All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is considered as probably the greatest poem in English literature. It is a fictional story about man falling prey to temptation and the subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. As I mentioned last week, we did have a Garden of Eden in real life too and it was covering 70% of the planet till the 1950s. Now over half of this paradise has been lost and today only around 30% of the Earth’s land surface has forest cover. But this paradise is almost lost and not lost. That difference is important to know.
It’s a fact that we have to feed 8.2 billion people around the globe and that’s why the pressure to turn forests to farms is at its greatest today, in the entire history of humankind. So what do we do now? One of the key answers is in smarter use of our energy & of our land – In both the developed and the developing countries of the world.
Few obvious areas in terms of energy are the use of renewals (wind, solar, hydro) and of nuclear in place of fossil fuels. Electric vehicles are also a great idea that is already in vogue but not at a tipping point just yet. And we need to remember that a lot of electricity is still generated by heating fossil fuels besides it being generated via mechanical & kinetic energy, by magnets, steam and by solar. So when you use EVs, assume you are using 1/4th or 1/5th of the fossil fuels that you would need for petrol or a diesel powered vehicle. There are also biofuels like ethanol, biodiesel, green hydrogen and e-methanol but these are yet to go main stream. In terms of these, the developed world is far ahead in adoption due to better infrastructure (like charging stations for cars) and better economics for (say) solar equipment. I know in India we use EVs and solar too, but I just can’t tell you how many Teslas and mega solar panels I have seen in the USA whereas there isn’t much to be seen in Indian metros, although hopefully it will change fast. It’s a question of economics really in order to have people transition out of dirty fuels. We can’t expect people to care about the planet’s future when they are financially impacted at a personal level. The world is not that utopian and doesn’t run on wishful thinking.
Besides energy, in order to ensure our paradise is not completely lost, we need to look at better land use since that’s when we stop cutting our forests. Some developed countries such as the Netherlands are doing very efficient vertical farming inside limited spaces within green houses. They also have efficient use & re-use of water besides growing foods that need less soil and water. In fact our own food choices can have a massive impact too on land use. Eating less red meat ensures that less land is needed for growing grains to feed the cattle. And the cattle themselves release huge amounts of methane (a big greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere when they (er) release gas. This directly leads to global warming at a rate way faster than what carbon dioxide can do. Can you believe the impact that breaking wind can have on the future of the planet?
Another sustainable and sensible choice of ours as customers would be to avoid all products that use palm oil such as certain ice creams, instant noodles, chips, chocolates, soaps, shampoos, detergents etc (note that I said ‘certain’ and not ‘all’, so it’s a choice). Basically the palm oil cash crop is being planted in place of pristine rain forests in Borneo (the home of the ‘orange-tanned’ orangutans) and today this paradise in Asia is nearly done. All this has happened despite carving out ‘national parks’ and ‘reserves’. Without proper space allocation, involvement of local communities and good governance, such policies don’t give much mileage.
However the grass is actually (getting) greener on the other side of the world as some country’s governments have even gone as far as greening their deserts. This means that contrary to others who are converting forests to farms, here these green revolution frontrunners are converting their barren lands into farms for growing crops. Almost all these countries are doing so out of necessity since most of their landmass is barren. These climate crusaders are Saudi Arabia (entirely desert), Australia (almost entirely desert) and China (around 30% desert, but a significant landmass)
Africa is also represented in this climate challenge in a big way by Senegal, Ethiopia and other countries in the sub-Saharan Sahel region with their famous Great Green Wall initiative. It was started by the African Union, head quartered in Addis Ababa, in 2007 and a lot of significant progress has been made in the last 18 years. Here, in order to avoid desertification of crop lands in the Sahel, the expansion of the mighty & merciless Sahara Desert is being halted by planting a thick wall of trees. This wall of trees is to stretch end to end from Dakar in Senegal (on the west coast of Africa) to Ethiopia & Djibouti (on the east coast). It’s almost too staggering a project to properly comprehend. It is very simple and elegant in thought and extremely difficult and complex in execution, keeping in mind the number of nations in the Sahel region, which stretches from east to west of this huge continent.
As Attenborough once said, this is not an agenda only for environmental organizations but an agenda for the UN Security Council too, since the countries across the Sahel band are some of the most unstable ones on Earth – Such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Sudan. Basically you take away food and water from citizens of a country (as desertification does) and you can be rest assured it won’t be a stable nation. You don’t need to be an Earth scientist or a climatologist to understand this.
Coming back to the forests – Of all the different types, it is the tropical rainforests that harbour over 50% of all animals and plants in the world despite being only 6% of the Earth’s land surface. And sadly today it is these rainforests that are under the maximum pressure since they are mostly in developing countries along the equator and the tropics and these countries do need to feed their millions. I have seen Chinese construction companies make roads through primary old-growth rainforests in Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia. The same is the story in the Amazon and the Atlantic rainforests in South America, the Selva Maya in Guatemala, Belize & southern Mexico and in the rainforests of Borneo & Myanmar. Only Papua New Guinea, due to its remoteness and the resultant lack of development, has been spared so far. The stories of cannibals roaming their jungles may have helped as well.
Now who is to say development is a bad thing, but when you hear that the equivalent of around 20 football fields of forest is being erased every minute, you do worry about the planet’s future. No, let me correct that – not the planet’s future, but our future on the planet. The planet will do just fine without us but it doesn’t work the other way around.
Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet, and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/
