October 09, 2008

Trees don’t grow without money?

I wanted to share a couple of maps from The Atlas Of The Real World [via BoingBoing]. The first is a map of net forest depletion, measured as

the dollar value of wood that is not sustainably harvested… Almost half of the world total (46%) occurs in India, where the annual timber depletion exceeds that of the next 25 countries combined, although the population of India is also almost as large as the combined population of those 25 other territories. [Link]

Forest Depletion: The size of each territory indicates the annual rate of depletion of forests, measured in terms of US dollar value

The second is a map of poverty around the world, in terms of the number of people living under $2/day

The size of each territory shows the number of people living on US$2 a day or less, adjusted for local purchasing power: barely enough to survive, let alone thrive

Three points:

1. India has a lot of people, which is part of why it’s on both of these maps. Note, however, that India is far larger than China on both, so sheer population alone doesn’t explain what we’re seeing
2. Poor people will cut down trees. If you want a greener world, maybe you need to increase the green in people’s pockets.
3. Sadly for the poor, cutting down trees will hurt them in the long term, like eating your seed corn. Forests protect land from erosion, increase the quantity and quality of water resources and decrease landslides [Link]. Unfortunately, overharvesting is a prisoner’s dilemma where overexploitation is individually beneficial but collectively detrimental. You need good governance to overcome a problem like this because of all the externalities involved.

It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve, but since the first world has an interest in third world forests soaking up their carbon emissions, perhaps it can be part of the solution.

ennis at 12:22 AM in Economics, Environment · 19 comment(s) · Direct link

September 27, 2008

Energy Ignorance is Bliss

Eek. Watching this video of South Asian youth getting interviewed on energy issues made me have bad flashbacks to the days when I would try to register South Asian youth to vote in front of desi parties. Tough crowd, those desi youngsters.

Seriously? Let me break it down. Global warming is bad (and not a myth). Thus, hybrid vehicles are good. Clean energy like wind and solar are good. Saving energy is good. Drilling for more oil (especially domestic) is bad. Suing polar bears to drill for oil is bad. Driving a gas guzzling hummer is tacky (and bad.) Paying high prices at the pump is bad. Bhangra as a source of alternative energy is so not good.

Get educated on the energy crisis, kids. Register to vote. Then vote for the candidate, whether Obama or McCain, whose stance on energy is most like your own.

Desi States of America is a weekly Tuesday night show that is screened on Pan Desi available on your cable channel of Colours TV nightly at 9pm. Desi States of America has a stream of shows uploaded on youtube, and to me it seems like the show is a desi version of a college version of a less funny version of the Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. Not bad, just not great. I get that the clip above was trying to be ironic - like when Jay Leno hits the streets to ask every day Americans questions. But there’s something so pathetically gut wrenching when a guy is asked to name alternative energy sources and he responds, RED BULL.

taz at 04:14 AM in Environment · 46 comment(s) · Direct link

July 21, 2008

Gas Consumption: California vs. China, India

According to Wired (via Manish), recent stats show that gas and diesel usage as transportattion fuel in the state of California was 20 billions gallons in 2006, an increase of more than 50 percent over the past 20 years. 20 billion gallons a year is more than the usage of the entire nations of China or India:

Given all the news coverage about the rise of the Chinese economy, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world’s most populous country is hogging all the world’s resources, while the developed nations are fighting for scraps.

But, at least with transportation fuel, you’d be wrong. California alone uses more gasoline than any country in the world (except the US as a whole, of course). That means California’s 20 billion gallon gasoline and diesel habit is greater than China’s! (Or Russia’s. Or India’s. Or Brazil’s. Or Germany’s.) (link)

It’s a remarkable statistic. The first question that jumps out is, of course, why do Californians need to drive so much? The number comes from a recent report issued by California itself (PDF here), and the report mentions some of the key reasons for the jump in consumption: more population, more cars, low fuel prices (until recently), lack of public transportation, lack of fuel alternatives, the absence of effective CAFE standards, and consumers’ preference for large, gas-guzzling vehicles. I would also add that California is a warm state, which means people like to gun the A.C., many areas have high speed limits, and most towns are designed so that you can’t really walk anywhere.

The second issue raised by the statistic is a familiar one — developing nations are sometimes blamed for challenging the comfortable life-style of the United States (for instance, see this post), when in fact the U.S. needs to start by looking in the mirror.

Which leads me to a related complaint. Environmentally-minded Americans have traditionally been particularly anxious about “overpopulation” in the third world (some of my students have said things like this to me, and not long ago I had an unpleasant conversation with a colleague along the lines of “India == Overpopulation”). Population growth is indeed a serious concern in big countries like India and China, but the number one culprit from the perspective of environmental degradation has for decades been the industrialized world. Arguably, the greatest immediate danger to the global environment is not overpopulation, but careless overconsumption.

amardeep at 10:43 AM in Environment · 44 comment(s) · Direct link

June 12, 2008

Fasting for Bhopal

A few months ago I wrote about Indra Sinha’s Booker-nominated novel Animal’s People, a fictionalized take on the 1984 Bhopal Union Carbide gas disaster.

In Animal’s People, several of the main characters embark on a hunger strike, including Zafar, the leading activist in the fictional town of Khaufpur. Now, a new development in Indra Sinha’s story, where his fiction is meeting his life: On June 10, Sinha began an indefinite hunger strike (from his home in France) in solidarity with 9 other Bhopal activists in New Delhi, many of whom are victims of gas or water contamination. His action is part of a global fast to finally force the Indian government into action to bring US giant Dow Chemical to justice in India.

Two days after the Worldwide Hunger Strike Relay has begun, 60 people in India, the US, Europe and South America have already signed up online to participate. Of this number, nine have committed to indefinite fasts, including Indra Sinha.

In his piece “Why I’m Going on Hunger Strike for Bhopal” in The Guardian today, Sinha writes:

I have spent much of the last five years writing a novel in which victims of a chemical disaster caused by a rogue corporation are sold out by their own politicians, triggering a desperate hunger strike. Animal’s People is set in the fictional city of Khaufpur, but whatever success it has had, it owes to the inspiring courage and spirit of the Bhopalis, and the descriptions of the hunger strike were drawn directly from the experiences of my friends. … On their small stretch of pavement in Delhi, now battered by monsoon rain, nine [people] have sat down to begin an indefinite fast for justice. Among them are my old friend Sathyu and, grown up into a fine young man … How can I not join them? How can we all not support them?

More on the strike and how to get involved, below the fold, as well as a look at Dow Chemical’s ironic “Human Element” ad campaign.

Global efforts to raise awareness and effect change have been building up since March when 50 Bhopalis undertook a 35-day padyatra to New Delhi to request a meeting with PM Manmohan Singh. With no meeting to date, it is hoped that this hunger fast will deny immunity to Dow Chemical and follow through on its rehabilitation schemes in Bhopal. [related article]

From the “International Hunger Strike Relay site:

Since February 20, 2008 – when 50 men, women and children set off on foot to cover the 500 miles from Bhopal to New Delhi – the Bhopalis have faced numerous hardships over more than one hundred days. They arrived in Delhi on 28 March and set up home on a small piece of footpath close to parliament. They’ve been arrested several times, including two times for protesting in front of the Prime Minister’s Residence. Finally, on June 2nd, the Prime Minister conveyed his “in principle” agreement to a Special Commission for rehabilitating Bhopal. But like past unfulfilled promises, no details nor timelines were provided, no proper health care or clean water were guaranteed. In the matter of the government’s neglected responsibilities as prosecutor of the criminal case still ongoing against the fugitive Dow/Carbide, there was silence. On June 9th, in desperation, 33 women and children and three men lay on the ground outside the PM’s offices. After arrest, several of them, including 6 and 11 year old minors, were beaten and verbally abused by police. This is the context we must react to now. In this important hour of our struggle for life, dignity and justice, we desperately need your solidarity and participation.

The site is set up for worldwide participants to join in the hunger fast, download a hungerstrike toolkit, add their personal statements, and keep a diary.

