The Dying Trust: Reviving Kashmir’s Forgotten Environmental Ethics
Asif Ahmad Dar
Six hundred years ago, long before global summits and climate change reports existed, Kashmir’s greatest saint, Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Wali (RA), handed us our blueprint for survival in just six words: “Ann poshi teli yeli wan poshi” – Food will last only as long as our forests last.
This wasn’t just a beautiful line of poetry; it was a socio-ecological contract. For generations, the Rishi and Sufi traditions taught Kashmiris that our mountains, our dense forests, our roaring rivers, and our quiet springs were a sacred trust. We did not own them; we shared them.
Today, as we look around the Valley, it is painful to admit that we have completely forgotten this ethical code. We have traded our ancestral wisdom for a short-sighted, consumerist greed that treats our fragile home like a commodity to be mined, paved over, and discarded.
The symptoms of this cultural amnesia are visible right outside our windows. Look at our wetlands. Places like Hokersar and Anchar, which used to host millions of migratory birds in a breathtaking winter spectacle, are being systematically strangled. We are choking them with plastic, suffocating them with silt, and aggressively encroaching upon them with concrete structures.
Our lakes tell an even more tragic story. From the iconically commercialized Dal and Nigeen lakes to the once-pristine, high-altitude waters of Nilnag, we have turned our lifelines into open sewers.
Raw household waste, bathroom drains, and chemical runoff from our sprawling orchards are dumped straight into our streams. This eutrophication leads to an aggressive growth of weeds, rapidly replacing the native biodiversity of our waterbodies.
Even our relationship with the landscape has shifted. We no longer visit our alpine forests or scenic meadows with a sense of reverence. Instead, we look at timber in terms of lakhs of rupees, and our valleys merely as backdrops for unregulated hiking and plastic trash.
Nature, however, is keeping score. The warning signs are flashing everywhere: our winters are growing increasingly erratic, snowfall patterns are shifting dangerously, glaciers are retreating, and our mountain streams are fluctuating between summer droughts and sudden, violent flash floods. The land is reacting to our betrayal.
Fixing this crisis cannot be left to top-down government policies, department funds, or legal acts alone. Laws cannot police a conscience. What Kashmir needs today is a radical cultural and ethical revival.
We must bring Nund Rishi’s philosophy out of the dusty pages of textbooks and insert it directly into our modern realities: into our school curriculums, our university research laboratories, and our village committees.
Our students and scientists need to lead the charge, combining local ecological wisdom with modern science to monitor the deteriorating fragile ecology of the valley and protect what remains.
We must remember that we are the children of this fragile mountain ecosystem, not its masters. If we do not restore our ancestral environmental ethics today, we will soon find ourselves living in a Kashmir that is beautiful only in old photographs. The choice is entirely ours, and time is running out.
