What is belief? With climate change being the raging issue that it is, causing an international summit to take place for two weeks where world leaders and Environmental Ministers alike have come to debate responsibility, restitution and action around the threat of climate change to the Earth, belief in the destructive power of that climate change seems like a premise for attending at all.

While debate simmers in the U.S. between factions who believe that global warming is either not caused by humans or not real at all, there is little doubt in the scientific community around the world that this is truly happening and that we have something to do about it. Glaciers are melting, that much is certain. And the glaciers of the Himalayas are melting above one of the “Greenest” valleys in the world in Bhutan at a rate of about 30 meters per year.

"It has not been easy to conserve our ecological balance," told Reuters in an interview. "It has come at a cost. We could have been much richer. Now we are as vulnerable and exposed as other countries," said Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley.

That is just brutal to hear. I sit here in my room, look at my computer, my plastic roughneck bins full of stuff, my closet full of clothes, think about the paint on my walls, etc. and think about how I define wealth, how I live my day to day, what I think of as a sacrifice- what I do in my own life by choice. I bike. I buy organic food. I recycle my beer bottles. But do I consciously exchange the prospect of extreme wealth for ecological health? No, not on a large-scale basis. I live in a country that made the opposite choice. I think now about what the U.S. would look like if we had not spent 200 years chopping down the forests- what if we had been as intent on preserving 60% of our trees as Bhutan has been? What if that was how we defined wealth and health and happiness, rather than industrialization?

In a valley beneath the melting glaciers lives 1/10 of Bhutan’s people- and a temple with holy relics. The lakes that gather the glacial melt are rising and over 30 of them have the potential to burst and flood the valley, potentially killing many people and destroying the relics. The monks there, though, believe that their faith will keep them, their relics and the monastery safe in the event of a flood. And perhaps it will.

Belief, faith, and certainty in a dramatic course of action are what will define both the political and pragmatic future as the world deals with climate change. Perhaps some of the faith that those in Bhutan have in both the value of keeping their country mostly green and in the power of belief to keep them safe could be of use in Copenhagen this week, as there is little there that people can agree on to bind their faith and belief to in the future.