Читать книгу Adventures in the Anthropocene - Gaia Vince - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEarth’s Great Aerial Ocean, the churning sky of gases that gravity hugs to the planet, is the breath of life that ignites this unique speck of the universe. Breathe in, breathe out: the atmosphere is vital to life on Earth. It is an organ of the living biosphere – a great pulsating body that recycles the breathable air, regulates the temperature and climate, and protects us from the hazardous meteors and deadly cosmic and ultraviolet rays of space.
The atmosphere extends for an indivisible one hundred kilometres, and is invisible except through its meteorological moods that reveal clouds of water vapour or falling snow, electric flashes of lightning or the blush of a sunset.
The swirling currents of Earth’s aerial and terrestrial oceans interact to create our planet’s many weathers and different climates, and these dictate the conditions for life. Perhaps the most significant of these global weathers is the Hadley Cell, a pattern of hot moist air that dumps reliable rains on the lush equatorial belt, generating the planet’s highly biodiverse tropical rainforests and swamps, while leaving parched deserts to the immediate north and south. The impact of this system can be seen from space as a sharp delineation of green to brown.
But life on Earth also dictates the atmospheric condition and its weathers. The world’s first atmosphere was hydrogen and water vapour – it took around 2 billion years for the gas of life, oxygen, to pervade the air, courtesy of the early photosynthesisers. Those ancient blue-green algae, which survive today as unremarkable-looking stromatolites, used energy from the sun to make sugars from carbon dioxide, in the process releasing oxygen as a waste product.
The continual breathing of Earth’s living organisms, from tiny ants to massive trees, depletes the atmosphere’s oxygen and replaces it with carbon dioxide and water vapour. During daylight hours, especially in the summer, this respiratory exchange is offset by the photosynthesis of the world’s terrestrial and oceanic forests of trees and algae. The various feedbacks between biota and air have created an atmosphere of roughly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen with the remainder being a mix of noble gases, carbon dioxide and traces of others.
It is into this intricate relationship that humanity has stormed, adding enough warming gases to the atmosphere to shift the delicate equilibrium of the past millennia and change global climate for centuries to come.
The atmosphere acts as a blanket against the unimaginably cold temperatures of outer space, and the main gas responsible for these cosy conditions is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is invisible because sunlight passes straight through the molecule. However, it is opaque to the infrared rays that heat travels in, so, like the glass in a greenhouse, it warms the air. Sunlight travels unhindered through the atmosphere until it hits the surface of the Earth. If that surface is very reflective – like a shiny white glacier – then most of the rays will bounce straight back as light. But if the surface is dark – like black rock, soil or ocean – then this energy is absorbed as heat, which radiates into the atmosphere as infrared rays that can’t pass through the carbon dioxide. In this way, heat gets trapped bouncing between the atmosphere and the Earth, warming them both and sustaining life.
We know from fossil records that the planet’s climate has swung between tropical prolificacy that saw metre-long insects, and ice ages that killed off the majority of life forms. These catastrophic big freezes were the result of massive events like meteor hits or supervolcano eruptions that filled the atmosphere with so much dust that sunlight couldn’t penetrate to the planet and killed the animals that produce that all-important carbon dioxide. At such times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped as low as 160 parts per million (ppm) molecules.
For the past half a million years – the world into which humans evolved – the carbon dioxide concentration has hovered between 200 ppm (during ice ages) and the comfortable 280 ppm of the Holocene. Historically, the main fuel humans used was wood, emitting the same amount of carbon dioxide that the tree absorbed during its growth. But in the Anthropocene, the vast majority of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels – emitting the huge stores of carbon dioxide from plants and creatures that died millions of years ago. As I write this, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are 40% higher than pre-industrial levels – 400 ppm – the atmosphere is warmer, more energetic and holds more water, giving rise to more extreme weather. Scientists are saying that there is no longer such thing as ‘normal climate’, by which they mean what was normal for the Holocene.
We are also using the atmosphere as a repository for other gases released during combustion and for a range of other pollutants, including refrigerants that attack the ozone layer high in the stratosphere that protects us from UV rays.
And, in the Anthropocene, the atmosphere has also become humanity’s global voice. Just as visible light can travel through the air, so can sound, radio waves, and microwaves, enabling instant communication by radio, telephone and Internet. The atmosphere is as transparent to the human-generated pulses in the satellites it hosts as it is to the sun’s vital energy, and allows our species to traverse the globe virtually in seconds.
In 1932, King George V became the first monarch to deliver a Christmas Day message by radio to 20 million listeners from Britain to the outposts of the empire. In a script written for him by Rudyard Kipling, he addressed ‘men and women so cut off by the snows, the deserts, or the sea, that only the voices out of the air can reach them’. The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is now full of these ‘voices out of the air’. Imagine if we could see the beams emitted by our radios, laptops, televisions, mobile phones and other devices. For almost all of the planet’s 4.5 billion-year history, the atmosphere has been lit solely by extraterrestrial flares, like suns or meteors, or by electrical storms. Now, the skies are infused with artificial lights of different wavelengths as our devices communicate with each other and with us. And that’s just in the invisible spectrum. In the visible spectrum we have lit up our world so brightly that towns and cities can be seen from space at night and, for city dwellers, the stars fade into oblivion.
Satellites enable us to look down from space at our home as no eye has done before. The same cameras show us in unprecedented detail just how much we are changing our world. Using the Internet, we can pool our shared knowledge and intellectual resources to solve new problems, to cooperate in different ways and to transcend the geography of our planet to inhabit a virtual room no matter where we are physically.
The atmosphere has also become a playground for our aerial adventures, a medium for rapid and direct long-distance travel around and beyond our planet into space. Humans can now journey from London to Sydney in less than a day. We can trade between communities within time frames that allow fresh blueberries to be picked by a human in South Africa and eaten by another hours later in London.
