Conservation
This is a passion project at its inception, and it is not a business.
It is my first step into a world far wider than my own. One drop of water in a mighty ocean. I know I cannot change an ecosystem on my own. What I can do is help people understand why the animal at the top matters, and why its survival quietly holds everything else together.
Remove the animal at the top, and everything below it changes
When wolves were returned to Yellowstone, they did not only hunt the deer. They changed how the deer moved. The valleys the deer had grazed to the bone began to recover. Trees came back, then birds, then beavers, then the rivers themselves changed their course. One predator returned, and the whole landscape answered. Ecologists call this a trophic cascade. The same principle holds in the high Himalaya, and the snow leopard sits at the top of it.
The snow leopard hunts
The apex predator of the high Himalaya, and the reason the chain below stays in balance.
Blue sheep and ibex keep moving
The alpine grasses hold
Grazed lightly rather than stripped bare, the fragile high pastures survive the short summer.
The thin soil stays on the mountain
Roots hold the soil in place. Without the grass, the first hard rain carries the mountain away
The rivers reach the people
The water that soil feeds becomes the streams, and the streams become the rivers that millions depend on, far below and far away
Starting with the snow leopard
We begin where the argument is hardest to ignore, with the snow leopard itself. The first step is simply to see them, and to help others see them. People protect what they have looked in the eye.
Ladakh · Zanskar · Spiti
Jan & Feb
The cats come lower
The first expedition
Planned across Ladakh, Zanskar and Spiti. Come to see them, or simply to follow the work