“What is the difference between climate and weather?”
That was the first question Navina Deshar, Senior Program Manager at Himalayan Environment and Life Protection (H.E.L.P.), put to our senior boys in Grades 5, 6, and 7 on Children’s Day. It opened a conversation that felt especially close to home this year. Less than three weeks earlier, on August 26, a glacier collapsed high in the mountains near the Nepal–Tibet border, sending floodwaters rushing down the river valleys north of Kathmandu. The floods claimed many lives and affected tens of thousands of people.
H.E.L.P. is a Tergar Mandala initiative, founded by Mingyur Rinpoche, that works with Himalayan communities to adapt to and ease the effects of climate change. For Children’s Day, we invited them to share their work with our students.
From there, Navina moved to a bigger question: why is our planet getting warmer? Our planet, she explained, is wrapped in a kind of blanket called the atmosphere. Sunlight warms the Earth, and the atmosphere holds some of that warmth in. Without it, Earth would be far too cold for life. But human activities are causing the blanket to trap more heat than it should, and the planet is growing warmer.
She was clear, though, that understanding climate change should not leave us feeling helpless.
“People often think climate change is something only scientists can work on, or only developed countries with advanced technology,” she said. “We may think, ‘What can we do? What can poor people do?’ But individuals and communities can do a great deal to adapt to and reduce climate change.”
Rinpoche came to the same answer. In a short video, he explains that seeing a glacier disappear led him to ask what he could do, and to look for work that would be good for local villages and good for the environment at the same time. “Everything is interdependent, everything is connected,” he says. When communities protect their land and forests, those same resources can support their livelihoods. And as people come to understand their environment better, they care for it more.
Navina described what this looks like in Tsum and Nubri, at the foot of Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain. H.E.L.P. supports climate-resilient potato farming, the planting of native trees, and new ways for families to earn a living from local resources, such as yak cheese, rosehip tea, and jam. The goal, she explained, is resilience. “A resilient community is not a community where nothing bad happens,” she said. “It is a community that is better prepared to face change.”
Navina then asked the students what grows in those high mountains. Together they worked through the list: potatoes, mushrooms, wild garlic, medicinal herbs. Then one student called out, “Tomatoes!”
It seemed an unlikely answer. But Navina explained that tomatoes are now growing in places where they traditionally wouldn’t, because of climate change. As temperatures rise, what can grow at those heights is changing. One student’s surprising answer had put climate change right there on the list, and it became a lesson for everyone in the room.
Then the conversation turned to an animal familiar to anyone who knows the Himalayas: the yak. Yaks, Navina explained, do far more than provide milk and cheese. As they graze, they help keep mountain pastures healthy. Their manure feeds the soil, and they even play a part in pollination. For many families, they are also a source of income. Yaks are built for the cold, so a warming climate puts them under pressure. And if yaks disappear, their work does not simply stop. It passes to alternatives that bring problems of their own: tractors and fuel-powered machines, which add pollution and feed the very warming that threatens the yaks in the first place.
Before the session ended, Navina raised a question of fairness. Children have done the least to cause climate change, yet they will carry its consequences the longest. The same is true of Nepal. The country produces only a tiny share of the world’s emissions, yet its mountains make it one of the most vulnerable places on Earth.
For the students in that room, this is not a story about somewhere far away. It is about the mountains of their own country and the future they will inherit. That is why the lesson could not end in worry. It ended instead with things everyone can do, starting with the everyday habits of reducing, reusing, and recycling.
In the afternoon, the conversation widened to the whole school, with an art competition on the theme “Compassion for Earth.” Many students drew the Earth hurting. Some showed it with a thermometer running hot. Others drew it on fire.
The Earth is hurting, and our children can see it. Compassion begins with that kind of seeing. It is the same compassion we hope they carry for one another, now extended to the planet they share.
