The mountaineer is first and foremost an advocate of the integral conservation of the environment. Who are these “gentlemen”?

The Chinese have been engaged in a campaign to clean Everest base camps where a landfill made company with the majestic walls. 

They collected 8.5 tons of waste left on site by commercial expeditions, makeshift alpine tourists, who claimed the right to rape nature for the mere fact that they paid to be able to say: I was there.

There has been much talk of the seas over the invaded by waste that are abandoned by man on beaches, by ships, in rivers and that all arrive in the seas and oceans. We have often been outraged to see turtles entangled in abandoned nets,in plastics found in fish stomachs, in the carpet of floating microplastics, forming infernal islands. 

But little has been said about another ecosystem subjected to violence and pollution: the mountains and in particular the Himalayan chain,which is traveled every year by a horde of commercial expeditions that are organized to bring aspiring mountaineers to the top of the 8000.

These expeditions recruit an increasing number of participants by ensuring their food and lodging, carrying the weights, tracking the way to the summit, equipping the entire ascent and assisting them with an oxygen “reinforcement” when they begin to pant.

The speed of shipments, also given by the stable time windows, the permits granted to climb the mountains, the coexistence of spaces with other expeditions and the recruitment of new participants for new ascents, has, over the years, the continuous abandonment of waste of all types, from human to technical to logistical support.

The Chinese, who are involved in the ascents from their side, have posed the environmental problem of the base camps at the foot of the mountains. They organized an abandoned garbage collection group that brought downstream 8.5 tons of waste. Of this amount, 5.2 tons were household waste, while 2.3 were represented by human feces.

Nepal and India are also raising the issue of increasing pollution in high-altitude areas, but they are struggling to forgo the flourishing compensations that result from climbing permits.

Nepal has imposed a bail of 4000 dollars,per shipment, if the participants do not report downstream at least 8 kg. of waste each, but honestly, they are only palliative, as the overall cost of a commercial shipment can absorb without the slightest trauma this fine.

Perhaps, at this point we have to ask ourselves whether the mountain must necessarily be accessible to all, by all means and, moreover, who is a mountaineer?

High-altitude areas have been between the beginning of the 70s and the end of the 80s of the last century, the field of action of the aspirations of the young mountaineers of that time, who experienced, after the era of the 50s and 60s made of a “military” and massively organized mountaineering, a fair comparison with the mountain and its extreme difficulties,without the use of hundreds of carriers, without the use of oxygen and without the use of mountaineers who equipped the ascent to those who would go to the top.

A mountaineering that respected the mountains had developed,where the measurement of one’s limits was fair and the environment solitary and pure, created a new world, made of personal redemption and veneration for the last areas escaped human manipulation.

On May 8, 1978, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler embodied the hopes of the new ecological mountaineering,reaching the summit of Everest without oxygen and with a light expedition.

“We were told that we were crazy with suicidal tendencies ,” he recalled in an interview with Ansa Messner, “with our company we disproved the science, which claimed that beyond 8,500 meters it was impossible to resist, that we would certainly die. We, on the other hand, climbed to almost 8,900 meters, and then went down to base camp safely”

Messner continued his mountaineering in search of his physical and psychological limits, managing, first, to climb all the peaks beyond 8 thousand, bringing to the world a clear message: with the mountain you must not cheat, the challenge is between you and the natural environment, without external aid.

The mountains at altitude should be like the marine nature reserves,closed to the paying public, and accessible only to experts who reflect their history, the environment and worry about their future.