Geologically, the Himalayan mountains are considered ‘young’ given that mountain building is still ongoing, with the Indian tectonic plate slowly sliding under the Tibetan plate, causing the Himalayas to rise at the rate of 5mm/year. This geological vitality of the Himalaya has profoundly shaped South Asian and global climatic history. The origin of the Indian Monsoons – a vital life force for the subcontinent’s population and the earth’s cooling during the Holocene period, can both be attributed to the tectonic uplift of the Himalaya.Today, the Indian Himalaya, part of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya system (HKH), is categorized as a climate change hotspot and is witnessing a surge in militarization, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and catastrophic disasters. This paper draws on my research on an anti-dam movement led by the Lepchas, an Indigenous community in Sikkim in the Eastern Himalaya. Both Lepcha activists and regional geologists believe hydropower development can be linked to growing disasters in Sikkim. Lepcha oral history, myths, and prophecies are replete with accounts of Sikkim’s landscape as lively and sentient, with stories of geological events such as floods and earthquakes and contests between Buddhist gurus and Lepcha ritual specialists traced into nearby hillocks and mountains. In Sikkim, hydropower presents a threat not just to tribal land ownership but also to Indigenous social history (Longkumer 2020).

This paper examines important theories, events, sites, and practices within Himalayan geological science and Lepcha social history. I argue that both forms of knowledge orient us to time and place in ways that maintain hope in uncertain times and, in doing so, offer an important critique of the universalizing logics of linear time embedded in narratives of the climate crisis and apocalyptic futures. I draw on the growing literature on geology within the humanistic social sciences, focusing on the discipline’s history as an imperial science (Clark 2017; Bobette and Donavan 2019; Quintana-Navarrete 2022) and diverse forms of geological thought and practice (Last 2018; Khan 2019; Yusoff 2018; d’Avignon 2022). In staging this conversation, I consider how integrating larger scales of representation with minor scales of social meaning (Jasanoff 2010) might re-orient how we prepare for and live with the spatially uneven yet collective crisis of climate change.