[Book Reviews] Security and Mount Everest

[thewronghands]

Hello, Seattle! Somewhat recently I read "High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed", which came recommended to me. Indeed, it was a good recommendation. It's rather the opposite of the more common triumphal feel-good read that is the staple of books about mountaineering, and doesn't quite fit in to the other common trope of the genre

Comments

[girl_on_a_stick]

Glad you like it! Like you I found the questions it brought up totally thought-provoking and relevant to non-mountaineering things. I heard there's a university somewhere that offers a course on Everest's ethics and this is on the syllabus.

[thewronghands]

Thanks very much for the rec! I tore through it in like a day and then regaled Mayhem and anyone else within opining range with my opinions about it, heh. Anarchy is way less fun when other people are jerks. At altitude and under stress, there are a lot of jerks. :/ Did you read that book that came out a year or two ago that was basically a history and study of the current economic state of the Sherpas? A lot of Western mountaineers have been real jerks to them, it's pretty depressing. I don't blame them at all for striking for better working conditions. We recap the history of labor. (Just like a lot of the high-altitude crime felt pretty Old West to me, and some of the system-centric graft felt 1920's robber baron... nothing new under the sun.)

[girl_on_a_stick]

There's another side to the sherpa story too and that is that their case was very much hijacked by extremist maoists. I remember reading of at least one case where a 'sherpa' came forward to western media and said he was abused when it turned out he wasn't even a sherpa, just a maoist trying to start shit. There was also at least one case of sherpas getting violent with their clients. Not that I blame them for being angry at all, but it's been a rather more complicated shitshow than I think most realize.

[thewronghands]

Yeah, the Chinese side of it is just O.O for politics. I wonder how much most news stories are that complicated by politics, peoples' hidden motivations, etc. Maybe everything is just like that, and you can only see it the more about that particular thing you know. Disturbing to apply that filter to reading the news, heh.

[tylik]

I can understand getting interested in climbing mountains, and even slowly working up to more and more challenging climbs, etc. etc.

But damn, everything I have seen encourages me to think that staying the hell away from Everest is pro-sanity. (I mean, some of these things are generalize-able, I do realize that. But damn. Everest.)

[thewronghands]

Seriously. I mean, I don't like being cold or sleeping on snow or camping, and I sunburn at low altitude if you look at me funny, so I'm not thinking that this is the sport for me. But even if it were, dang. What a rodeo.