In San Francisco tomorrow, there will be a hunger strike solidarity protest from 10 am to 12 pm [details]

While all this is going on, it seems a bit creepy and ironic to catch a glimpse of Dow Chemical’s “Human Element” advertising campaign. You might have caught a two-spread ad in “The New Yorker” a few weeks ago or seen this ad.

Now, watch this interpretation of the same ad.

Sandhya at 02:43 PM in Environment, News · 37 comment(s) · Direct link

January 25, 2008

Free Market NGOs in Bangladesh

There’s an article in the January/February issue of The Atlantic about Bangladesh. Authored by Robert D. Kaplan, it’s called “Waterworld,” and it starts out with a long, perhaps sensationalist account of what Bangladesh might have to look forward to because of global warming — a scenario which wasn’t very surprising to me at least. (This much we knew from Al Gore.) There is also a bit about the growth of Islamic extremism — and that too wasn’t at all surprising for those of us who have followed Bangladesh even off-and-on.

What was interesting, however, was Kaplan’s account of the role NGOs play in making an otherwise dysfunctional country work. To begin with, Kaplan argues, central government has always been rather weak in Bangladesh because of the geography and climate:

Yet Bangladesh is less interesting as a hydrologic horror show than as a model of how humankind copes with an extreme natural environment. Weather and geography have historically worked here to cut one village off from another. Central government arrived only with the Turkic Moguls in the 16th century, but neither they nor their British successors truly penetrated the countryside. The major roads were all built after independence in 1971. This is a society that never waited for a higher authority to provide it with anything. The isolation effected by floodwaters and monsoon rains has encouraged institutions to develop at the local level. As a result, the political culture of rural Bangladesh is more communal than hierarchical, and women play a significant role.

Four hours’ drive northwest of Dhaka, the capital, I found a village in a Muslim-Hindu area where the women had organized themselves into separate committees to produce baskets and textiles and invest the profits in new wells and latrines. They had it all figured out, showing me on a crude cardboard map where the new facilities would be installed. They received help from a local nongovernmental organization that, in turn, had a relationship with CARE. But the organizational heft was homegrown. (link)

Later Kaplan goes on to mention Grameen Bank and BRAC, both of which blend the idea of social uplift with free market principles, and have had widespread success in Bangladesh as a result:

The credit for coping so well rests ultimately with NGOs. As familiar as their work now is, NGOs in Bangladesh represent a whole new organizational life-form; thousands of them fill the void between village committees and a remote, badly functioning central government.

Of course, this enhanced role raises ethical questions, not least because many of these Bangladeshi humanitarian enterprises have for-profit elements. Take Muhammad Yunus, who, along with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering micro-credit schemes for poor women: Grameen also operates a cell-phone and Internet service. Then there is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, which, besides doing bounteous relief and development work, operates dairy, poultry, and clothing businesses. Its head offices, like those of Grameen, are in a skyscraper that is some of Dhaka’s most expensive real estate. Yet to focus on the impurities of these NGOs is to ignore their transformative powers.

“One thing led to another,” explains Mushtaque Chowdhury, BRAC’s deputy executive director. “In order not to be dependent on Western charities, we set up our own for-profit printing press in the 1970s. Then we built a plant to pasteurize milk from the cattle bought by poor women with the loans we had provided them.” Now they’ve become a kind of parallel government, with a presence in 60,000 villages. (link)

We’ve had several posts on the Grameen Bank over the years, particularly after Muhammed Yunus won the Nobel Prize for his work, but there’s been less about BRAC.

I went to the BRAC homepage, and found a link to a YouTube video, with one young woman’s answer to the “Davos Question.” An interesting idea — though I have to admit I wasn’t overwhelmed by BRAC’s entry. (I liked this one, by “Going to School in India,” better)

Just as I was interested in what readers had to say about Pratham in a post on education in India last week, today I’m interested to know what people have heard about BRAC.

amardeep at 11:10 AM in Economics, Environment, Politics · 6 comment(s) · Direct link

October 23, 2007

Maurauding Macacas Murder Municipal Minor Mayor

By now everybody has seen the news that the Deputy Mayor for Delhi, S.S. Bajwa, died over the weekend:

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys. SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys. [Link]

The coverage I’ve seen has generally been smirking, with photos like the one at right. The caption of that photo reads “Angry animal … a monkey in India”, even though it shows a monkey acting cute, and it’s above an article about Bajwa’s death.

I understand the urge to crack a joke about the matter in part because the whole story sounds implausible. That said, I want to resist the temptation to make light of this. Firstly, a person did die here. Secondly, it’s condescending, as in “Look and the wacky and quaint ways people die in India!” sort of like an Indian newspaper juxtaposing a photo of a cute puppy next to an article about Michael Vick’s Ving Rhames’ groundskeeper getting mauled to death.

Furthermore, this isn’t just about nature red in tooth and claw, it’s the actions of humans as well. Partly, this is the story, familiar in the west, about growing cities encroaching on the natural habitats of wildlife. But the bigger problem would seem to be that the monkeys are being fed by humans, which encourages their population to grow, and makes them far more aggressive:

Baiwa’s house is near a temple dedicated to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, where hundreds of monkeys gather every day to be fed offerings by devotees…human residents of the capital have long tolerated the monkeys, whose natural habitat is the surrounding forest, and many revere and feed them, believing them to be incarnations of Hanuman. [Link]

The problem has been ongoing for a while, and getting worse all the time:

In 2004 … the Supreme Court ordered that monkeys should be driven out of Delhi and local authorities started rounding up the macaques. First they sent them to monkey “prisons” on the outskirts of Delhi but animal rights activists complained. Then they sent hundreds to nearby states, where they were released into the forest. But several states have refused to accept more because they say that the “urban” monkeys steal food from villages and terrorise the indigenous monkeys.
In March the Delhi High Court ordered local authorities to capture all city monkeys and transfer them to a nearby wildlife park within three months. By May little progress had been made and members of the Indian parliament complained that monkeys were routinely entering official apartments and offices in central Delhi. [Link]

I’m not sure what the right solution is - whether it is to build larger parks for monkeys or whether it is to get rid of them. Current methods are clearly not working:

The city government says that it has advertised for people to join its current team of three monkey catchers but has received no responses, despite offering 450 rupees a monkey. Experts say that one of the only ways to keep the rhesus macaques at bay is to use the larger langur monkey to scare them off. Demand is now so great that their owners are said to be earning up to 10,000 rupees a month. [Link]

While I don’t know what the correct solution to the problem is, Mandirs feeding the monkeys in the middle of town seems to be a very bad thing. However, it’s precisely the sort of collision between faith and secular argumentation that both India and America are bad at handling. Given the politics of the BJP, I doubt the BJP led municipal government will be up to the task.

Update: You might also be interested in Slate’s what to do if you’re surrounded by angry macaques

When monkeys get aggressive, it’s usually because they think you have something to eat…If you are holding a snack, throw it in their direction, and they’ll stop bothering you. If you don’t have any food, hold out your open palms to show you’re not carrying a tasty treat or back away from the monkeys without showing fear. To diffuse the situation, don’t make eye contact or smile with your teeth showing—in the nonhuman primate world, these are almost always signs of aggression.

What if you can’t or won’t appease the monkeys with food? You can try to chase them off by shaking a stick at them, but they might get violent if cornered. If they don’t budge, bop ‘em on the head; visitors to temples in India sometimes carry a stick for just this reason. Primatologists will sometimes send a macaque warning signal called the open-mouth threat. Basically, form an “O” with your mouth, lean toward them with your body and head, and raise your eyebrows. [Link]

ennis at 12:49 PM in Animals, Environment, News, Politics, Religion · 72 comment(s) · Direct link

October 12, 2007

Along With Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri

As everyone has presumably heard by now, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this morning for his work on climate change, in conjunction with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The head of that panel is an Indian scientist named Rajendra Pachauri, who formerly worked for the Tata Energy Research Institute. (As an aside, if you’re the head of a panel that wins a Nobel Prize, do you get to say “you” won the prize? Probably not, I suspect. One would have to find a nuanced way to put this kind of thing on one’s CV…)

According to the BBC, Al Gore and Pachauri had a brief conversation after the award was announced:

The two men spoke on the phone after the announcement. “This is Pachy… I am certainly looking forward to working with you. I’ll be your follower and you’ll be my leader,” Dr Pachauri said. (link)

(Pachy? Oy.)