Our technological invasion of the skies has allowed us to communicate across our species in a way that no other life form has. The atmosphere is un-ownable, common to all Earth-dwellers – it gives life with the first breath and life is extinguished with the last. In this chapter I look at how our changes to the atmosphere will help decide how societies develop over the coming decades.
I meet Mahabir Pun outside the tiny airstrip in Pokhara, some 200 kilometres west of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu. He is a shortish fellow in his mid-fifties with an inflatable ball of a stomach and thick black hair that emerges at extraordinary angles above his square face.
‘Gaia, come. Come!’ he says urgently, setting off ahead of me at a rapid pace and agitating his hair further, so that it stands wildly up on one side.
As I trot along behind him, people gather to watch the unusual spectacle of the pale, sweating foreign woman dressed for Arctic exploration with a bulging backpack following a local guy in light cottons and open sandals.
A political demonstration earlier in the week has led the Maoist government to impose a military-enforced curfew in the area, banning all vehicles including motorbikes, buses and taxis, so Mahabir has had to walk several kilometres to meet me. But here, as in every other place that lacks functional governance, people are resourceful. Casting a sly look around, Mahabir motions for me to get on one of two motorbike taxis, while he takes the other, and we speed off.
Pokhara is a lake town, shimmering within a halo of mountains. It is closest of anywhere in Nepal to achieving the new prime minister’s promise of turning the country into the ‘Switzerland of Asia’. Enticing cafés and shops crowd the lanes beside the lake. Brightly clad clusters of men, women and youngsters gather at a little jetty that delivers worshippers to the pretty Buddhist temple on an island a hundred metres away. Women wearing saris are knee-deep in the lake dousing rainbows of laundry and shampooing their long black hair. Fish leap clear of the surface and birds circle overhead looking for snacks.
Rising above the town is the oddly shaped peak of Fishtail Mountain, whose sheer granite sides point a geological finger into the blue sky. It is mid-December in the Himalayas, there should be ice on this lake and snow descending far down the mountainsides. But only the highest peaks are white; pink flowers bob at head height on green stalks that sway in the sun. We stop and I remove another fleece.
The picture-postcard prettiness includes some less appealing details, I begin to notice. A fetid slick of vibrant green run-off from the town’s cafés and businesses is discharging raw sewage and some sort of oily pollutant directly into the lake. Dirty, poorly clad children are poring over discarded plastic and other solid waste littering the banks – while I watch, one boy walks a few metres away, pulls down his shorts and defecates at the lake’s edge. Looking upwards, I see that the quaint country homes lining the street are in fact filthy dilapidated mud-floored shacks, offering little protection or comfort for their large families. We’re a long way from Switzerland here. And this is one of the most improved parts of the country.
In trying to grasp the enormity of the development task facing the poor world at the beginning of Anthropocene, Nepal is a good place to start. Sandwiched politically, culturally and geographically between two of the world’s fastest emerging economies, Nepal has avoided following either the Chinese or Indian model for national growth and slid further into decline. It is one of the ten poorest countries, with more than one-third of the population living below the poverty line on less than $0.40 per day and half of children under 5 malnourished. Around 90% of Nepalis live in rural areas, many depending for survival on subsistence plots too small to support them, with little or no access to electricity, clean water, sanitation, education or health care, and national shortages of everything from rice to kerosene. More than a decade of Maoist insurgency and civil unrest has wrecked the economy and crippled infrastructure. Nepal has been incapable of even basic governance over the past few decades, and relies on an army of aid charities to avoid mass starvation – the number of NGOs in the country soared from 220 in 1990 to more than 15,000, now contributing around 60% of GDP.
Desperate times? A century ago, most people in Switzerland lived in similar conditions to this, and were even less likely to reach their fiftieth birthday.
Around the world, 40% of people (2.8 billion) have no access even to a communal toilet, which is a major factor in the 2.4 million deaths every year from diarrhoea. About 80% of illnesses are caused by faecal matter (people living without sanitation can ingest as much as ten grams of faecal matter a day). If Nepal is to make the leap in development that Switzerland made, it will need to grow its economy to make similar social investments in health, education and infrastructure. Nepali women will be able to do laundry at the push of a button, freeing up time for education and income-generating activities. Nobody will be using the public lake as a toilet. By 2048, it’s predicted that the average income earned by a person in Asia will be dollar for dollar equivalent to that earned by someone in the United States. The question is how they are going to get there in the changing conditions of the Anthropocene, and without exacerbating the environmental challenges humanity faces. I’ve sought out Mahabir to discover how humanity’s recent exploitation of the atmosphere is being used to smooth that path.
It is a five-hour tortuous drive to the tiny town of Beni (‘the place where two rivers meet’), in a Toyota that dates from 1973, as the driver tells me proudly, giving the chassis a fond slap that causes the side panel to reverberate and almost detach from the rest of the car. The threadbare re-treads skid and swerve in and out of potholes along a narrow road that disappears alarmingly into gorges on either edge. We’re chasing sunset, but it wins, plunging us into darkness for the final, hair-raising hour of the trip.
We overnight in a spartan hotel – made of timber, like all of Beni’s buildings – and set off again at first light. There is no road to Nangi. Reaching Mahabir’s remote mountain village involves a full day’s hike up near-vertical paths, and it’s not long before my pack is straining at my shoulders and my legs complaining at the unaccustomed exercise. In an age where I’m more used to judging distances by the time it takes to travel them by car, plane or other oil-fuelled transport, it’s quite an adjustment to talk in journey times of hours or days by foot.
My laced-up hiking shoes are stifling in the sun. Mahabir had warned me that we would be trekking at altitude where there was likely to be thick snow at this time of year. ‘Tonight freezing, tomorrow night more freezing,’ he tells me cheerfully, as I eye his open flip-flops. Until recently, everyone in his village went barefoot, he says. Even in the snow? ‘Yes, of course. But now even the poorest person has sandals.’
The ascent is immediately steep and continues so for nine hours. Every time the path diverges and I hopefully query it, the answer comes emphatically from below: ‘Up, up.’ It is with a certain satisfaction that I notice Mahabir starting to look a little damp and taking rather longer than before to plod up this interminable stairway.
