The Teesta River has been at the center of conversations surrounding its future, with some people inevitably asking, ‘Isn’t this just a Lepcha issue?’ While it’s easy to think that, given the resistance from Dzongu, the ancestral homeland of the Lepcha people, the reality is more complex. The Teesta is not just about one community; it’s about how we imagine the future of mountain landscapes, including rivers that sustain towns and villages, forests that regulate water and climate, biodiversity, and local economies vulnerable to ecological decline.
The questions raised by the Teesta are no longer just for the Lepcha community; they’re for everyone who believes the Himalayas deserve a future that’s both ecologically secure and economically just. This leads to another question: If large-scale extraction can’t be the only language of development in the mountains, what can? How do we create livelihoods worth returning for, and ensure that protecting forests and rivers is seen as the foundation of prosperity, not a hindrance?
For decades, our answers have looked outward, borrowing development models designed for the plains and expecting them to work in mountain landscapes governed by different realities. However, mountains function through relationships between forests and rivers, people and place, ecology and culture. We’ve been chasing ‘heera’ and ‘moti,’ convinced that the world beyond the hills holds everything we seek, only to find ourselves drawn back to the things we left behind.
The task before us is not to import another model but to recognize the value that has quietly existed in the mountains all along. One framework attempting to do this is the Creative Mountain Economy, developed by Sonam Tashi Gyaltsen through La & Echostream. This initiative works at the intersection of ecology, culture, material innovation, and livelihoods in the Eastern Himalayas.
The Creative Mountain Economy is not a universal solution but offers a different way of thinking, a roadmap that could help shape long-term, place-based futures for mountain regions. It begins with a shift in perspective, asking what already exists in the mountains that deserves recognition. The Eastern Himalayas are not resource-poor landscapes waiting to be developed; they’re among the richest ecological and cultural regions on Earth.
The Creative Mountain Economy proposes that these systems can become the foundation of a contemporary economy, imagining development as regeneration, not extraction. It recognizes healthy forests as productive infrastructure, rivers as economic assets, and culture as accumulated knowledge. Production becomes distributed across communities, design adds value without erasing identity, and circularity ensures waste is minimized.
These ideas are already being embraced in places like Dzongu, where Himalayan nettle is helping demonstrate what a Creative Mountain Economy can look like in practice. Women harvest nettle from healthy forests, process it using traditional knowledge, spin it into yarn, and weave textiles whose value extends far beyond the fabric itself. Each stage depends on a living ecosystem, and income flows back into the community, creating an incentive to protect the landscapes that make the livelihood possible.
Nettle is just one example; across the Himalayas, bamboo, wool, natural dyes, traditional agriculture, regenerative tourism, forest foods, medicinal plants, and other place-based enterprises hold similar potential. The Creative Mountain Economy asks each landscape a crucial question: What can only you create? This is its greatest strength, offering a way of thinking that encourages every mountain community to begin with its own ecology, culture, and knowledge systems.
When livelihoods emerge from the health of the landscape rather than its depletion, conservation and development cease to compete; they begin to reinforce one another. The story of Himalayan nettle in Dzongu is just one expression of this idea, a doorway into a larger conversation about what mountain economies can become. The deeper question is: What kind of future do we want for the Himalayas? A future where rivers are valued only for electricity generation, or one where rivers, forests, cultures, and livelihoods are recognized as parts of the same living system?
The conversations around the Teesta have always been about more than a single river or community; they ask us whether development in the mountains should be measured only by what we can extract, or also by what we can sustain, regenerate, and pass on. If the mountains are asking us to listen, the answers may not lie beyond the hills; they may already be here, in our rivers, forests, knowledge, and communities that have long understood that the health of one depends on the health of all. The future of mountain economies lies not in becoming miniature versions of cities but in becoming more fully themselves.