In recent years, Pachauri has sharply criticized the general lack of action on climate change, though interestingly his name was originally put forward for this post by the Bush administration, because he was thought to be less passionate about the subject than his British predecessor:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and called for immediate and “very deep” cuts in the pollution if humanity is to “survive”.

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too “aggressive” on the issue. (link)

The backstory on Pachauri’s initial appointment goes back to the controversy over the Bush administration’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol; more on that here. I’m a little puzzled as to why the Bush Admin. thought Pachauri would be a quieter candidate, especially since I gather he himself supported a boycott of ExxonMobil back in 2001.

Last year I wrote a post about Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, with specific emphasis on the potential impact on the Indian subcontinent. As I mentioned earlier, there is a very high likelihood of major population displacement in the Bay of Bengal due to rising sea levels. Also, the core of the water supply for the entire Indian subcontinent is likely to dry up, possibly in our lifetimes, due to the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. Thirdly, the overall monsoon climate pattern may significantly change, though no one knows exactly how that will happen (people say there have already been changes in the pattern).

amardeep at 10:12 AM in Environment · 70 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

August 29, 2007

Omnivores: More Dangerous Than SUVs

As someone who tries earnestly to be a better citizen of the planet (car-sharing, cloth grocery bags, no printing stuff unless it’s required, turning off faucet when brushing teeth/sudsing hands, obsessive recycling, impressive amounts of reusing, not so good on the “reducing”…sorry), I tend to fume at SUV-drivers and not bat an eyelash at my carnivorous and omnivorous peers, even though I am well aware of all the statistics which Esprit, Sting and other organizations drilled in to me in the 90s regarding how many acres or gallons of water beef requires blah blah blah.

Well, apparently I can’t give H3s dirty looks any more.

Via The New York Times:

EVER since “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore has been the darling of environmentalists, but that movie hardly endeared him to the animal rights folks. According to them, the most inconvenient truth of all is that raising animals for meat contributes more to global warming than all the sport utility vehicles combined.

The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions, but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.

Oy, I don’t see this going over well with the public at all. Amurricans love their flesh. They like to eat meat, too.

Some backlash against this position is inevitable, the groups acknowledge, but they do have scientific ammunition. In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

That sound you heard was my mind being blown. I knew raising animals was less than ideal, I never realized that it was worse than driving, let alone all types of transportation combined! SWEET. I can go back to having naughty dreams about the Veyron, sans shame or guilt. Anyone know how to type that sound Homer makes when he’s contemplating donuts or other yummy things? Because I’m totally doing that right now.

When that report came out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other groups expected their environmental counterparts to immediately hop on the “Go Veggie!” bandwagon, but that did not happen. “Environmentalists are still pointing their fingers at Hummers and S.U.V.’s when they should be pointing at the dinner plate,” said Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for PETA.

In a move which makes me feel confused and anxious, PETA has decided to drum up awareness by plastering a banner festooned with this new, urgent, “Meat is (Earth’s) Murder”-message on a Hummer, which will tool around my town, complete with a chicken in the cockpit. Well, it’s a driver in a chicken suit who will be in the cockpit, and not an actual specimen of poultry, but what I want to know is, why not a Rooster suit? Why don’t men get any respect?

“You just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist,” said Mr. Prescott, whose group also plans to send billboard-toting trucks to the Colorado Convention Center in Denver when Mr. Gore lectures there on Oct. 2. The billboards will feature a cartoon image of Mr. Gore eating a drumstick next to the tagline: “Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat Is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.”

The Humane Society is also on board, since it worries about polar bears as well as puppies:

On its Web page and in its literature, the Humane Society has also been highlighting other scientific studies — notably, one that recently came out of the University of Chicago — that, in essence, show that “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry,” said Paul Shapiro, senior director of the factory farming campaign for the Humane Society…“Our mission is to protect animals, and global warming has become an animal welfare issue,” he said.

And switching from a Camry to a MINI will do more to curb boredom. Bow down before the mighty Cooper S, I say!

Let’s hear from a spokesperson for Gore:

Chris Song, his deputy press secretary, simply noted that a suggestion to “modify your diet to include less meat” appears on Page 317 of Mr. Gore’s book version of “An Inconvenient Truth.”

He did not address Mr. Gore’s personal food choices.

An activist quoted in the article rightly mentions that “it’s a lot easier to ask people to put in a fluorescent light bulb than to learn to cook with tofu”, and to that I say, uh…yeah. Tofu scares the Madagascar out of the picky and unadventurous (read: me). It IS easier to swap a bulb for a more energy-efficient one, take metro instead of a car or use one of the handy cloth bags which are now all over Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, for groceries.

Aside: those of you who scored this are on my “I’m so jealous”-list. I will console myself by marinating in haterade, since the bags aren’t made of anything organic, weren’t fair trade and obviously used icky, poo-ey airline miles to get to us from China. Ha! You may have the bag, but I have my obnoxious, envy-tinged righteousness. ;)

Off-aside: food is very personal, and I’m not sure how successful these efforts will be, but I don’t think there’s any harm in educating people about the impact our diets have on our bodies and on the world.

anna at 03:45 PM in Environment · 162 comment(s) · Direct link

August 07, 2007

Blame it on the rain

Monsoon rains come every year, but the flooding caused by this year’s downpour has been some of the worst in decades for India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

19 million people have been displaced by the deluge. That’s roughly the entire population of New York State, the 3rd largest state in the union, or around the entire population of Sri Lanka.

Put another way, these monsoon floods have already produced nineteen times as many refugees as Katrina did. Katrina scattered up to one million Americans, and that was the largest American population displacement in 150 years.

The biggest danger from the rain isn’t drowning, it’s the disease that it brings once water supplies get contaminated:

“Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,” … UNICEF’s health chief in India, said in a statement.

The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters … In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours… [Link]

The danger is worse because floodwaters have closed the roads to many villages, so aid workers can’t easily distribute food and clean water. The Indian air force has air dropped food for 2 million people in Bihar. This is going to be a serious task, one that will require both government and civil society working together, something they are lousy at doing.

A lack of coordination between relief organizations can have serious effects. During the 2005 Pakistan earthquake all the groups involved worked without even a map to determine who was most important to reach, who had been reached, and who still needed help. Not only were they uncoordinated, but they were hostile to the very idea of coordination:

no one was coordinating the hundreds of aid groups… Improving coordination would not be hard, the economists realized…. they designed a simple form and approached donors with a simple request: whenever you send out a consignment, please fill out one of these. There were paper copies available as well as a Web-based form and a call center.

The reaction, when it was not actually hostile, tended to be derisive: “Are you mad? You to want us to spend time filling out forms when people are dying? We need to go and go fast.” Go where? the economists wanted to ask. But nobody seemed to care… the most reputable Pakistani NGO … did not fill out a single form. The United Nations team filled out a few. [Link]

The same sort of thing happened after the Tsunami - plenty of groups stepped in, but their efforts were not coordinated at all, so areas near roads got too much (and often of the wrong stuff) while areas further out went without.

Why don’t they do better? Well, everybody is in such a hurry to do something that nobody wants to do the unglamorous work of coordination so that those most in need get helped. And of course it doesn’t hurt than neither voters nor donors penalize governments or NGOs a year later if it turns out that their efforts yielded nice PR photos but did little to help those most in need.

We need more than feel good efforts, we need either accountability or a whole bleepload of gopher wood.

If you want to donate, a great place to start is one of the International Red Cross groups.

