Archive for the 'environment' Category

Floating golf course to be built in Maldives

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on March 12, 2010
in Climate change, The Maldives and environment
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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

The island nation of the Maldives, confronted by rising oceans and a landscape that is just a few feet above sea level, is poised to build a floating golf course and convention centre in what could be the first of a series of futuristic off-shore developments designed to confront the threat of global warming.

The country’s government has signed an agreement with a Dutch firm to investigate the feasibility of developing a number of facilities that would be located among the 26 main atolls. It is likely the company, Dutch Docklands, will also look into the possibility of building floating homes. It has previously built floating islands in Dubai.

“The methods and procedures developed by the company for floating developments reduce the impact on underwater life, and minimise the changes to coastal morphology,” said a statement issued by the office of President Mohamed Nasheed. More:

A climate-change chameleon

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on March 8, 2010
in Climate change, Economy, India and environment
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It’s hard to tell whether New Delhi really understands the economic cost of fighting ‘global warming.’ Mary Kissel from New Delhi in the Wall Street Journal:

“The climate world is divided into three: the climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I’m a climate agnostic.”

A direct—some would say brash—man with a penetrating stare, it’s hard to believe India’s Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh, is agnostic about anything. This is the man who dressed down Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year when she pushed for India to adopt binding emissions targets. He was the first politician of a major nation to question the United Nations’ claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a rapid pace. And he’s spearheaded his country’s very own climate-change research institute—a direct challenge to the U.N.’s now-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That record makes Mr. Ramesh one of the few policy makers in the world in a position to push a new, more economically rational approach to climate change—and debate the politics of it, too. It helps that he isn’t media-shy. And like many Indian men, Mr. Ramesh has a penchant for the dramatic: “You have unlimited time!” he tells me, hands outstretched, as we settle down to a chat in his darkened office, with a single spotlight shining on the minister himself. More:

Sunderbans will drown in 60 years

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on February 23, 2010
in Bangladesh, Climate change, India, Wildlife and environment
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From The Times of India:

The World Wildlife Fund has warned that days are numbered for much of the sensitive Sunderbans eco-system and in 60 years vast tracts of the rare mangrove forests, home to the Bengal tiger, will be inundated by the rising sea.

The study, focussed on Sunderbans in Bangladesh, says the sea was rising more swiftly than anticipated by

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and would rise 11.2 inches (above 2000 levels) by 2070. This would result in shrinkage of the Bangladesh Sunderbans by 96% within half a century, reducing the tiger population there to less than 20, said the study.

Unlike previous efforts, WWF’s deputy director of conservation science Colby Loucks and his colleagues used a high-resolution digital elevation model with eight estimates of sea level rise to predict the impact on tiger habitat and population size. The team was able to come up with the most accurate predictions till date by importing over 80,000 Global Positioning System (GPS) elevation points. More:

Click here to read the report: Sea Level Rise and Tigers: Predicted Impacts to Bangladesh’s Sunderbans Mangroves

Image of Sunderbans mangrove forest from Kolkatabirds

Shah Rukh Khan vs Shiv Sena

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on February 12, 2010
in India, Movies, Politics, Religion, Sport and environment
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Update: Mumbai calls Sena bluff as movie opens to full house

Multiplex chains in Mumbai will have only a limited release of Shah Rukh Khan’s new film “My Name Is Khan” following threats of violence by the ultra Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena party. As things stood on Friday noon, single-screen theatres will not show the movie.

Bal Thackeray, the leader of the party, has warned that he will not allow the movie to be released unless the actor apologises for opposing the party’s call to boycott Pakistani cricket players.

Shah Rukh Khan is the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket team. He had said Pakistani stars should be included in the Indian Premier League teams. Shiv Sena supporters say that Pakistani players are not welcome in the city after the 2008 terror attacks.

Thousands of police were guarding Mumbai’s cinemas on Friday.

The movie is a classic love story set in the US after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and the Times of India’s critic has given it a rare five-star rating:

Ok, let’s get this straight from the very beginning. It’s Khan, from the epiglotis (read deep, inner recesses), not `kaan’ from the any-which-way, upper surface. In other words, it’s the K-factor — Karan (Johar) and Khan (Shah Rukh) — like you’ve never seen, sampled and savoured before. My Name is Khan is indubitably one of the most meaningful and moving films to be rolled out from the Bollywood mills in recent times. It completely reinvents both the actor and the film maker and creates a new bench mark for the duo who has given India some of the crunchiest popcorn flicks.

The battle for brinjal

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on February 11, 2010
in Science and environment
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Top points to Samar Halarnkar who has the case for and against BT Brinjal clearly cut out in the Hindustan Times. Cogent, balanced and everything you need to know and understand about why Bt Brinjal has everyone — Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, environmentalists, NGOs, farmers and scientists — so worked up.

In 1997, in a field outside Delhi, government regulators forced scientists at the State-run Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) to destroy India’s first field of locally designed killer brinjals (aubergines or eggplants to the rest of the world).

