There are Mountains

G. Gankhuu reached the top 4887 meters above sea-level and was greated by Mongolia’s president Enkbayar. The photo is unfortunetely not of Gankhuu on the top of Mount Winston, Antarctica, but this photo can be seen on Asiangypsy's blogspot. Instead we see my friend the Gnome who has reached the top of an unknown mountain in the middle of Nowhere. According to my experience Mongolians are not entirely familiar with the idea that it is of uttermost importance to reach the summit of a mountain. A Mongolian friend of mine told of an acquaintance of hers that had been climbing on the Altai Bogd Khan Uul and from her story I realized that the idea was to be on the mountain, not necessarily reach the summit.

Coming to think about it, it was just during the 19th century that Europeans came to the conclusion that reaching mountain summits had anything of importance in it. During those year, when a clearly mad French man, Charles Rabot 1883, reached the Summit of Sweden’s highest mountain it was considered as impossible to reach. But nevertheless this French guy made it, and thereby showed the Swedes that it was possible. In 1994 we got our first man on the Mount Everest, when Michael Reutersvärd reached the summit on 8848 meters.

Mountains are interesting and Sweden’s highest mountain, the Kebnekaise, is nowadays 2104 meters, but in 1922 it was 2135 m. This means that the mountain is actually shrinking, which means that it becomes more and more easy to climb the mountains of the Earth as Climate Change approaches. A further complication is that the sea level is rising. Taken together this means that it becomes less and less of an achievement to climb the high mountains of the planet.

And who is to be blamed for this? That is the easy part. Basically we kind find four culprits; First we have the oil company’s. Their guilt cannot be doubted, as these gravediggers of humanity has forced this carbone dioxide economy upon us, and made us addicted to it. Second we have the car industry, that has been building a whole concept and mythology of individuality and freedom around the petrol driven car. Third we have the mainstream economists and neoliberals who have been telling us that this is okay and in fact is contributing to the greater good. Finally we have ourselves to blame because we bought this pack of myths, cons and fairy tales without questioning them. Where did our ability to critical thinking go?

Goethe once said: “As individuals the Germans are admirable, but as a people only worth contempt.” I think that this could be applied on humanity seen as a whole. Seen as a whole humanity act as some kind of virus or bacteria, thus producing the poison that in the end is going to kill everybody off.

Or as an old Swedish lady once said: “It was all better in the past, before we had an environment to worry about.”