Related posts: Here comes the rain again

ennis at 03:23 PM in Environment, Health and Medicine, News · 36 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

March 23, 2007

World Water Day

It’s almost over but shouldn’t go unnoticed on the Mutiny. The river Indus, or the Sindhu, lent her name to a land and a people. Now, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, she and her East-facing twin Ganga are dying:

Five of the ten rivers listed in the report are in Asia alone. They are the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges and Indus…Even without warmer temperatures threatening to melt Himalayan glaciers, the Indus River faces scarcity due to over-extraction for agriculture. Fish populations, the main source of protein and overall life support systems for hundreds of thousands of communities worldwide, are also being threatened.(link)

In a report issued about dangers to 10 of the world’s great rivers, the WWF. Climate changes threatens the Ganges and especially the Indus with both a decrease in supply and the hazardous instability of sudden floods. The Indus basin more than 178 million people and draws as much of 80% of it’s water from Himalayan glaciers; the Ganges basin has atleast 200 million people (See Razib’s comment below). 60% of the tributaries of the Ganges are being diverted. Both rivers are the homes to their own special populations of rare freshwater dolphins—approximately 1100 Indus river dolphins and only a couple thousand Ganges Dolphins, as well as a very rare Ganges freshwater shark. The Ganges and Brahmaputra together span 10 biomes and water the last tiger inhabited mangroves. The report is available in PDF form and is well-written and well-foot-noted—it’s a concise set of geography lessons and worth reading on its own.

One of the loveliest things I ever saw in India was while crossing a branch of the Ganges in the West Bengal countryside—half a dozen dolphins jumping in coordinated arcs across the river, their tails flipping, backlit by the afternoon sun. I stood up in my amazement, rocking the boat, but I was suddenly unafraid—they were so delightful. I want my grandchildren to see them too.

Related: Drinking Water, Melting Glaciers and Climate Change, previous WWF report on Rivers.

(Updated in light of Razib’s comment.)

namrata at 12:03 AM in Environment · 21 comment(s) · Direct link

March 22, 2007

A whole lota environmentalism going on

In today’s NYT there is an article about a bobo couple’s experiment with low impact living in “an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue”. They’re eating only locally grown food stuffs and eschewing even spices, olive oil and vinegar because these come from further away. They’re buying only food, composting their trash, and they’ve stopped using paper. All paper. Writing paper, paper towel, and even … toilet paper. This last bit is supposed to let us know that they’re serious about their experiment:

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there… Toothpaste is baking soda … Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying… [Link]

I’m just not impressed. Don’t get me wrong, as an ABD I like my conveniences, and I’m not willingly going give this one up. On the other hand, it just doesn’t seem like that much of a hard core thing to do. My FOB friends swear that TP is unhygienic compared to a lota; a buddy from silicon valley used to smuggle his in and out of the bathroom because he just felt … dirtier without.

For this couple, it’s all part of a stunt designed to generate a non-fiction book (he’s a writer). However, a far better place to look for hard core urban environmentalism is in the Dharavi slums of Bombay, Asia’s largest. Dharavi takes the discards of Bombay’s 19 million residents and turns it into close to $1 Billion of production a year, making it the world’s richest slum.

… Dharavi is becoming the green lung stopping Mumbai choking to death on its own waste… This is where 80 per cent of Mumbai’s plastic waste is given a new life. All around young boys cart wheelbarrows filled with everyday plastic waste. Junk is a word that does not exist. Dharavi’s plastic recycling industry employs almost 10,000 people, melting, reshaping and moulding discarded plastic. Close by you will find the soap-makers who reprocess soap from hotels and schools. In single rooms hundreds of men toil in the heat over large metal troughs filled with sinister-looking yellow-green liquid. Around them their co-workers boil vats of molten soap, stirring the cauldrons with oar-sized sticks.

Dharavi is an extraordinary success story, its recycling industry employs over 250,000 people … The new money through recycling has in effect spawned a new slum gentry. Certain corners of Dharavi have even gone upmarket with bars, beauty parlours and clothing boutiques. Last week a major bank opened the slum’s first ATM. [Link]

I don’t want to romanticize Dharavi. These sound like hazardous working conditions, and I’m sure much of what’s going on is toxic. Life in Dharavi sounds grim:

There is little sign of clean drinking water and the sanitation facilities are appalling - up to 800 people are forced to share one toilet. [Link]

But these are the folks who really impress me with their recycling. Of course, a book on them wouldn’t sell as well as a book on the bobo couple would. For one thing the conditions in Dharavi are too far from those in America for the audience to comprehend, for another you can’t write a book about the third world without a white protagonist.

p.s. The residents of Dharavi are currently fighting a battle to prevent their slum from being razed as part of an urban redevelopment scheme. Expect to hear more about it as the conflict heats up.

Related posts: Politicians are full of …

ennis at 12:38 PM in Environment · 92 comment(s) · Direct link

January 28, 2007

Vultures At Risk

I’ve had a warm feeling toward vultures, buzzards and other scavenger birds since the time I attended a wedding in Burkina Faso, the arid, land-locked West African country, back in the early 1990s, and looked up to see clusters of big, bad-lookin’ buzzards hanging around on trees, waiting for the event to be over so they could swoop in for the remnants of the dozen or so sheep that had been slaughtered for the occasion. It was one of those “hey, what’s up?” moments humans can have with animals, when you realize that we’re all in this together, that each creature serves its function, and that the social and cultural practices of one species have significant effects on the well-being of others. I want to say it “humanized” the buzzards for me, which obviously isn’t the right word, but it demystified them and made me appreciate them. Nuff respect to the scavenger birds.

Today tipster Sakshi brings to our attention a fascinating article from Smithsonian magazine on vultures in the subcontinent, which not only offers an interesting glimpse into the lives of these birds but, more importantly, shows how closely we and they — and other species — lead interwoven lives and how fragile that balance can be. It turns out that scientists, picking up on the observations of cattle herders and others in the field, have noticed a substantial decline in the long-billed vulture population in the subcontinent for some years. The disappearance of the lead scavenger has resulted in the accumulation of un-scavenged cattle corpses as well as the growth of packs of feral dogs, in ways that you can read about in the article. It has also placed a new burden on secondary scavenger birds that used to only come in after the larger, more powerful vultures. Those birds in turn have become vulnerable to whatever it is that has decimated the vultures:

… across the subcontinent all three species of Gyps vultures are disappearing. Dead livestock lie uneaten and rotting. These carcasses are fueling a population boom in feral dogs and defeating the government’s efforts to combat rabies. Vultures have become so rare that the Parsi in Mumbai have resorted to placing solar reflectors atop the Towers of Silence to hasten the decomposition of bodies. International conservation groups now advocate the capture of long-billed, white-backed and slender-billed vultures for conservation breeding.

So what’s the cause? After initially speculating it was some kind of virus, scientists now have strong proof that it’s a particular medication that herders give cattle that is toxic to the vultures. This brings into the story the Indian pharmaceutical industry and its history of reverse-engineering cheap drugs, which arguably has done a lot to save human lives but has also resulted in a proliferation of drugs on the market without necessarily sufficient regulation or understanding of appropriate use. The chain of effects goes on:

Public health officials say it’s likely that India’s rat population is growing too, sharing the bounty of abandoned carcasses with feral dogs, and raising the probability of outbreaks of bubonic plague and other rodent-transmitted human diseases. Livestock diseases may increase too. Vultures are resistant to anthrax, brucellosis and other livestock diseases, and helped control them by consuming contaminated flesh, thus removing reservoirs of infectious organisms. Some municipalities are now resorting to burying or burning carcasses, expending precious land, firewood and fossil fuels to replace what Rahmani calls “the beautiful system nature gave us.”

In all, this is a powerful story of interdependence and one that, just possibly, might have a happy ending, as the governments of India, Pakistan and Nepal have grown aware of the problem and taken remedial action. Read the article for that story as well as a rich perspective on the interconnectedness of all things, one that might, at a minimum, help us step back from some of the ridiculous disputes over trivial matters that we humans, including those of us who hang out at this site, sometimes so enjoy wallowing in. There’s also a nice sidebar interview with the article’s writer, Susan McGrath:

Well, I knew that my trip to India was going to be different than most people’s trips to India. All my friends were saying, “Oh you’re so lucky! The crafts! The clothing! The wildlife!” And I spent half my time in India in carcass dumps.

