When Profit Breaks the Mountain — How Human Selfishness Wounds the Himalaya and the Earth
When Profit Breaks the Mountain — How Human Selfishness Wounds the Himalaya and the Earth
A long, emotional investigation rooted in the Himachal Himalaya: abandoned cows left at roadsides, calves dying at birth, forests felled for short money, rivers caged by hydropower and the spiritual loss when temple and land become transactional. This expansion adds local case studies, reporting, and references to help readers see how individual acts and policy choices together shape the future of the mountain and its people.
Introduction — what has changed (and why it matters)
The Himalaya has always been a fragile, living system: steep slopes, seasonal monsoon rains, and micro-climates where valley-scale relationships determine whether crops succeed, springs flow and communities thrive. For generations, mountain lifeways were built around reciprocity — people carefully tended animals, guarded forests as commons, and relied on rivers as shared lifeblood.
In recent decades, commercial pressures, changing aspirations, and extractive policies have pushed many mountain societies into a new logic: if something does not return a monetary value — today — it is expendable. That shift is not abstract; it shows in cows abandoned by the roadside, in illegal timber washing downstream, in the growing list of hydropower projects contested by villagers, and in the landslides that follow deforestation and poor planning. These are linked problems: social change, environmental damage, and spiritual erosion combine to make a cascade of loss that threatens mountain livelihoods and the stability of whole watersheds.
Cows, Calves and a Loss of Care — the human and ecological story
One of the most wrenching signs of change in many Himachali villages is the fate of the cow. Once central to household economies — providing milk, dung for fuel and manure for fields, and forming part of ritual life — cattle are increasingly being abandoned when they become "unproductive". This abandonment is visible: animals left to scavenge by roadsides, congregating in towns, and sometimes causing accidents and crop damage. The state-level animal census and subsequent reporting show thousands of stray and deserted animals across Himachal, and government efforts to shelter them are ongoing but insufficient.
Local realities: what reporting shows
In early 2023, Himachal Pradesh reported tens of thousands of stray or deserted cattle and a major government effort to place many animals in gaushalas (cow shelters). While official shelters provide relief for some, local reporting and recent news coverage show the problem persists: hundreds or thousands of animals still roam, causing social friction and indicating that market pressures and changing livelihoods make keeping non-productive animals difficult for many families.
Why calves die — the silent cruelty behind the search for profit
In many Himachali villages today, a heartbreaking practice has become common: when a cow gives birth, people often separate the calf early or do not feed it properly so that the mother’s milk can be sold for profit. The hungry calf grows weaker day by day and many die within weeks of birth. This cruel habit is not born of ignorance alone — it reflects a deeper moral decline, where even the bond between mother and calf is broken for money. The result is visible across the hills: the population of oxen has fallen to barely a fraction of what it once was, because most male calves never survive. Villagers themselves are now witnessing this imbalance — a land once full of life now echoes with the silence of lost calves and vanishing oxen.
Social ripple effects
- Stray cattle damage crops and create tension between people and the animals once considered sacred.
- Roadside abandonment increases traffic hazards; courts and state agencies have taken notice in recent PILs and court actions.
- Loss of dung as a local source of fuel and fertilizer reduces soil fertility and increases dependence on chemical fertilizers — a feedback loop that harms local agro-ecology.
To heal this problem requires both compassion and practical support: veterinary camps, community shelters, revival of pastoral practices, and social programmes that help families manage costs so they do not see abandonment as the only option.
Forests: timber in the rivers, illegal felling and the cost of short money
Forests in the lower Himalayan slopes provide the infrastructure for water security, slope stability, and biodiversity. When trees are cut illegally or with weak oversight, the consequences are immediately physical: more erosion, higher landslide risk and reduced spring flows. Recent viral footage of logs in Himachal rivers sparked public controversy and political finger-pointing, with ministers and forest officials debating whether the wood came from natural drift or illegal felling — a debate that reveals the fragility of forest governance and accountability in mountain states.
What the evidence shows
Multiple media reports in 2025 recorded floating timber and raised questions about enforcement. Even when footage can be explained by natural flooding and driftwood, the pattern of tree loss after storms, combined with earlier instances of illegal sawmills and chainsaw activity across the region, points to a persistent management challenge. The presence of drift logs after extreme rainfall can be natural, but it also acts as an alarm — communities and authorities must investigate and ensure that cutting is not opportunistic or illegal.
Local impacts that readers can see
- After trees are felled, rain has less canopy to slow it; the force of monsoon water increases surface erosion and the chance of flash floods.
