Tibetans have endured waves of genocide since the 1950s, and now they face ecocide. The Himalayan snowcaps are rapidly melting due to climate change, exacerbated by black soot from extensive coal and fuel burning in China and India.

Chinese engineering firms are damming Tibet's rivers to satisfy the mainland's growing demand for power, while relentless mining depletes the land's minerals to fuel China's industrial complex. Plans are also underway for a massive project to divert water from Eastern Tibet to drought-stricken Northern China. Ruthless Chinese repression has left Tibetans powerless to halt the destruction of their sacred land, but they are not the only ones affected. Nations downstream depend on Tibet's rivers for water and rich agricultural silt.

This environmental devastation has gone largely unnoticed—until now. In Meltdown in Tibet, Michael Buckley shines a light on the darkest side of China's rise as a global superpower.

REVIEW:
“Meltdown in Tibet is full of evidence of ethnocide and ecocide, brutal repression, human rights violations, wide corruption and profiteering at the highest levels…it is the huge dams that most worry Buckley. Widely travelled, with deep knowledge of terrain and peoples, he… neatly encapsulates the mainstream Chinese view by quoting a hydrologist who says such rivers are ‘an awful waste of water leaving China.' …Highly readable.” ―NewScientist

About the Author
Michael Buckley is an award-winning Canadian journalist who, amongst other things, wrote Lonely Planet's first guidebook to Tibet (the first guidebook ever to Tibet) in 1986. A freelance travel writer and photographer, he has traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges. He has made two short documentaries about major environmental issues in Tibet and moves between Asia and Vancouver, Canada.