Glad you did, Ms. McGrath. And to the vultures: keep ya ugly heads up, my avian brothers and sisters, stay strong!

siddhartha at 11:40 AM in Animals, Environment, Science · 22 comment(s) · Direct link

December 25, 2006

The Real Hard-Knock Life

Erstwhile Sepia guest blogger Saheli is amazing for many reasons, but now I have confirmation that it’s obviously genetic; her Uncle is Arunabha Ghosh, who recently accompanied rapper Jay-Z to Africa. Uncle Arunabha (do you like how I totally mooched him?) is involved with many worthy issues:

He worked on the rights of indigenous people, international migration, and the rise of culturally intolerant movements around the world. He recently delivered a lecture on the integration of immigrants at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona. [link]

What caught my attention and what Saheli just blogged about, however, is water:

Over a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Every day—including today, Christmas Eve—over 4000 children lacking good drinking water will die of diarrhea-causing diseases.

It’s hard to wrap our heads around such astonishing statistics, or understand what causes this great gaping need, and how simple some of the solutions are. Last month MTV put up a set of videos in which Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter went on a tour of a home and a school in Africa to understand the basic issues. He was accompanied by his “homeboy,” my uncle, Arunabha Ghosh, a Policy Specialist and one of the authors of the UNDP Human Development Report. Arunabha has spent the last few years tirelessly running around the world, raising the alarm about development needs and spreading the word about development solutions. Last week he addressed an Indian Parliamentary forum on national water issues.[link]

Saheli does a fantastic job of breaking down the plight of children who spend hours fetching something which most of us shamefully take for granted, as we let the faucets run while brushing our teeth (wasting 3-7 gallons per minute). See for yourself, on her “More Fantasticness” blog, here. And if you want to know what I want for my birthday, see for yourself, here.

anna at 11:10 PM in Environment, Issues · 29 comment(s) · Direct link

June 19, 2006

Global warming withers Shiva lingam

Not long ago Abhi, fresh from watching Al Gore’s documentary, alerted us to the consequences of global warming for the subcontinent. And they are as dire as he predicted. In a crisis that has mobilized India’s High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) and Snow and Avalanche Studies Establishment (SASE), the Shiva lingam at Amarnath has failed to form this year. The glacier cover of the cave has receded by 100 meters, and there has been insufficient snowfall. At the onset of the annual pilgrimage season, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims trek up to the cave to see the lingam, temple officials faced a major problem. Consider the two pictures below. The first shows the lingam in a normal year. The second shows the lingam site on May 6, 2006:

But when pilgrims and journalists arrived, a full five-foot lingam had mysteriously appeared in place even though there had been no snowfall. It was immediately evident that this lingam was a crude fake:

Though the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) on Sunday said the ‘lingam’ was natural like every year’s, it does not take more than a look at it to conclude otherwise. In the absence of a natural ‘lingam’, someone thought it was better to put together one so that pilgrims are not disappointed and the pilgrimage, like every year, earns the “success” tag. And indications are that the SASB was in the thick of action.

The Governor of Jammu & Kashmir was in on the cover-up:

The operation would have worked but for the lingam’s finish. The natural smoothness was not there and dirt and imprints (though partially covered by a fresh layer of snow) gave away the story.

Sources said in all probability J&K Governor S.K. Sinha too knew about the lingam as he chairs the SASB. He had himself seen the lingam twice — on May 16 and on June 11. Still, he kept quiet.

Now, with the media on the case, the SASB has changed its story, admitting the lingam was tampered with, but only because it formed smaller than usual:

In a fresh twist to the controversy surrounding the ‘Shivlingam’ in the Holy cave of Amarnath, the Chief Executive of the shrine board admitted that it was “tampered” with even as religious leaders and the saffron brigade demanded that the truth be made public.

“We received some complaints that some people had brought some snow and put on top of the usual Shivling. We don’t defend that but this is something which has happened in the past,” Arun Kumar, Chief Executive of the Shree Amarnath Shrine Board and Principal Secretary to the Jammu and Kashmir Governor said. …

He, however, was quick to add, “Our belief is that the Shivlingam has naturally formed howsoever small it maybe.”

The custodian of the holy mace is demanding an inquiry:

The custodian of Lord Shiva’s holy mace has termed as “sacrilege” the reported installation of an artificial ice ‘lingam’ in place of the naturally-formed structure at the Amarnath cave shrine and demanded a judicial inquiry.

“It appears to be an act of sacrilege if the ‘himlingam’ has been raised manually or mechanically as reported by a section of the media. Keeping in view the sentiments of devotees, I demand that a sitting Supreme Court Judge be appointed to find out the truth so that the guilty are punished,” ‘Charri Mubarak’ custodian Mahant Deependra Giri said on Sunday.

He expressed concern over an artificial, chemically-made ice ‘lingam’ being installed in the cave and sought the Centre’s intervention.

All jokes about shrivelled lingams aside, this is a pretty remarkable example of the effect of global warming and what we are doing to our planet. If I were Lord Shiva, I wouldn’t be pleased either.

siddhartha at 11:30 AM in Environment, Religion · 19 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

June 17, 2006

Gita, R.I.P.

I absolutely love animals: sometimes I feel that I’ve learned almost as much from animals as from human beings about how to live and conduct myself in the world. So a tip on the News page (thanks, WGIIA) about the recent passing of one of the three elephants at the Los Angeles Zoo has got me deeply saddened. Gita suffered from foot ailments, as apparently many captive elephants do. She’d undergone surgery earlier this year and was making what zookeepers believed was good progress toward recovery. But last Saturday they found her in her area lifeless, with her legs folded beneath her. She was 48 years old and had lived at the zoo since 1959.

The photo shows a priest from the Malibu Hindu Temple (lately of Britney Spears fame), Krishnama Samudrala Charyulu, giving prayers last Wednesday at a service for Gita (she was an Asian elephant) held at the entrance of the zoo. The service was the idea of activists who oppose keeping elephants in captivity and who have been waging a battle against the city of Los Angeles. Apparently Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa failed to veto a $50m improvement in the elephants’ lodgings. The activists believe elephants should be kept in wildlife sanctuaries, not zoos, which seems reasonable enough; so they actually exposed the expansion of the zoo exhibit on grounds that it would still be too small and that the city had more pressing needs for the money.

There seems to be some disagreement as to how the elephants are protected from foot ailments that stem from walking on hard surfaces. From the Los Angeles Times article:

But she also had become a symbol for impassioned animal rights activists who argued that her crippling problems were the result of treading on concrete surfaces in the zoo for years, and that she would never completely recover. (All the zoo’s elephants now pad around on soft dirt surfaces.)

And from the Last Chance for Animals press release:

It has become evident that the LA Zoo cannot provide the space, exercise or social enrichment needed to preserve the elephants’ health and well being. They are kept in woefully inadequate quarters and are forced to stand on hard surfaces such as concrete or hard-packed earth.

The organization says that only one elephant was on exhibit at the L.A. Zoo, while Gita and another were kept for two years in a “temporary” off-exhibit area with only one-tenth of an acre for the two of them. If so this is quite damning, as the Bronx Zoo in New York has three Asian elephants on two acres, and has decided to shut down the exhibit altogether once these elders pass away.

So why not support the $50 expansion which, according to LCA itself, will increase the elephant area to 3.5 acres? I understand the arguments against keeping elephants in zoos altogether, but zoos can be better or more poorly designed and run. Isn’t it somewhat inflexible to oppose the chance to improve the exhibit to state of the art standards, a process that a more accomodating activist group could even be invited to take part in?

