. Bruno Latour's 'Parliament of Things,' which proposes that law should not be centred on men and that non-human rights should also be sought, should be taken seriously in this regard.

Climate change is accelerating the decline of forest biomass, and rural people reliant on firewood extraction from forests are suffering an energy shortage for cooking and heating. Determining region-specific fuel wood demand, it is found that demand increases with elevation of mountains while output declines. The gap between firewood demand and availability is widening as a result of population expansion, increased tourism, and dwindling forest resources (Chhetri and Sharma 22). The indigenous people of Sikkim have always been dependent on the environment and have modified it in minor ways, but with the advent of tourists, it has gotten out of hand. Tourism is exploited by the wealthy and powerful to cause issues for indigenous peoples and tribes, pushing them to give in to the tourism industry and the capitalist system, and ultimately furthering its growth.

Capitalism is based on the separation of man and nature. The entire thrust of capitalist civilisation is based on the idea that we live in something called Society and interact with something called Nature (Moore 7). Nature is introduced as a factor, a variable, and a character in the plot. This makes us less responsive and to an extent indifferent to the damages caused especially at the intersections. This logic is profound — it's a reflex, part of our mental muscle memory. It influences our understanding of the global issue and its causes, supposing mankind and nature to be distinct first and related second (Moore 2). Indigenous people have never thought of Nature as something different or external to them. Their lives are linked with the natural world. Yoshimi Kawade's thesis that an individual organism is not self-sufficient backs this up. A solitary organism with its physical body does not represent the entirety of what "a living thing" entails. It is, as the real "doer" of life processes, the embodiment of a certain living being's subjectivity and requirements for survival. Thus, a living thing's subjectivity is seen to be composed of three elements: the individual organism, the Umwelt (the surroundings and how they are perceived by the organism), and society — all of which are inextricably linked by bundles of physical and semiotic relationships (208). From this vantage point, we must recognise that we are not living in the Anthropocene — the 'age of man' — with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist perspectives, but rather in the Capitalocene — the 'age of capital' — the historical epoch moulded by the never-ending accumulation of capital (Moore 3).

Sikkim is a global biodiversity hotspot with unique flora and fauna, but global warming, poor biomass and fruit production, and forest removal for developing hotels and resorts are endangering their survival. Capitalism is defined by an uncommon blend of productive and destructive violence. The Capitalocene is also a Necrocene — a system that not only accumulates capital but also accelerates the extinction of species. What is at stake is how we conceive the Capitalocene and Necrocene relationships — between the ingenuity of capitalist progress and its underlying exterminism, an exterminism that is capitalogenic rather than anthropogenic (Moore 4).

Capitalism has certain methods of not just understanding but also controlling and altering the world. For starters, it bestows "an ontological position upon entities (substances) as opposed to connections (that is, energy, matter, people, ideas, and so on become things)" (Watts 150–151). Second, it promotes either/or rather than both-and logics — Nature and Society rather than societies-in-nature. Third, it promotes the "concept of a purposeful control over nature through applied science," which gives birth to a rationale of world conquest and dominance. Capitalists have transformed the mountains of Sikkim in numerous ways to promote tourism, and they have frequently cited science and progress to legitimise their efforts: 'to make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature' (Descartes 51). The tourism industry has resulted in an increase in the use of fossil fuels in the transportation sector. Because of the mountainous terrain, public mass transportation, such as trains, is largely absent in Sikkim. People must rely on cars to commute between towns. The increased use of motorised transportation is fast leading to an increase in pollution levels. Aside from that, the release of untreated wastewater from the various hotels that are springing up is harming the ecosystem.

Tourism's rise can be ascribed to development planners' efforts to promote the industry as a strategy for economic growth, particularly in 'less-developed' regions that have not received significant gains from conventional development strategies (Fletcher 445). Tourism has been exploited to develop a location and secure economic growth not just by industry owners and capitalists, but also by transnational institutions. Tourism, according to Munt, is "a last-ditch attempt to break from the confines of underdevelopment and get the IMF to lay the golden egg of an upwardly-mobile GNP" (49). Indeed, tourism has been adopted as a development strategy by a large number of development planners, including international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, since the 1960s. Capitalism is planned to be regarded as a project for growth and prosperity, and tourism, in particular, in its pursuit of relatively underdeveloped locations, is portrayed as the pinnacle of this approach. This means that capitalism operates on two levels: as a project and as a process. The overarching illusion of capitalism is that it can do anything it wants with Nature — that Nature is external and can be divided, measured, and rationalised to serve economic progress, social development, or some other greater good. This is capitalism as a project (Moore 8), and tourism growth is regarded as one of the important mechanisms by which capitalism supports itself in the present day, providing outlets for excess capital that might otherwise provoke an overproduction crisis (Fletcher 446).

Given the importance of the mountains for both indigenous peoples' sustenance and the region's biodiversity, the interests of the many 'actants' should be taken seriously, and efforts to protect the mountains should be pursued with renewed zeal and determination. The implementation of sustainable tourism must be explored in order to keep capitalist greed at bay in order to save the mountains.

Being deeply moved by the encounter and the discussions with the local people, I have tried to argue in this essay that tourism is one of the major contributors to climate change in the mountains and how the tourism industry nourishes and helps in furthering the capitalist agenda. I have also tried to resonate with Jason Moore's argument which states how the ecological crisis has arisen from capitalism and that it is capital, not man, that has aggravated the ecological crisis.

Works Cited

• Chettri, Nakul, and Eklabya Sharma. "Assessment of natural resources use patterns: a case study along a trekking corridor of Sikkim Himalaya, India." Journal of Resources, Energy and Development 3.1 (2006): 21–34.
• Descartes, René. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. 2006.
• Fletcher, Robert. "Sustaining tourism, sustaining capitalism? The tourism industry's role in global capitalist expansion." Tourism Geographies 13.3 (2011): 443–461.
• Ingty, Tenzing, and K. S. Bawa. "Climate change and indigenous people." Climate Change in Sikkim: Patterns, Impacts and Initiatives. Information and Public Relations Department, Government of Sikkim, 2012: 275–290.
• Kawade, Yoshimi. "On the nature of the subjectivity of living things." Biosemiotics 2.2 (2009): 205–220.
• Moore, Jason W. "The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis." The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 594–630.
• Munt, Ian. "Eco-tourism or ego-tourism?" Race & Class 36.1 (1994): 49–60.
• Watts, Michael. "Nature: culture." Spaces of Geographical Thought (2005): 142–174.