3 ideas
Arsen Samanchin, a Kyrgyz journalist whose singer lover Aidana has left him for commercial pop, takes work guiding a wealthy foreign trophy-hunting party into the Tien Shan, where the hunt is for snow leopard. At the same time the ageing leopard Jaabars, driven from his range and his mate by a younger male, is being pushed toward the hunters.
Once everything can be priced, the mountains stop being a homeland with its own inhabitants and become a product sold to whoever pays, and a rare predator becomes a trophy fee. The same logic turns art into show business and people into hostages worth a ransom. Commercialism does not just add a price to things. It removes every value that cannot be expressed as a transaction.
Read the ageing leopard losing territory and mate to a stronger rival alongside the idealist losing his lover and his vocation to a mass-culture producer, and one mechanism appears. Anyone whose worth lies in rarity and integrity rather than competitiveness gets pushed out of their niche. Seeing the human and natural displacement as one process shows that ecological loss and cultural loss are the same loss.