Most of all, I go back to what I get from exposure to animals, which is perspective and a sense of peace. Many a time I’ve taken a personal “time out” at the zoo, just to be in the company of other species and get my head straight. So I see value in exposing people, especially children, to animals at close range. Taking animals away from city zoos and placing them in rural wildlife sanctuaries makes seeing them a much more complex and expensive project. It means that wealthier families will find it much easier to expose their children to animals, while poorer families — whose children often grow up in more precarious and violent settings, and can benefit from encounters will animals — will find it much more difficult. There’s something profoundly democratic in going to a city zoo and seeing the shared joy and wonder on the faces of children of all backgrounds. If we can really invest in giving zoos the space and resources to honor the animals’ needs, I think that is money well spent.

In the meantime, pour a little of your drink onto the ground in honor of Gita the pachyderm to help speed her in her transition to ancestry.

siddhartha at 09:07 AM in Animals, Environment · 18 comment(s) · Direct link

June 10, 2006

An Inconvenient Triumph (Climate Change in the Subcontinent)

Abhi mentioned the documentary An Inconvenient Truth earlier this week. I just saw it, and I think it’s beautifully done as well — I would strongly recommend it. Even if you don’t think much of Al Gore as a politician, the science is convincing and all the pictures of vanishing glaciers and dried-up inland lakes (Lake Chad!; the Aral Sea!) are terrifying.

In the film, Gore refers several times to the potential catastrophic consequences of Global Warming in the Indian subcontinent. It’s somewhat ironic, because countries on the Indian subcontinent are far smaller contributors of greenhouse gases than the developed countries (India’s per capita emissions are one sixth the world average) but you can be sure that the subcontinent will feel its effects. As I understand it, there are two major consequences of global warming for the Indian subcontinent that are essentially guarantees, and a third which seems to me to be a maybe:

First guarantee: significant amounts of land in the Bay of Bengal are going to disappear if oceans rise even 1 foot, as is predicted to occur in the next 50 years. Most estimates I’ve found give the number at about 15% of the total landmass of Bangladesh, with a comparable loss of land in West Bengal on the Indian side. As many as 60 million people will be displaced in both countries.

In Orissa, the receding coastline is already a fact of life. In the Satabhaya region of the Orissa coastline, according to this article, the shore has moved 2.5 km inland over the past 25 years, displacing a number of villages. And it continues to move. (The article doesn’t specify what could be causing the rising sea levels in that specific part of the state.)

In the short run, scientists are already noting a pattern of a growing number of low pressure systems (leading to cyclones) in the Bay of Bengal in the post-Monsoon season. These are expected to worsen — meaning that extreme storms may force mass evacuations of coastal regions well before the land itself disappears. (See this article for more.) Also, erosion caused by the storms is already seriously affecting these regions. As Banglapedia puts it:

Flooding and erosion/sedimentation Bangladesh experiences moderate to severe flooding every year. Frequent storm surges also cause severe coastal flooding. The flood situation is further aggravated by the high tide in the Bay of Bengal. It has been seen with a 1.4m rise in sea level water level rises to about 6m near the meghna estuary. Even with a 0.2m rise in sea level, water level rises between 4.5 and 5m near the estuary. Since most of the coastal area is below 1.5m above mean sea level (MSL) and the area near the confluence of the ganges and Meghna is below 3m above MSL, both depth and area of inundation will increase extensively. However, the water level in the Ganges and Upper Meghna also increases significantly due to backwater effect as a result of changes in the hydrodynamics of flow. Hence the severity and extent of flooding will increase even in the upstream portion of the river. On the other hand, a rise in sea level will also move the shoreline landward and this will result in loss of farmland, leading to the shifting of agriculture, reduced crop yields, and loss of cultivable areas. Increased flooding will cause problems with existing irrigation and drainage system too. (link)

Even small changes in the mean sea level could lead to a cascade of problems for the Bengal delta, because the water systems are all interdependent. Even before the land disappears, the damage caused by increased flooding is expected to make a lot of coastal land essentially uninhabitable.

Tyler Cowen, when he was in India a couple of years ago, did a thought experiment on this. It’s a little in the “heartless economist” vein, but it’s worth reading.

And here’s a Salon article about attempts that are being made in Bangladesh to raise awareness about the coming catastrophe.

The second guarantee: The glaciers will disappear, leaving all of the subcontinent’s major rivers dry. Abhi already posted on this last fall, though he didn’t get much of a response to this shocking fact at the time. These rivers, as everyone knows, provide the vast majority of water to India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. (And glacial water also feeds China; in total, 40 percent of the world’s population is dependent on water from the Himalayas.) The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is not a prediction; it’s happening. The only question is when the effects will start to kick in. But I would say that even if it takes 100 years for the water supply to crash, it’s not to early to start doing something about it.

But here’s the irony: in the short run, the rapidly melting glaciers may actually cause flooding in the plains.

The third “maybe” consequence is that the whole weather pattern could change if ocean currents change as a result of rising water temperatures. The monsoon could disappear entirely (or it could double in intensity!). There’s not much to say about this — because no one really knows — except that it reminds us how little we really know about what is happening.

In An Inconvenient Truth Gore talks about an instance where scientists were surprised by the rapidity of change. In Antarctica, in 2002, the Larsen ice shelf collapsed over the course of a few weeks. No one predicted that a chunk of solid ice the size of Rhode Island could break up so fast. But now scientists think it was probably caused by earlier partial melting, leading to the creation of ‘moulins’ under the ice, that exponentially speed up the break-up of ice shelves. Those same moulins are being observed in Greenland, suggesting that large melt-offs may be imminent there too.

In effect, the predictions for ocean level rise over the next fifty years may be understatements: it could be much sooner than that. Scientists have been unpleasantly surprised by things like this before, and may be again.

amardeep at 10:10 AM in Environment · 24 comment(s) · Direct link

March 16, 2006

The Short Kiss Goodnight

How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. Burial is popular in the U.S., but a new book called Body Brokers makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it’s a triumph of capitalism:

Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. [Link]

The corpses — including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues — “are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers,” Cheney writes…

… she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools… their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor… she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone’s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day. [Link]

Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:

Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. [Link]

In an Instruction issued in 1926, the Holy Office [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as “a barbaric custom … a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead.” [Link]

Cremation also has non-theological issues. In India, some object because it destroys murder evidence. Even cops are perpetrators:

… the blatant murders continue behind the high walls of police stations, as it has now happened in the case of Harjeet Singh, a Dalit youth, in the Batala area. Here the policemen even cremated his body without following proper procedure… the police force still continues to be seeped in colonial mentality. Being true inheritors of the British legacy, they think that the only way to govern the country is through the use of brutal force. [Link]

And cremation of dental fillings was recently linked to toxic emissions in the UK:

Mercury is a highly toxic heavy metal that has been linked to damage to the brain and nervous system. It is estimated that crematoria release up to 16% of the UK’s total mercury emissions. [Link]

Parsis have customarily relied on vultures, but the bird population is dwindling:

In recent years, India’s vulture population is estimated to have declined by as much as 90 percent, which has affected the rituals surrounding the mortal remains at the towers of silence. In Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay and home to more than 50,000 of India’s 76,000 Parsis, the disposal of dead bodies is becoming a problem. Gone are the days when about 70 to 100 birds would swarm at the tower of silence. Today only a few birds come. [Link]

… conservationists are now warning that a drug [diclofenac] used to treat sick cows is killing the scavenging vultures by the millions. They say the drug is responsible for a 97 percent decline in the species over the past decade… [Link - thanks, WGIIA]

But there’s a new, secure, environmentally-friendly solution on the horizon. It’s called promession, and it freeze-dries the corpse using liquid nitrogen. Han Solo knows:

Promession involves freezing the body and coffin to -18C then dipping it in liquid nitrogen at -196C. Both body and coffin become so brittle that by the time they are placed on a vibrating pad, they disintegrate into a powder. A metal separator then picks out metals such as artificial hips and mercury dental fillings to be put in a biodegradable coffin.