It is beautiful, though. Vultures spiral up from below us on thermals that take them high into the eye-watering blue. The mountains seem to grow vaster as we climb and I start to experience ‘peak mirage’ – each time we approach a peak, the path unfurls higher and the peak recedes further up. Children often draw sky as a stripe of blue high above the grounded green of domesticity. It feels as though every step is taking us closer to piercing that blue, penetrating that mysterious space where men have placed angels and gods.
The atmosphere is vast and unknowable, but as familiar to us as it was to our distant ancestors. Who has not lain under a tree and taken pleasure at how the phantasmal wind shivers its leaves, or delighted in the puffs of clouds cruising by, or peered at night through the breathable air to the stars beyond. Until recently, only winged creatures could transcend our planetary home and explore the three-dimensional Great Aerial Ocean of the atmosphere. The closest we earthbound humans got was through arduous climbs like this, ascending slowly and painfully through the clouds to taste the chilled, thin air beyond. It wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century that hot-air balloons carried men high above the sod, giving them a bird’s-eye view of our home and enabling direct travel between destinations ‘as the crow flies’. Now that we can dance through the atmosphere with our toys and technologies, we can achieve a truly global perspective on our natural and artificial worlds, and perhaps even reconcile the two. Satellites orbiting the planet can allow us to track tagged marine and land mammals, measure forest loss, and compare Arctic ice coverage over decades. We can measure the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene in real time as the planet changes.
Handily placed stone rest-stops are built into our steep path at twenty-minute intervals and we make use of them all – stopping to sit a while, offloading our backpacks and admiring the view. There’s something noble about conquering a peak: this 3,500-metre hill is my Everest and I take the same pride in my pathetic achievement as Hillary.
We see no other foreigners, just local people commuting up and down between villages that are unlinked by roads, and traders carrying impossibly large baskets of firewood and oranges from the higher slopes to the markets below. ‘Oranges are growing very well in the past few years as it’s become warmer,’ Mahabir tells me. ‘Many villages higher up are growing oranges now.’ We have an orange-pip-spitting competition and Mahabir giggles in delight when he doubles my distance.
‘Normally this whole area is covered in snow from October,’ Mahabir says, looking at the muddy earth. ‘Recently we have been getting less and less snow. We used to get two metres in the winter, and it would stay for weeks. Last winter we only had two centimetres, and it comes later. It means the winter crops have no water and are dying. The price of wheat and barley will be high this spring,’ he predicts.
As we warm the atmosphere, the vast, churning blanket of greenhouse gases that protect life on Earth from the freezing cold of space is changing, affecting the snow here in Nepal and the price of food around the world. As we release more and more stored carbon into the air by burning fossil fuels, we are heading for a 4°C post-Holocene warming this century alone. That’s 2°C higher than the ‘safe’ level determined by scientists. The impacts of this atmospheric carbon are affecting every part of the planet.
No single person or community came up with the idea to put the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oil-based market-driven economy is a characteristic of civilisation that arose out of the human love of energy and its promise of power and wealth. One gallon of oil contains an amount of energy that would take a man eight days of labour to produce. What is wealth if not the key to freedom, a way of throwing off the shackles of labour and the circumscribed life – the liberty to have, be and do as you choose; the dream of no man having dominion over you? It’s intoxicating stuff.
Around the world, scientists and governments now understand the relationship between oil and global warming, and are discussing how to steer us towards healthier ways of achieving this hit. But replacing the efficient package of energy found in fossil fuels with alternatives is far from easy. Poor countries like Nepal, where people still get much of their energy from pre-industrial renewable sources, are feeling the effects of global climate change even while they yearn for the benefits of reliable power that fossil fuels provide. It’s a problem I will encounter throughout my travels.
A road is planned for Nangi, Mahabir tells me, but until then, the only way for people to communicate or trade beyond the distance a voice carries is to physically meet each other or send an emissary. For millennia, people have made journeys like this out of necessity, and yet, in my home life, making the journey to meet someone in person now is often so unnecessary that it carries its own message, that of deference or love, for example.
As we climb, we chat in panting bursts. Mahabir, who despite his grubby outfit and self-effacing manner is something of a celebrity in these parts, tells me about his quest to transform his tribe’s villages through the unlikely medium of Wi-Fi connectivity. His plan leapfrogs the traditional model of connectivity – improved roads followed by landline connection – and exploits the atmosphere instead.
Nangi village, home to around 800 people of the Pun tribe, has no telephone line or cellphone reception and consists mainly of subsistence vegetable farmers, yak herders and those who leave to seek their fortune as Gurkha soldiers. Mahabir was taught in the valley by retired soldiers who had never been to school themselves. They used wooden boards blackened with charcoal, writing with soft limestone from the local cliff. He first used a pen and paper in seventh grade (age 13) and a textbook in eighth grade, but even these rudimentary lessons were expensive for his father, a retired Gurkha from the British army, who had to sell all his land to pay for them. So Mahabir left school at 14 and worked for twelve years as a teacher, supporting his family and helping his brothers through school.
It took two years of writing daily application letters to universities and institutes in America before Mahabir was finally accepted with full scholarship on a degree course at the University of Nebraska in Kearney. ‘I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I wanted to bring an income in and better education and medical facilities,’ he says. Twenty-odd years after arriving in America he returned to Nangi with his dream and an equally important folder of contacts.
It is dusk and we have climbed 2,500 metres higher by the time we are greeted with an excited rush of village children who present us with garlands of sweet-scented marigolds and escort us the last few yards to Nangi. Mahabir shows me to my home for the night: a small round wattle-and-daub hut with a stone roof. I make my introductions by candlelight and share a tasty curry of home-grown vegetables cooked on a smoky dung-fuelled stove by the school’s science teacher, before falling into exhausted sleep.
