Later this month, the government of Nepal will hold a cabinet meeting at the base of Mount Everest at an altitude of 17,585 feet to draw global attention to the effects of climate change in the Himalayas (India Times). This landmark revolutionary meeting is expected to predate the UN Climate Change Conference, which will be held from December 7th through December 18th, 2009 in Copenhagen. With this call for urgency, responsibility and environmental vigor, the ministers hope to incite the international world to rise from its slumber.

The Himalayan glaciers feed some of the region's most widely utilized and well-known rivers, including the Ganges, the Yamuna and the Brahmaputra. Fulfilling their divine purpose to service mankind and the environment, the glaciers irrigate agriculture in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and India. However, rising temperatures are having an enormous impact on the region. Many of the largest glaciers, including the Siachen glacier separating India and Pakistan in Kashmir, have significantly melted, causing major crop failures and floods. According to the Washington Post, the Gangotri glacier, which provides up to seventy percent of the water of the Ganges during the arid summer months, is shrinking at a disturbing rate of 40 yards a year. This may not worry you too much. Ice melts after all. Well, to give you a better sense of how rapidly environment is changing, I must include that the rate of Gangotri melting is nearly twice as fast as the rate only two decades ago!

                               The Himalayan Glaciers recede at an alarming rate 

Veer Bhadra Mishra, engineer, priest and director of the Sankat Mochan Foundation, urges us to take action: "This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus. The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can't even help our beloved Ganga?" Though environmental groups like Mishra's have worked arduously to reduce the river's pollution, the Ganges is under an even greater threat from climate change.

They may not be rampant in the media, local or global. However, these shrinking glaciers should be of utmost concern, for they threaten the supply of fresh water to Asia. Five hundred million people in India alone depend on the Ganges for water for farming and/or drinking. The World Wildlife Fund listed the Ganges among the world's ten most endangered rivers in March of 2007.

We could dismiss these statistics as exaggerations made to bolster the effects of global warming or we could face the uninviting yet undeniable reality that we currently live in. Like I stated in "Water: A Victim of Environmental Negligence in Southern New Jersey and Northern India," we must alter practices that are ecologically destructive and speak out against ignorance. This involves a global sense of responsibility, liability and genuine concern for the environment. According to environmental lawyer Mahesh Mehta, quoted in the Washington Post, "If humans don't change their interference, our very religion, our livelihoods are under threat." If the government and local people do not take action, the Ganges will become a seasonal river, dependent on monsoon rains for supply.

If we follow the status quo, leaving gigantic carbon footprints and polluting our environment daily, our livelihoods will no longer be under threat, but will become extinct. The elements of nature that we take for granted will be gone and our children and children's children will only read about their past beauty and utility.