The powder is put into a small box made of potato or corn starch and placed in a shallow grave, where it will disintegrate within six to 12 months. Relatives would then be encouraged to plant a tree on the grave which would feed off the compost formed from the body. [Link]

The process shakes a corpse into sand, like The Mummy in reverse. Freeze-drying: you heard it here first.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

— Robert Frost, ‘Fire and Ice’

Related post: Purification, Surviving a crash, Life after Stiffness

manish at 05:37 PM in Environment, Health and Medicine, Religion · 36 comment(s) · Direct link

February 17, 2006

End of the line

The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine has a spectacular photo essay by Brendan Corr on shipbreaking in Bangladesh: huge ships driven at full speed onto the beach at high tide, armies of workers trudging out to strip them with bare hands. The physical danger is intense; the health and environmental consequences are potentially dire, as these tankers and container vessels and cruise liners are loaded with asbestos and other contaminants.

In Bangladesh, according to the text, shipbreaking employs 200,000 people. Amazingly, it yields 80 percent of Bangladesh’s steel production. So this massive and hazardous recycling effort generates a vital input into the economy. You can provide your own comment about macroeconomic trade-offs.

Shipbreaking has been a major activity in South Asia for years now; here is a 2000 article by uber-reporter William Langewiesche on the Alang beach in Gujarat, which favorable tidal conditions have turned into a surreal junkyard of corroding behemoths. Now, though, it seems that Chittagong has outflanked Alang with even cheaper labor.

This week, the Clemenceau, once France’s biggest aircraft carrier, was forced to break its journey to Gujarat after legal challenges in both countries. President Chirac has now ordered the Clemenceau back home.

Meanwhile the 315 meter-long cruiseship France, is reported to be on its way to Chittagong though the Bangladesh government has demanded it be decontaminated first. Now called Lady Blue, the ship is registered in the Bahamas by a Norwegian company owned by a Malaysian company owned by a Hong Kong company. This opaqueness, standard in the shipping industry, makes accountability hard to enforce.

siddhartha at 11:02 AM in Environment · 35 comment(s) · Direct link

November 22, 2005

They're Lucky Champawat isn't Alive

Yesterday when I was watching Oprah spoil people who selflessly gave up time, money and jobs to head South and volunteer with the victims of Katrina, the moment I broke down was right after a woman in the audience was lauded for her work in rescuing emaciated, terrified dogs who had been locked in closets. I mourn for all of Katrina’s casualties, but something about an animal being unable to scrawl, “HELP” on a roof makes me extra farklempt.

When I was in college, before I had my first german shepherds, tigers were what I adored. I took an International Law class at Davis just because we were going to focus on the CITES and Biodiversity treaties. I did all of my assignments on India’s tigers, and winced as I learned more about their situation. That was over a decade ago, but this story from ye olde BBC still makes me happy:

Four alleged poachers in the western Indian state of Rajasthan have confessed to killing tigers in the Ranthambore National Park, police say.
The hunters, who were arrested last week, have admitted to killing nine tigers and one leopard, police said.

Mock it if you care to, but it’s a start. The government of Rajasthan has also transferred two senior park officials for their inability to protect the only cats I’ve ever loved. We haven’t much time:

Tiger numbers at Ranthambore dropped to 26 from 47 last year, a census showed. Urgent action is needed to stop Indian tigers becoming extinct, activists say.

At least Ranthambore still HAS tigers. According to environmentalists, Rajasthan’s Sariska sanctuary has all of zero, down from over a dozen in the May before last’s census. Restocking the park is under consideration.

What’s depressing is that a few turtles (another animal I find sweet) might have been sacrificed for the aforeblogged arrests:

Police in the town of Kota near Ranthambore, about 200km (125 miles) south of the city of Jaipur, told the BBC the arrests resulted from information obtained during another investigation.

“We arrested two poachers for hunting wild turtles and it led to the arrest of two more hunters, from where the details about the tiger killings unfolded,” police superintendent Alok Vashisth said.

What? Someone “important” wasn’t above the law?

Mr Vashisth said one of those arrested was a village chief from the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh.

Good.

:+:

Champawat:

These tigers are the most feared of all tiger species, since they have been known to resort to hunting humans for food. In fact, the record for the most people killed by any large animal goes to one of these tigers, called the Champawat Tiger, who alone devoured 436 people in the Kumaon area of India during the 19th century.

anna at 01:49 PM in Animals, Environment, Issues, News · 18 comment(s) · Direct link

October 04, 2005

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness

Many countries look at their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of how strong their economy is and whether it’s expanding or contracting, but also to give an idea as to the standard of living in the country:

GDP is defined as the total value of final goods and services produced within a territory during a specified period (or, if not specified, annually, so that “the UK GDP” is the UK’s annual product). GDP differs from gross national product (GNP) in excluding inter-country income transfers, in effect attributing to a territory the product generated within it rather than the incomes received in it…

The most common approach to measuring and understanding GDP is the expenditure method:

GDP = consumption + investment + exports - imports… [Link]

Blah Bla Bla Blah Blah.  I’m not freakin’ Alan Greenspan and I’ve never taken an economics course in my life.  What else you got?  The New York Times reports on Bhutan’s economic indicator of choice.  It is a measure that in my opinion is ready for export.  The GNH, or Gross National Happiness:

What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.

Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan’s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.

Their economic theory isn’t that far out is it?  I am not naive enough to think that they’ll get the prize later this week and am not ready to declare that I am moving to Bhutan, but why not consider the merits of this idea?  Every economic statistic thrown at you about a given country might tell you that the population as a whole is becoming wealthier.  That doesn’t mean that the lives of individuals are any better in terms of quality or happiness does it?

“We have to think of human well-being in broader terms,” said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan’s home minister and ex-prime minister. “Material well-being is only one component. That doesn’t ensure that you’re at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other.”

It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as naïve idealism.

The article informed me that an American wrote about a very similar idea way back in 1973 in a book titled, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  Such ideas in the long run may be destined to fail though.  Numerous studies have shown the following to be true about humans:

Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.

Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.

About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

Read the rest of the article.  It contains many insights on the intersection of wealth and happiness.  Keep in mind though that even in a “happy” country,  not everyone is smiling.

abhi at 05:07 PM in Business, Economics, Environment, Politics, Religion · 15 comment(s) · Direct link

September 22, 2005

Hurricane Rita Alert (update)

Hurricane fatigue set in, so I’m horrified to admit now that I haven’t followed the latest developments on Hurricane Rita. Until I heard this morning that it had been upgraded to a Category 5 storm, headed directly towards Houston. That’s where my Ammi lives!!

Several desperate phone calls later, Ammi intrepidly reports from my sister’s place in California:

They evacuated people from Galvaston and Corpus Christi. And they told people living near the coast, or near the bayous to leave. For everyone else, they kept saying not to panic…but if you can leave, go. But not to panic..it was really confusing.

Rita was downgraded to a Katrina-level Category 4 a few hours ago:

The National Hurricane Centre said the path of Rita, with top winds dropping slightly to 265 kph and is now a Category 4 storm, had shifted toward the north. It appeared to be headed toward Galveston and Houston…forecast to hit Texas as no less than a Category 3 storm with winds of up to 209 kph.

1.3 million Texans told to evacuate…Bumper-to-bumper traffic jams filled the region’s highways. Area stores were scrambling to keep supplies on the shelves while gas stations with fuel to sell dwindled to a precious few.

Maj. Gen. Charles Rodriguez of the Texas National Guard told CNN they have 3,500 troops on the ground and expect to have 5,000 by Friday evening and Saturday morning.[link]

Lessons learned:

Along the Gulf Coast, federal, state and local officials heeded the bitter lessons of Katrina: Hundreds of buses were dispatched to evacuate the poor. Hospital and nursing home patients were cleared out. And truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals as well as rescue and medical teams were put on standby. [link]

But still confusion:

Houston Mayor Bill White said passengers should plan for waits of at least four hours at airports because of the failure of Transportation Security Administration employees to show up for work…At William P. Hobby Airport, some airline employees said only two TSA screeners were at work this morning.[link]

My mom asks us to pray for those who couldn’t leave. And please don’t forget to donate to the Red Cross.