In the morning Mahabir leads me through the small village, past women grinding masala spices and kneading dough for chapatis on wood and stone, past a circle of community leaders and elders sitting cross-legged and deep in discussion on the cold ground, to the school. Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles and greetings – everyone is glad to see Mahabir. He points out a rather grand, newly finished hut. ‘Girls’ composting toilet,’ he says, taking me inside. He smiles and pats the internal wall approvingly, as I stand awkwardly either side of the hole, trying not to notice the smell of, um, toilets. ‘The compost works very well for growing vegetables,’ he says.
As nations develop, societies work in increasingly technical, mechanised and complex ways, and entirely new jobs emerge to support these industries, most of which demand literacy and numeracy. Globalisation favours those who speak international languages, and the people who will shape our lives in the Anthropocene will be those whose understanding and experience goes far beyond small village life, and those who are able to negotiate the accumulated learning, wisdom and knowledge generated by millions of global citizens via the hive mind of the worldwide web. It starts with school – with reading and writing and the self-confidence and awareness that sprout from those uniquely human skills. Done effectively, education is the bridge out of poverty, and educating girls is now recognised as a transformative development goal. Educated women marry on average four years later, have at least two fewer children and provide better health care for their families, for example. And not only is the income generated by an educated person higher, the average income of the community is also raised. ‘When you educate a girl, you are educating a nation,’ a 6-year-old girl once solemnly recited to me in Uganda. So what stops girls being educated? I’ve heard everything from worries she’ll be too clever for marriage, to worries that she’ll no longer be ‘pure’ or that she’ll get pregnant. But the biggest factor is poverty – girls are first to be pulled out of class to work when money is tight. And as they get older, it’s a question of toilets. Schools that lack clean private toilets – and many have no facilities at all – lose girls once they reach puberty and begin menstruating, and they also struggle to keep female teachers. Development comes down to the importance of toilets, like the one Mahabir showed me.
Nearby, there is a fenced-off vegetable patch with plastic sheeting over half of it. ‘We started experimenting with growing vegetables later in the year, so that we would have some fresh greens all year round,’ he explains. ‘At first we needed the plastic sheeting as a kind of greenhouse, but the past three years, the warmer weather means the plants have grown perfectly well without it.’
At the far side of a rectangular patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general assembly area for the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts. We walk over to them and Mahabir pulls back the door.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array of computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a startling sight. Girls and boys, many barefooted, sit studiously working away, the only sound the clatter of keypads. ‘You want to check your email?’ Mahabir asks me, grinning at my surprise. The computer and Internet facilities here would be unusual in a school in London – here, they are astonishing.
In the Anthropocene, the world no longer needs to end at the village perimeter. Just as social development goals now include a right to electricity, it is no longer acceptable for people to be denied access to Tim Berners-Lee’s brilliant toy. Through it, we are no longer a few individuals collaborating with a few more. We are a bigger more beautiful creature: the organism of humanity, ‘Homo omnis’. We can communicate not just with remotely located people, but with everybody simultaneously – we’re even attempting to speak to aliens located elsewhere in the universe.
The atmosphere of Earth has been lit up in the Anthropocene by the billions of invisible beams of our communicating devices. And it has happened in a remarkably short time. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent in 1858 by Queen Victoria to the US president James Buchanan, and by 1902, cables encircled the world across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, connecting even faraway Australia. A century later, the phone in my pocket, beaming signals through the atmosphere, allows me to check weather reports and traffic cams, chat to my grandmother in Sydney, broadcast live to a television studio and pay my bills. Smartphones are getting so clever and human-responsive that they will soon be our personal dashboard, telling us how much exercise we do, monitoring our calorie and vitamin intake, our sleep pattern, heart rate, stress levels, cholesterol and so on. Further into the Anthropocene, some researchers believe, we will increasingly think of our smartphone as a partner – even in emotional terms.1
In East Africa, I saw how mobile money services, such as M-Pesa, are enabling phone users to transfer cash and pay for goods with the speed and convenience of an SMS text message.2 A customer pays cash to his local corner-shop agent, who then tops up his mobile money account using a special kind of secure SMS. He can then transfer money to another person or pay for something by sending a text to the recipient’s mobile phone account, which transfers the money straightaway. Even people without mobile money accounts can receive payments in the form of a text code, which can be exchanged for cash by their local corner-shop agent. For the millions of Africans who don’t meet the criteria for a bank account, or who live too far from a branch, mobile money presents an opportunity to save securely for the first time. Kenya’s M-Pesa is now used by over two-thirds of the adult population (more than 17 million people) to pay for everything from school fees to grocery and utility bills, taxi fares to airline tickets. It allows people in remote, rural areas to trade their wares in markets thousands of kilometres away, urban migrants to send money rapidly to their families in their home village, and for the government and aid agencies to distribute timely emergency cash to starving people living in slums.
Mobile phones aren’t just bringing access to money, though. A Nepali peasant with a smartphone on Google, now has more access to information than the president of the United States did fifteen years ago.3 In the Philippines most communications between the government and citizens take place by SMS texting. In Malaysia, flood warnings are sent by text message, and across the world, from quake-struck Haiti to the famines of East Africa, evacuations and relief for natural disasters are coordinated by SMS. In India, tribal groups are using mobile phones for ‘citizen journalism’, spreading information and giving voice to disenfranchised groups.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, citizens organised themselves to fight oppressive regimes using mobile phones, even bypassing government Internet and network clampdowns by accessing social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook through apps and proxy servers. Across Africa, voting in national elections with a smartphone can cut election fraud by 60%.4 In Afghanistan, the police receive their government salaries through mobile phone banking because it cuts down on fraud. Into the Anthropocene, mobile phones could even start to democratise markets. Enterprising individuals using crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter have a way to access markets that have been the exclusive domain of big corporations since the days of the East India Company.
