The rivers of the Asian Highlands are central to the world’s weather systems and activities in their water catchments have shaped the human past and will shape the future. These rivers support more than three billion people and provide water for 85% of Asia’s populations. Weather patterns that originate on the Tibetan Plateau affect the annual monsoon in South and Southeast Asia, and this completes its course in northern Australia, where it influences how much water falls there. El Niño and La Niña also intersect with these events. What happens to Asian highland rivers is of global significance.
Today human activities are contributing to rising temperatures, which leads to glacial shrinkage and uncertain river flows. Highland rivers are a planetary space, and it is suffering from multiple crises, including inept management, negative effects from poorly planned damming, and declining fish stocks, along with decreased biodiversity.
Crisis on the Tibetan Plateau
The causes of the present crisis stretch back through history and all over the planet. They are underpinned and intensified by unequal global systems that extract from the Global South and give to the Global North and inequalities within the catchments between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and the Highlands and the Lowlands.
This book responds to the need for a comprehensive historical study of the origins of the present crisis and current events that will shape the futures of Highland rivers and the populations that depend on them. It takes a different approach from most studies of rivers. Rather than focusing on the heavily populated river plains, it seeks to reset Highland-Lowland knowledge imbalances by concentrating on the Asian rivers’ upper reaches, and it does so by employing a deep time analysis along with discussions of modern developments.
This study is unusual in that it was undertaken by a team of humanists, natural scientists, and social scientists working in close collaboration. Our research required developing a new methodology for integrating approaches and methodologies used in sciences and humanities and creating a vocabulary for expressing integrated insights. Each chapter was originally drafted by one of the team members and then discussed in emails prior to group meetings in which everyone critiqued and added material and insights, bringing together information from historical sources, oral histories of people who live along the Highland rivers, scientific data on glacial core samples, geomorphological analyses of how the rivers of the Tibetan Plateau formed over the course of millions of years, often changed course, and how humans adapted to these changes.
The project focusses on two of the most historically important Asian rivers that originate in the Highlands—the Yangzi and Brahmaputra. We examined them using three core perspectives: geologically, from their headwaters to the places where they leave the Tibetan Plateau and descend to the lowlands; historically in terms of how they are described by the people who have lived near them; and culturally, as recurring themes in the literature of the Highlands. Our view extends the rivers’ temporality, positioning them in their deep-time earth-water-climate cycles and the longue durée of generational care by local and Indigenous people. We ask how this larger-than-human perspective provides insights into the rivers’ current crises and possible futures.
By becoming a geological force in the Anthropocene, humans have stepped into this deep-time story, making decisions with implications that spread across the planet and further into time.
From the perspective of the Asian Highlands as a planetary space, we ask what led us to these crises, how much the rivers’ legacies have locked in their futures, or whether the threads that bind the rivers’ present can be unravelled.
Bringing together disciplinary perspectives & methodologies
The book’s principal authors have been trained in nine disciplines—anthropology, climatology, geology and geomorphology, political ecology, environmental history, and religious studies. Most of these fields seldom work collaboratively. The study is highly interdisciplinary in that we wrote by explicitly comparing and contrasting disciplinary observations. Sometimes these observations overlapped, but in most of the book there is a deep intersection of data and analysis from different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies that together led to new understandings that would not be possible had we approached the subjects we studied from within a single academic silo. Our diverse sources—reflective of our disciplines—include empirical data sets, manuscripts, archives, literature, art, and ethnographies. We present case studies from the Earth, biological, environmental, and social sciences, along with stories translated by the group’s humanists.
Co-writing in this way across multiple disciplines—each with its own distinctive methodologies, assumptions, and blind spots—was both fraught and productive. Insights arose in group discussions that would have been impossible for any single academic working in isolation and following the approach of his or her discipline.
As the project progressed, we decided to place our variant understandings of rivers alongside each other and in conversation rather than seeking compromise or synthesis. This forestalled conceptual hegemonies and allowed commonalities to unfold during the process of writing, discussion, and rewriting. No one approach was hegemonic, and all contributed to the final outcome. We did not set up a competition between perspectives; instead, the goal from the beginning was to allow our perspectives to converge and diverge like the channels of a braided river. The book’s cover photo—of a landscape in Tibet in which a large river branches off into multiple intersecting sections before re-converging—symbolises our approach and how we studied our subject matter.