- Siltation increases in rivers and reservoirs, reducing storage capacity and harming fish habitat.
- Loss of non-timber forest products (medicinal plants, fuelwood, wild foods) reduces local livelihood options for communities that once depended on a balanced forest economy.
Tackling illegal felling requires transparent forest surveys, community forest rights that empower local monitors, and consistent penalties for illicit loggers. It also requires alternative livelihoods so that poor households do not choose short-term cash over long-term security.
Hydropower, dams and people's protests — the Luhri case and the 'No Means No' movement
Hydropower projects in the Himalaya are a classic example of complex trade-offs. They promise energy and development, but their costs — displacement, altered river ecology, reduced downstream flows and increased landslide risk due to tunnelling and blasting — fall heavily on mountain communities. In Kinnaur and other districts, organized local resistance has become an important force: residents have called 'No Means No' to projects where they feel consent, fair compensation and safeguards are missing.
The Luhri hydel project — a recent flashpoint
The Luhri hydel project on the Satluj basin, which drew protests and public demonstrations, exemplifies these tensions. Reports from 2024 and 2025 document villagers' complaints about dust, blasting-related damage to homes, poor compensation, and potential long-term impacts on agriculture and water supplies. The Luhri story mirrors other contested projects across Himachal where construction impacts and inadequate rehabilitation stir protests and legal challenges.
Why hydropower becomes conflict
- Scale and design: Big dams and long tunnels change subsurface drainage and increase slope vulnerability.
- Procedural issues: Weak or perfunctory environmental impact assessments (EIAs), insufficient local consultation, and poor benefit-sharing spark resistance.
- Distribution of benefits: Energy often flows to distant urban centres while local communities carry environmental and social costs.
Solutions include smaller, distributed renewable options (micro-hydro, solar), stronger community consent procedures, and enforceable benefit-sharing agreements so that local people gain long-term returns rather than short-lived compensation.
Landslides, storm extremes and a warming climate — the soil remembers
Landslides in the Himalayan region are increasing in frequency and severity as changing rainfall patterns, unplanned development, road-building, and deforestation combine with climate-driven extremes. Recent scientific reviews and papers have linked exceptional rain events to catastrophic slope failures in Himachal, and have highlighted how human activity — road cuts, tunnel blasting, and deforestation — worsens natural hazard risk.
What the science tells us
Studies reviewing monsoon-triggered landslides in Himachal and the broader Himalaya stress that steep slopes and fragile geology make the region inherently vulnerable, and that human actions can tip slopes from marginal stability to catastrophic failure. When forests are removed and slope drains are altered by construction, hillside resilience is lowered — and when an extreme rain event occurs, the damage is magnified.
Real-world consequence
Landslides cause loss of life, destroy homes and block roads for months, severing access to markets and medical care. The 2023 monsoon season and associated slide events in Himachal are reminders of this vulnerability and of how quickly a chain of decisions — cutting forests, approving oversized projects, and ignoring early warning signs — can become a disaster.
Prevention is not glamorous: it means better planning, slope-friendly roads, reforestation with native species, and strong oversight on construction activities that alter drainage patterns.
Reaching for Mars While Neglecting Home — The Shame of Priorities
Every day we hear of rockets and rovers, of colonies planned on Mars and satellites sent to explore distant worlds. Curiosity and discovery are noble parts of being human — yet it becomes tragic when the energy, money, and pride spent on exploring lifeless planets far exceed the compassion needed to protect the only living planet we have. Across all recorded history, no other world has ever shown the breath of life, the sound of rivers, or the pulse of forests that Earth holds. The truth is simple: life exists only here. Other planets are barren deserts or frozen rocks, and the dream of living there is still fiction — an escape born from our unwillingness to care for our real home. We already possess the knowledge to restore forests, purify rivers, and end suffering for both animals and people. But blinded by greed and competition, humanity builds rockets to reach the stars while destroying the soil beneath its feet. The irony is unbearable — we can travel millions of miles through space, yet we fail to walk gently on our own ground. Until we learn to heal Earth first, every mission to Mars will remain not a triumph of science, but a monument to our moral failure. True progress begins not in the sky, but in the soil that feeds us.
Temples and transactions — when the sacred is measured by gain
The Himalaya’s temples and sacred sites have long functioned as moral anchors and community centres. But as the market logic spreads, pilgrimage and ritual are sometimes used instrumentally: offerings and rituals performed with a calculation of outcomes in mind, temples treated as ladders to personal success rather than shared spaces of humility. This slow commodification strips rituals of their deeper purpose and undermines local custodianship of sacred groves and temple forests. When a sacred grove is monetized, its ecological as well as spiritual protections are at risk.