It’s no wonder that the way our species communicates globally has become fundamentally different in the Anthropocene. In 2012, the UN telecoms agency predicted that by 2014 cellphones will outnumber people on this planet, with 70% of new phone subscriptions coming from the developing world; by 2017, there will be over 10 billion networked mobile devices around the world, carrying 130 exabytes of data a year. Up until 2003, humans had created 5 billion gigabytes of digital information. In 2010, the same amount of information was created every two days; by 2013, it was every ten minutes. By 2020, 5 billion people are expected to have access to the Internet via mobile devices, an extent of connectivity that governments and development organisations couldn’t have dreamed of just twenty years ago.5
This is made up of users in the poor world becoming part of the collective human conversation, where they can have influence beyond the restrictions of wealth, geography, caste, gender or other ways people have traditionally been stifled. The human species in the Anthropocene is a changed, networked animal. With this technology we have exceeded the limitations not just of our human body but of our hive – we’ve become a global community. The secret of our enormous planetary influence is our cooperation as a species, and our technological exploitation of our atmosphere-based communications system takes this cooperation to a new level. It is an accelerator of humanity’s impact, and as such can be used to increase our destructive traits, or it could prove our salvation: a tool that enables development and human progress, showing us in real time how we are affecting other humans and the rest of the biosphere.
Mahabir well understood the opportunities that communications technology could bring to remote villages when he set about transforming Nangi.
At the end of a line of regular-looking computer hardware, I spot something a little different – a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards. ‘Ah, these are the first computers that I built with recycled parts donated from old computers, because we couldn’t afford new ones,’ Mahabir explains. In 1997, Australian students donated the four adjacent computers, and the rest were sent over subsequent years by people in the US and Europe. Without a telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realised that to bring twenty-first-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to be imaginative. In 2001, he wrote to a BBC World Service radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home Wi-Fi technology to connect his village to the Internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.
Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station using television antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak – and from there sent the signal more than twenty kilometres away to Pokhara which had a cable-optic connection to the capital Kathmandu. Nangi was on the Internet.
‘I used a home Wi-Fi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of four metres,’ he says. ‘I emailed the company and told them that I had done twenty-two kilometres with it – I was hoping they might donate some equipment, but they didn’t believe what I told them.’
One of the advantages of Wi-Fi is that it doesn’t require costly and resource-intensive infrastructure – mile upon mile of cables and copper wires do not have to be laid over complicated terrain. Development in the Anthropocene need not be as dirty and as invasive of the natural world as it has been to date. More than forty other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the Internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. ‘The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] phones,’ he says. ‘And they can talk for free within the village network using the local VoIP system.’ I realise that Mahabir and the kids have been using VoIP for longer than me. Having always had access to a landline phone, I’ve only started using VoIP – Skype – within the past couple of years to make cheaper overseas calls, whereas the village adopted the technology a decade ago.
Teachers are a rare commodity in this part of the world, but the children are no longer being taught by barely literate soldiers. The Wi-Fi network means that a teacher, based here or even in Kathmandu, can teach classes across many villages, face to face with students via the monitors, answer questions and receive and mark homework. Mahabir’s ‘tele-teaching’ network also allows the few good teachers in the region to train others. He is also developing an e-library of educational resources in Nepali that will be free to use, and working with the One-Laptop-One-Child organisation, which he hopes will provide laptops to children in the region. Thanks to Mahabir’s work, a generation of children that would otherwise miss out on an education until the country gets around to training some teachers, instead have unprecedented opportunities to learn and discover a world beyond the dreams of their parents – it’s a good definition of development.
But how does he power such a system so far from the grid? ‘We built a hydropower generator in the stream at the bottom of the village,’ he says. He wants to install another, bigger turbine when they can afford it, so that the entire village has power – at the moment, the precious electricity is reserved for the computers and server.
As we embark on another full day’s climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component there, we come across another of Mahabir’s networked villages. Here, towering incongruously among the simple stone-roofed huts is a huge white satellite dish. ‘We tried for years to get some sort of phone system here,’ Mahabir explains. ‘Then a few months ago, we got sent this dish by an NGO for a satellite phone and television. By then of course we had the wireless network Internet phone so we didn’t need it. Anyway, it would be far too expensive to make calls on that.’ Still, the villagers have erected it on the roof of the school where it sits like a totem to the useless. Nobody in this village has a television set, let alone the electricity to power one.
Mahabir was quick to realise that the connectivity had numerous other important applications. In the past year, the village has built a telemedicine and dentistry clinic, in which village midwives and nurses can talk using the webcam directly to doctors in a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses have been trained in reproductive medicine, childcare, wound and accident management, and basic dentistry.
The Wi-Fi has also improved livelihoods here, allowing yak farmers to talk to their families and dealers several days’ walk away, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to home-made paper, jams and honey. Finding a sustainable income stream is key to keeping the other social development projects going, and Mahabir is betting on tourism. Many of the villages are located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes in the Annapurna mountain range, and they have started advertising campsite facilities and trekking guide services for tourists. The local teenagers and adults know the routes well, and Mahabir is organising training for them, including some rudimentary English. And with the help of Western volunteers, the villages have come together to build their first tourist hostel just below Relay No. 1, on a remote stretch of the mountains. ‘We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the Internet so that more tourists will come, which will help finance the education and health projects,’ he says.
Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to transform the village, including a yak cross-breeding farm. The warming rate here in the Himalayas is five times higher than the global average and it’s forcing yak farmers into ever more remote and dangerous locations, because the thickly coated animals can’t live below 3,000 metres. Mahabir is trying to cross the yaks with cows to produce a useful pack animal that is hardy, can live at lower elevations and also produces good milk. ‘The first sixteen cows we took up there for breeding got taken by snow leopards, so we’ve had to guard them more carefully,’ he says.
Cattle are vital for the villagers because they produce the dung that is used to fertilise the poor mountain soils, enabling their crops to grow. But the cattle need to eat and, ideally, something other than the villagers’ crops. In another of his inspired projects, while all the villages around have been destroying their sparse forests for firewood, timber and agriculture, Mahabir has fostered a substantial nursery from which he plants about 15,000 trees a year in Nangi, and more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It provides the villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder. While many people in Nepal’s hill villages suffer food shortages, the people of Nangi look well nourished – some of the teachers are even a little plump, which is hard to believe considering the slope they have to conquer just to get from their homes to the school each day.