Update: Officials STILL can’t get it right:

As many as 2.5 million people jammed evacuation routes on Thursday, creating colossal 100-mile-long traffic jams that left many people stranded and out of gas…[Mayor] White and the top official in Harris County, Judge Robert Eckels, admitted that their plans had not anticipated the volume of traffic. They maintained that they had not urged such a widespread evacuation, although only a day earlier they invoked the specter of Hurricane Katrina, and told residents that the “time for waiting was over.”

Officials also made matters worse for themselves by announcing at one point that they would use inbound lanes on one highway to ease the outbound crush, only to abort the plan later, saying it was impractical…

Noting the difficulty medical examiners have had in identifying the dead from Hurricane Katrina, [LA Gov. Kathleen] Blanco offered morbid advice to those who refuse to evacuate. “Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms in indelible ink.” [link]

What the hell is wrong with these people! Why on earth weren’t they reviewing evacuation plans for Houston the minute things went to hell in New Orleans? My mom lives near a bayou and the roads flood whenever a storm hits. She even had to bail out of her car once. Houstonians, please share your worries and concerns in the comments. We will keep you in our thoughts and prayers.

Related posts: 1, 2.

cicatrix at 04:30 PM in Environment, News · 15 comment(s) · Direct link

September 09, 2005

"Maybe God is unkind and sends less water in the river...”

As I have stated on this blog before (met by derision from some), when I think about my future and the future of my eventual offspring, terrorism and the rise of fundamentalism has a considerably smaller profile on my radar screen when compared to what I consider larger dangers.  Global climate change and natural resource mismanagement being the largest.  I only compare the two because often, when deciding where taxpayer dollars go, this is an either/or competition.  CNN reports:

Imagine a world without drinking water.

It’s a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region’s main water source.

The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma’s Irrawaddy.

But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.

A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world’s glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.

“If the current scenario continues, there will be very little water left in the Ganga and its tributaries,” Prakash Rao, climate change and energy program coordinator with the fund in India told Reuters.

And keep in mind that the “disappearing” water will find the lowest ground…the ocean.  The ocean will then rise of course.  That means you will have many more cities in the same geological predicament as New Orleans.

Tulsi Maya, a farmer on the outskirts of Kathmandu, has never heard of global warming or its impact on the rivers in the Himalayan kingdom, but she does know that the flow of water has gone down.

“It used to overflow its banks and spill into the fields,” the 85-year-old farmer said standing in her emerald green rice field as she looked at the Bishnumati river, which has ceased to be a reliable source of drinking water and irrigation.

“Maybe God is unkind and sends less water in the river. The flow of water is decreasing every year,” she said standing by her grandson, Milan Dangol, who weeds the crop.

abhi at 04:14 PM in Environment, News · 13 comment(s) · Direct link

August 28, 2005

We have a reporter at the scene

The reason that blogs are so relevant is that you ALWAYS have a woman (or man) on the scene.  In this instance SM reader and frequent commenter, Maitri is at what is soon to be ground zero for potentially the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. in decades (although hopefully she is fleeing as I write this).  Some believe that the entire city of New Orleans may be destroyed on Monday.  Now personally, I don't usually believe in weather.  I don't even check the weather in the morning before I leave my apartment.  I will break-up with a girl if I catch her watching the Weather Channel.  I have long believed that "weather" is a hoax pushed on us by the umbrella and sun-block lobbies.  This one looks like it may be the real deal though.  Maitri breaks it down for us:

Update 3: A gloomy prognosis still. Even Bob Breck isn't feeling the hurricane mojo, and that bodes badly for staying in a 130-year-old house. New Orleanians, board your homes and leave. August 27 21:02

Update 4: Up surveying all animated predictions of our impending local weather pattern. Landfall anon, i.e. tomorrow PM. Dinner in the Quarter last night (tomato, lettuce and Diet Coke with Shiraz chasers - anything the gastrointestinal tract can keep down) saw veteran residents discuss seriously the act, not just the thought, of getting out of here. Then again, there are the brave ones staying such as Mac and KFrye, who plans to "stand out on my balconey and shake my fists at the storm." Good plan - is the webcam all set up? Time for push-ups before hauling stuff to car; hey, the CPUs have got to go. August 28 6:57

Because of what seems to have been excellent planning, the state of Louisiana sent out the evacuation notice in plenty of time.  Really, it seems to have been superbly handled and this will hopefully prevent loss of life.  Get ready for shocking oil prices though.  25% of the U.S.'s refinery capacity is in the center of that green and red blob.  Also, I'm sure we will get to see congressman Bobby Jindal in action around his state.  

abhi at 11:36 PM in Environment, News · 17 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

August 26, 2005

The Markhor stands proud

There is at least one group (above all others) that values the comparative “calm” that has recently settled over the LOC in Kashmir, as India/Pakistan relations have thawed.  The mighty Markhor.  The Independent reports:

The ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Kashmir has produced an unexpected beneficiary - the world’s largest goat.

The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to be extinct in Indian-held Kashmir. But a recent joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds - 155 goats - thriving near the Line of Control.

As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian side, but by 1997 they had been driven to near extinction. The main cause was the conflict.

The Indian Express goes into more detail:

”It is really encouraging that we still have a sizeable Markhor population here. The present peace situation is conducive for wildlife. Regular cross-border firing and shelling was a serious threat. But the habitation was improving even before the ceasefire was announced in late 2003. We declared protected areas and were hopeful that the Markhor population would improve,” J&K Chief Wildlife Warden CM Seth told The Indian Express.

J&K Principal Chief Conservator of Forests SD Swatantra also lauded the Army for its role.

”Army personnel have been sensitive to the environmental concerns. Border thaw during the last two years has helped the animals a lot. Earlier, constant presence of the troops minimised poaching and human interference. Now in the absence of conflict, the habitat is improving fast,” he said.

What a noble animal.  A part of me has always wished that humans too had horns.  A lot of petty arguments could be settled by simply locking horns for a few moments…or impalement.  Plus girls would immediately know that you were packing.

abhi at 06:55 PM in Environment, Humor, Military · 11 comment(s) · Direct link

August 25, 2005

No Plastic for You!

When asked, “Paper or Plastic?” how do YOU answer?

Are you blissfully indifferent to the ramifications of your choice? Angst-ridden because neither option is perfect? Filled with guilt because you are an Alum from the University of California at Santa Cruz or Davis, and thus, you should know better?

While you’re sorting all that out, I’m filling my much-adored Boat and Tote, sans guilt, confusion or consternation. It turns out that if I ever visit Mumbai, I might have to schlep it THERE, too.

The government in the western Indian state of Maharashtra has banned the sale and use of plastic bags.

“Mumbai and various other areas have suffered from the misuse of plastic bags,” state chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said in Mumbai. [BBC]

Perhaps you are asking yourself, “What misuse?” No, you pervs. Not that kind.

“These tend to choke the drainage and sewage systems.” [BBC]

Who’s brilliant enough to guess where I’m going with this?

Mr Deshmukh said plastic bags had added to the problems of the recent floods across the state, which claimed more than 1,000 lives. [BBC]

Exactly. w00t smart environmental choices! :D

:+:

You know what annoys the fecal matter out of me? When I buy something insignificant, like ONE glitter eyeliner and I clearly state “I won’t need a bag, but thank you anyway.” annnnnd….they give me a bag.

REDUCE. REDUCE is the first part of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. Sheesh.

anna at 02:41 AM in Environment · 5 comment(s) · Direct link

August 18, 2005

The Savannahs of America

A couple of days ago the New York Times had an interview with Dr. Ullas Karanth, a wildlife biologist/conservationist from India who is desperately trying to save the tiger from extinction (thanks for the tip Yamini):

Dr. Karanth, 57, was in New York on a recent summer afternoon to attend a conference at the Bronx Zoo, a subsidiary of the conservation society, on the future of tigers in the wild. In a break in the proceedings, he spoke of his favorite feline.

Q. Do we know how many wild tigers still exist in India?

A. We don’t. The government claims that there are over 3,000. But that figure is based on a flawed counting method that officials developed for themselves. There are preservation groups who claim the number is more like 1,000. It’s probably not that low.

We believe th