Religious leaders and institutions can be powerful allies in environmental protection — when they assert stewardship rather than profit, and when temple trusts model ecological care through watershed protection, tree-planting, and support for local commons.
Families, expectation and the marketization of life
At the deepest social level, the Himalayan transformation involves how families evaluate human worth. Children often inherit the burden of earlier generations’ debt and, in many cases, the explicit expectation to earn money and secure the family. As measures of success narrow to salary, land sale price or contract wins, the social value of many life paths — crafts, pastoralism, art, local stewardship — declines. This has two consequences: a brain drain from rural life to urban jobs, and a collapse of the informal systems that once sustained mountain economies (seed sharing, mutual aid, local veterinary knowledge).
When worth is equated with market value, many ordinary acts of care (keeping an old cow, tending a spring, protecting a grove) are seen as luxuries that no longer pay off.
What can be done — immediate, mid-term and long-term actions
There is no single fix. The mountain crisis demands many responses that combine local action, policy reform, and a broader cultural turn back to reciprocity. Below are practical steps at different scales.
Individual & household actions
- Care networks for animals: Organize local rescue groups and coordinate veterinary camps so families do not feel forced to abandon animals. Seek state support for mobile veterinary units.
- Support regenerative farming: Buy and support farmers who maintain soil health and traditional seed systems; reduce dependence on chemical fertilizers that erode soil structure.
- Teach and practice stewardship: Share practical knowledge about water harvesting, calf care, seed saving and native tree planting with younger generations.
Community & gram sabha level
- Reinstate commons governance: Strengthen community forest rights and locally enforced grazing rules; use participatory mapping to protect springs and sacred groves.
- Local energy solutions: Consider micro-hydro and community solar where suitable to avoid oversized projects and ensure local benefits.
- Hold developers accountable: Use gram sabha decisions to require proper, independent EIAs and binding benefit-sharing agreements.
Policy & institutional reforms
- Transparent forest oversight: Regular independent forest surveys, anti-logging enforcement and community monitoring with legal teeth.
- Reform environmental assessment: Make EIAs truly independent, require cumulative impact assessments for river basins, and publish results openly for public scrutiny.
- Long-term compensation & restoration: Compensation must include ecological restoration funds and livelihood replacement programs that last beyond a single payout.
Spiritual & cultural leadership
- Reclaim ritual for reciprocity: Encourage temple trusts to invest in ecological protection and treat sacred groves as community assets.
- Teach humility: Use religious and cultural narratives to restore a moral economy that values care as much as profit.
FAQ — quick answers
Why are so many calves dying in Himachal villages?
Many calves die because households prioritise milk sales over feeding newborns, lack timely veterinary support, and face economic pressures. Early separation of calves from mothers and inadequate feeding are common drivers of mortality. Strengthening veterinary outreach and community shelters can reduce deaths.
Are hydropower projects always harmful to mountain communities?
Not always. Small, well-planned, and community-managed micro-hydro projects can be beneficial. The problems arise with large-scale projects that lack proper consultation, ignore cumulative basin impacts and provide few local benefits compared to the costs of displacement and ecosystem damage.
How can I help if I see an abandoned cow or calf?
Contact local gaushalas (cow shelters), animal welfare NGOs, or your nearest veterinary office. If safe, provide water and inform local authorities. Community rescue groups can often arrange temporary shelter and veterinary help.
What are immediate things villages can do to prevent landslides?
Planting native deep-rooted trees, avoiding unnecessary slope cutting, maintaining traditional terrace systems, and demanding independent geotechnical studies before approving new roads or tunnels are practical steps. Participate in gram sabha planning and local disaster preparedness drills.
Conclusion — a prayer, a charge, and an invitation
This long essay has tried to mix grief with evidence. The stories of cows left at roadsides, calves that die alone, forests that are cut and sometimes wash as logs downstream, highways and tunnels cut through fragile slopes, and rivers tamed for projects — all of them are signs of a moral misdirection. We can still choose a different path: one that values being a guest and steward rather than an owner and exploiter.
Change requires courage. It requires villagers speaking together and saying 'no' when projects will truly degrade their futures. It requires policy-makers who listen, scientists who place resilience above speed, and spiritual leaders who preach reciprocity. It requires each of us to choose care over convenience, presence over profit, and generosity over calculation. The Himalaya needs us to remember what we were taught: we are not masters here; we are custodians for the generations to come.
May the mountain forgive our greed. May the rivers return to their old songs. May our children inherit a world where kindness outlasts price tags.
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