As Mahabir calls up instructions to a guy at the top of a swaying tree who is grappling with tools to fix the relay equipment, I realise that development in these remote villages need not be hostage to a failed government. For much of the Holocene, people like the residents of Nangi would have been limited socially and economically by the geography of their village. A true visionary with determination like Mahabir can effect change village by village, incrementally constructing a web through the atmosphere. But how much faster and effective Nepal’s development would be if it were backed by national coordinated programmes, good governance and regulated private industry with access to markets, as is occurring elsewhere.
The democratisation of online information, education, communication and markets, means that the Anthropocene has the potential to lead to a more equal global society – a ‘flatter Earth’, in which the dominance of Europe, the United States and a few other rich nations is challenged by eastern and southern rivals, such as China, Brazil and India. At the beginning of the Anthropocene, there are already signs that humanity’s well-being is improving – there are now fewer ‘failed states’, more countries practising a degree of democracy, and a global reduction in poverty compared to just a few decades ago. In 2008, for the first time, the number and proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell in every continent, and the trend has continued since.6 Our exploitation of the atmosphere with mobile and Internet communication – and the entrepreneurship that follows – has played a significant role in this trend.
We humans may have brilliantly exploited the atmosphere to communicate as an interconnected super-species, but at the same time we have been horribly indiscriminate about what else we’ve put up there.
The ugly face of humanity’s atmospheric interference – the many gases we have emitted – now threatens to overwhelm our civilised and natural world. In as much as they have put off the next ice age, perhaps indefinitely, carbon gases have been to our advantage, but the greenhouse effect of those emissions is impacting every part of our planet from farmlands to deserts to oceans. We are dumping so many different pollutants into our aerial ocean that we are not only changing our climate and weather systems, we are also poisoning ourselves.
Air pollution is not new – ancient Rome was notorious for its smoky streets from wood and coal fires, and in 1306, King Edward I of England actually banned coal burning on penalty of death. Needless to say, it was ineffectual. It wasn’t until a London smog of 1952 killed an estimated 4,000 people in just four days (and a further 8,000 in the weeks and months after) that a Clean Air Act forced Londoners to burn smokeless coke rather than coal. Similar acts in the 1950s and 60 s transformed the atmospheres of New York and other cities in the then-developing world – Westerners still breathe a cocktail of pollutants, but they are mainly invisible carcinogens, like ozone and oxides of nitrogen, rather than soot and sulphurous emissions. However, the citizens of the current developing world are now experiencing similar conditions to those mid-century pea-soupers, but on a much greater scale.
The ‘dark satanic mills’ of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the coal stations that powered them, blackened the skies and caused countless deaths – air pollution from European coal power stations continues to kill more than 22,000 people every year, scientists calculate.7 Greenhouse gas emissions from smokestacks and exhaust pipes continue to pump out. But the visibly filthy skies of the past few centuries have cleared because of more stringent pollution controls that have forced factories and power plants to install scrubbing technologies and other practices. And, because the dirtiest manufacturing has moved out of western Europe.
China, where the vast bulk of dirty industry is now based, has an atmosphere so filthy that only 1% of the nation’s urban population is breathing air considered clean by European Union standards, a 2007 World Bank study found, although much of the report was redacted by the Chinese, who feared social unrest.8 Visiting Beijing in springtime, I was struck by the eerie absence of the sun. The pollution, which stung my eyes and throat, shielded the sun so thoroughly that although the cloudless days were light, the source of this light was impossible to see. And that was the city after its ‘clean-up’. China has followed Europe’s example and outsourced its dirty industry from the wealthy cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, inland to rural and less developed central and western areas, as well as to poorer countries, such as Indonesia. In doing so, China’s air quality will improve, just as Europe’s has, while the atmosphere of developing countries will worsen. Ultimately, the only way to halt the filthy process is to clean up industries such as construction and manufacturing, by using the latest plant designs in the poorest countries – and also to vastly improve efficiencies and recycling. Eventually, many dirty industries will become obsolete and be replaced by newer ones, providing an opportunity to design pollution avoidance from the outset.
The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is remarkable not because it is infused with a range of chemicals and particulates – natural events such as volcanic eruptions can produce that – nor because it is the first time humans have produced their own emissions, but because it is the first time that humans have done so on the global scale of the planet’s biggest natural events.
Our vast population – already more than 7 billion – is part of the cause. An increasing proportion of humanity relies on the goods, services and energy produced through dirty industrial activity. And on top of this, people are producing their own home-made pollution, the combined effect of which is turning the invisible air brown.
Kathmandu, Nepal’s only real city, is inscrutable through thick acrid smog. Pollution and dust generated in the bowl-shaped valley is not easily dissipated – there is limited rainfall to wash it away and little wind. The air is so laden with dirt that the shopfronts all wear a film of grime. Lacking customers, underemployed staff spend their hours pointlessly dusting and sweeping – shifting the miasma, which resettles in seconds. Visibility is so poor that flights are often cancelled or delayed, but perhaps not as often as they should be: there were five plane crashes here in 2012–13 alone, killing more than sixty people. Most of the haze, around two-thirds, comes from burning biomass for cooking, like the dung fires I saw in Nangi, with fossil fuels supplying the remainder. Plumes of smoke rise from the wood and dung fires burning in every household and merge with the emissions of factory chimneys and agricultural clearance fires. In the streets, motorbikes and cars with badly tuned engines crawl bumper to bumper, farting out sooty black puffs. The resultant fug hangs over the region for the entire season and well into the spring. It spreads in mile-long clouds of brown haze for thousands of kilometres from the Yellow Sea to the Arabian coast, and its sooty particulates have even been discovered in the Arctic ice at Svalbard.9 The brown cloud can be seen as a stain over Asia in satellite images, but it has become a highly emotive issue. When the pollution layer was at first called the Asian Brown Cloud, India complained, and so the United Nations Environment Programme renamed the haze ‘Atmospheric Brown Cloud’ during its follow-up study.
The warming effect of the brown haze adds to that of the greenhouse gases, and is hastening the retreat of the Hindu Kush glaciers and snow packs, including the snow that melts to drive Mahabir’s turbines, partly because rising air temperatures are more pronounced in elevated regions. And black unburnt carbon in the filthy clouds is being deposited on these white peaks, reducing their reflectivity and exacerbating ice melt. It’s a reason for the five-times-higher warming rate seen here, oranges growing higher on the slopes towards Nangi, and Mahabir’s overheating yaks.
The dense blanket of pollution hovering shroud-like over Asia is also affecting monsoons and agricultural production. It’s a complex relationship: the soot particles, ozone and water vapour in the haze absorb sunlight, heating the atmosphere, enhancing warming by as much as 50%; while at the same time, the sulphate particulates cool Earth’s surface by shading.10 The shading aerosols alter the global hydrological cycle because less sunlight hits the sea, so there is less evaporation and therefore less rainfall. A decrease of about 40% in the monsoon rainfall over the northern half of India to Afghanistan, and a north–south shift in rainfall patterns in eastern China has already been observed, reducing crop yields.11 The brown cloud also reduces the efficiency of precipitation because it makes it harder for large raindrops to form, leading to drought-like conditions. Its effects can be felt all the way to Australia.
Any changes to rainfall immediately affect plant growth, including agriculture, which is further impacted by particulates deposited on the plant leaves. These reduce the amount of light that gets through, limiting photosynthetic activity, and can also cause acid damage to the plant cells. And elevated levels of ground-level ozone reduce the yield of certain crops including wheat and legumes – one study estimates that the brown clouds have already reduced Indian rice yields by 25%.12
The haze is also a health hazard, linked to an increase in acute respiratory infections, particularly in children; lung cancer; adverse pregnancy outcomes; heart attacks and other conditions. In India alone, it is estimated that nearly 2 million people die each year from conditions related to the brown cloud. Household solid fuel used for cooking, a major source of brown haze, kills more people each year than malaria – wood smoke alone kills more than 1.5 million a year, mostly women and children. By 2050, urban air pollution is set to be a bigger killer than dirty water and poor sanitation, according to the OECD, with 3.6 million premature deaths a year predicted mainly in China and India. In many places where we live, we have turned the planet’s vital fresh air into a poisonous dangerous vapour.
But the atmosphere of the Anthropocene may not be permanently stained. The good news is that dealing with brown haze presents a much easier and faster solution to regional – and global – warming than acting on carbon emissions. The rewards of decreasing soot emissions from biomass combustion could be sizeable and rapid – because unlike carbon dioxide that persists for a hundred years, the brown cloud pollutants only hang in the atmosphere for a matter of days. Slashing black carbon alone could bring an astonishing 40–50% reduction in global warming, and that’s in addition to all the health benefits.13
This would mean more stringent vehicle emissions standards, which many developing countries from China to India are already starting to enforce. And it means fundamental changes to how people cook and warm their homes in places like Kathmandu. Supplying a $30 clean-cook stove to the 500 million households who cook with open fires could be done for just $15 billion. Distributing clean-cook stoves would not only reduce the pollution burden, but also free girls and women from gathering and carrying firewood, a task that endangers their health, puts them at risk of rape and prevents them from going to school. A big win all round.
The pretty village of Phakding, on the busy trekking route to Everest base camp, is immediately different to others I have visited, but it takes me a few hours to realise what is missing. I twig when I spot Ani, the owner of my guest house, cooking on an electric stove: the smoke, which has been a continual presence of every street and house since I entered the country, is strangely absent. I breathe in deeply through my nose to check. There is the faintest whiff of a fire burning on a far-off ridge but otherwise nothing smoky. I can smell the garlic and chillied onions cooking in Ani’s kitchen, the sweet dank smell of drying vegetation mingling with fragrant marijuana and flowers, and the earthy sourness of buffalo manure.
I chow down on vegetable stew with chapatis, and press Ani for details of this smoke-free nirvana. It’s an NGO initiative that has seen the whole village embrace micro-hydropower, using a flowing stream to drive a turbine that produces electricity for the village. ‘We were using more and more kerosene and diesel because of all the tourists that were coming, and it was getting so expensive,’ she says. Initially, when the micro-hydro was suggested, there was scepticism from some of the villagers, who thought that converting to the new energy source would cost too much. After all, those who couldn’t afford the increasingly costly diesel simply chopped wood in the forest and supplemented their fires with dung and other waste. But as more and more tourists came, and the village’s energy requirements rose, the sparse, high-altitude forest was becoming frighteningly depleted. Arguments were brewing between those who wanted to keep the forest for buffalo feed, and those who needed it for fuel.
Micro-hydro has changed all that, Ani says. ‘It powers everything for free – all the lights, the music, cooking. And the kitchen is so much cleaner without the black soot,’ she smiles. The forest has even started growing back. The other villagers I speak to agree that the new energy supply has been an improvement, even if one important controversy remains: whether chapati can ever be properly tasty when cooked on anything other than an open fire.
The glacier that feeds the village’s micro-hydro sits high in the mountains, a dirty apostrophe surrounded by snowy peaks on Nepal’s northern border with Tibet. ‘We used to play on the glacier as children, and it came right down to the monastery,’ says Ringin Laama, a local yak herder. ‘But now it’s about two kilometres further back.’ The mountainside beneath the glacier is heavily scarred, clearly marking its original extent on the rocks. Every year, the glacier retreats much further, according to Laama. ‘I think it will be completely gone in ten years’ time,’ he says. ‘Strange to think.’
Curved walls made of large boulders have been constructed along the mountain face above each small cluster of houses. The ground here used to be permanently iced all year, and the melting has exposed fissures in the rocks. The Himalayan mountain range – the ‘Abode of Snows’ in Sanskrit – is one of the youngest on Earth and it’s still highly energetic with active seismic and tectonic processes. Landslides, already common here, are becoming more frequent in the warming climate, with deadly consequences. Laama traces a large scratch in the mountain opposite with his finger. It extends down through the rubble of former houses and terminates in a huge boulder.
Elsewhere, landslides are damming up rivers, resulting in a build-up of water. The risk then is of a catastrophic release: a flash flood that occurs rapidly, with little warning and transports vast amounts of water and debris at high velocity. Every year, hundreds of people die – in 2002, flash floods and landslides killed 427 people in Nepal and caused $2.7 million-worth of damage.
Glacier-fed rivers are set to swell over the next decade as melting accelerates. But it will be a short-lived sufficiency – once the glaciers have gone, there will be no more meltwater. It means that the turbines that power Ani’s kitchen will lie still. Perhaps anticipating this, some of the villagers have invested in a rival cooking source, supported by another NGO. I visit the home of Alok Shrestha, a man so self-sufficient he makes methane cooking gas from his household’s sewage, animal manure and other waste, which are shovelled into a biodigester under his house. The biodigester is a large feeding box for bacteria, which metabolise the nutritious waste and produce useful methane in the process. Shrestha taps this for his cooking stove and has plenty left over to power lighting and a small generator that recharges batteries.
I have visited several homes around the world where people are making their own biogas from a range of wastes, including one in Peru that was powered by guinea-pig poo, and all fuel efficient cooking stoves with smokeless flames. Firing up a stove for brief, if regular, intervals is one thing; powering equipment that requires a continual source of electricity is another. For example, the hydroturbine on which the hopes and dreams of Mahabir’s Pun tribe rest is powered by a stream fed by snowmelt higher up. No snow means no meltwater and no power, and levels have been diminishing in the once-deep stream. When the water fails, the development of that entire region, which outstrips its neighbours on every measurable scale from literacy to health, will be at the mercy of the government for grid provision.
The government has just a few years to build enough reservoirs to trap the melting waters and power the country towards twenty-first-century development, before lights go out. It is hard to see how that will happen. Drought conditions are already causing blackouts as the nation’s hydropower struggles with lack of water and poor energy infrastructure. As throughout the developing world, most of the blackouts are planned load-shedding intervals, where the government tries to manage the poor supply by rationing electricity among different regions in turn. The load-shedding is seriously impacting Nepal’s fledgling electric car industry, its 700 Safa Tempos (three-wheeled electric passenger vans), which cleanly ply Kathmandu’s streets, charging at thirty-two stations and transporting around 100,000 people a day. More than $8 million is invested in the industry, and its five manufacturing companies employ thousands. But power outages have pushed the industry to the verge of collapse – people (90% of whom are self-employed single women) who purchased a Safa on loan schemes backed by NGOs can’t afford to pay the instalments because they can’t use their cars and have to take taxis instead. If the industry does go under, it means more filthy cars on the streets – which means more carbon in the atmosphere and more brown haze. Which means more warming.
The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is quite unlike any atmosphere the planet has known, and the effects of humanity’s impacts on our aerial ocean will leave their mark on the world for millennia to come. The chemicals we are introducing into the air will find their way into the oceans, rocks and living parts of our world. Corals and trees are ingesting a different ratio of isotopes (forms) of carbon from the one they took in during the Holocene, because they are now absorbing carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. But despite this, our changes to the atmosphere itself are as transient or permanent as we make them. If, tomorrow, we stopped releasing gases into the atmosphere, switched off our millions of signalling devices, ceased all aerial transport, within a matter of years most of our atmosphere would return to Holocene-like conditions. Within a few centuries, even the carbon dioxide levels would drop down to pre-industrial norms.
We are of course not going to stop releasing chemicals tomorrow, though. The amount of almost every pollutant humans emit is increasing, and will continue to change the climate. Despite being told repeatedly that our climate is changing, by numerous scientists, agencies and media, it is nevertheless hard to fully appreciate how significant this is – we may intellectually believe the change, but to emotionally understand and realise what it means is a different matter.
Our climate is one of humankind’s most powerful reference points. It fundamentally describes where and how we live, our culture, environment and even our place in time. Climate is what defines the Holocene geological epoch. The climate is what determines biodiversity regionally and globally, it decides the ecology, the hydrology (how much water there is) and weather. It determines, for example, whether malaria is more likely and whether wheat can grow.
Living in a changed climate is like living in a different world – or rather, our world in a different geological time. Instead of the climatically stable Holocene, we are entering the uncharted territory of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. We will feel its effects even as we try to insulate ourselves from the changes and adapt to them. Climate change will increasingly affect our food production, the integrity of our cities, energy production, global politics, and the way we interact with other people and other species.
Human behaviour and the way nations develop will decide the atmospheric conditions as the Anthropocene unfurls. And the atmosphere of the Anthropocene will also play a deciding role in how humans develop. Poverty-stricken, backward Nepal is teetering on the edge of a bright new future: it has the promise of a functioning democracy, and the benefits of a decade of NGO experimentation in projects from micro-hydro to clean-cook stoves, even while it battles the legacy of atmospheric warming from industrialisation elsewhere. Whichever way it teeters, the children of Nangi have in many ways escaped the destiny of most of their contemporaries. Because they are already a part of the great human conversation, theirs will be a more assured Anthropocene, with opportunities to overcome the limitations imposed by geography.
The effects of our transformation of the atmosphere will crop up frequently in this book – I’ll show how they are intertwined with other changes we’re making to our planet. Many of humanity’s solutions rest on our innovative technological invasion of the skies, innovations just like Mahabir Pun’s in Nangi. As Google’s Larry Brilliant said about world-changing: ‘It starts with ordinary people. Ordinary people do extraordinary things, and then we lionise them. We make heroes out of them. And that’s a problem, because it makes other ordinary people look at these heroes and think that they can’t achieve the same things. But that path is open to everybody. Anybody at any time.’