India is littered with State institutions that fail their purpose or flatly refuse to crack down on erring colleagues, so the 1997 move against the government-grown brinjals was extraordinary. These were no ordinary brinjals. In the invisible reaches of their DNA, scientists had spliced in a gene that let the brinjals kill a caterpillar, which bores holes into it and forces farmers to use costly and poisonous pesticides. But the IARI scientists lost their field of dreams because they had not followed some of the safety procedures required. more

And from the Indian Express:

Bt brinjal is on indefinite hold because the Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, has said there are many questions still to be answered. But the fact is there are many questions the minister needs to answer. We look at the Bt brinjal story from the day Ramesh took charge as Environment Minister, we assess the procedural changes he put in place, and we examine his argument that research in food science is best left to the public sector. As much as the decision he took, it’s also how he came to that decision that has raised troubling issues. More:

Signs of change in the Himalayas as Copenhagen summit begins

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on December 7, 2009
in Climate change, Nepal and environment
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John Vidal in Jomsom, Nepal in the Guardian:

On a 1,000-mile journey from the world’s greatest water source in the Himalayas, down rivers and then by train through Nepal, India and Bangladesh to the Bay of Bengal, we saw evidence of profound changes in weather patterns right across south Asia. Wherever we went we were told of significant temperature increases, and found governments slowly waking up to the threat of climate change and communities having to respond in any way they could to erratic rains and more serious droughts, floods and storms.

The starting point was Jomsom, a small town in the Kali Gandaki valley, 2,300 metres high and at the heart of the Annapurna range. This remote town, which saw its first ever car last year, has experienced no snowfall this winter. The temperature soared way above normal to 27C, and only fell to 13C, against a usual -4C, while the snowline has risen above 5,000 metres. The Gandaki river, fed by 1,200 glaciers, flows to the Ganges and on to Bangladesh.

“The temperature is higher, so there’s less snow, and less meltwater in spring to plant crops. People have no need to come down from the mountains in winter. They can grow chillies and peppers now,” said Sunil Pant, a Nepalese MP. “But now they cannot grow wheat or staple foods.” More:

A cloud still hangs over Bhopal

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on December 4, 2009
in India and environment
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Suketu Mehta, a journalism professor at New York University, and the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” in the New York Times:

bhopalIN the Mumbai kindergarten my son went to, the children never had to clean up after themselves; that was the servants’ job. So I really liked the school my son attended when we moved back to Brooklyn, where the teachers made the children tidy up at the end of the day. “Cleanup time, cleanup time!” my 6-year-old sang, joyfully gathering his scraps. It’s a wonderful American tradition: you always clean up the mess you made.

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes. More:

Bhopal gas disaster: Hunting the corporate killers

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on December 3, 2009
in India and environment
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Warren Anderson, the man many people consider to be responsible for the world’s worst industrial tragedy, continues to defy attempts to hold him accountable.

25 years and still waiting

Vidya Subrahmaniam in the Hindu:

In the fall of 2002, Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harell paid a surprise visit to the New York State private estate of Warren Anderson, and found him living a “life of luxury”. Nothing odd about the discovery except that in the eyes of the law Mr. Anderson was untraceable, and had been so since 1992 when an Indian court, exasperated by his refusal to heed multiple summons for trial, declared him a fugitive from justice.

Mr. Anderson was chairman and chief executive officer of the United States-headquartered Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) at the time of the lethal December 2-3 methyl isocyanate leak from Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal and faced charges on many counts, including culpable homicide. The UCC chief, or “Accused no 1” in a December 1, 1987 chargesheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation against him and 11 others, including UCC, USA; Union Carbide (Eastern), Hong Kong; and Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), had been placed under house arrest soon after the disaster but won his release on a promise to return to India to stand trial. More:


Animal in Bhopal

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on December 3, 2009
in Books and environment
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Indra Sinha, Regional winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, in Himal:

himal_sketchEver since that book of mine, Animal’s People, came out, I have become quite a traveller. Used to be that hardly did I set my four feet outside the bastis of Khaufpur. Only once in my life had I left the city, which was when I quit the vicious world of humanity and ran away to live in the jungle. But since my story was published, the humans have sought to reclaim me as one of theirs, and I’ve been invited to scores of places – their names clamour in my mouth – London, Oslo, Roma, Napoli, Stockholm, Yerushalayim . . .

Most recently I was in Paris, to promote the edition française of my book, which has been nicely translated by Dominique Vitalyos. ‘You do crazy things,’ Farouq had said to me in the original. In translation this became ‘Tu fais les trucs dingues’, which makes me laugh aloud from sheer pleasure in the sound of the words.

The lady from the publisher accompanies me everywhere, to radio and TV studios, to cafés where I sit and practise warnings. ‘La société va s’éffondrer,’ I endlessly intone. ‘Aujourd’hui c’est nous, mais demain c’est vous qui serez les pauvres, c’est vous qui êtes le peuple d’Apokalis.’ If you don’t know français, it means, ‘Society is going to the dogs. Today it’s us, but tomorrow it’s you who’ll be poor. It’s you who are the people of the Apocalypse.’ This has them all nodding.

Later, perhaps as a reward, she takes me up to the top of the tower of Montparnasse, the highest building in Paris. ‘What makes this such a wonderful view,’ she says, ‘is that from here one sees the entire city . . . except the tower of Montparnasse.’ More:

[Artwork: Venantius J Pinto / Himal]


Can this man save the Maldives – and the rest of the world – from the rising seas?

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on October 14, 2009
in Climate change, The Maldives and environment
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Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives. Photo: the Guardian

Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives. Photo: the Observor

Robin McKie in the Observor:

On a humid, airless night last March, Mohamed Nasheed – the 42-year-old president of the Maldives – opened up his palace in Male for an unusual public event. A projection screen was hung at the back of a ballroom and brightly coloured chairs were arranged in rows. Then the audience was shown in: lawyers, cabinet members, presidential advisers and journalists, along with a sizeable chunk of Maldives society.

Nasheed, dressed in an open-neck striped shirt and dark chinos, sat in the front row. The lights dimmed and scenes of environmental mayhem unfolded on the screen: Sydney Opera House in flames, ice sheets crashing into the seas, deserts spreading and forests burning.

Thus the people of the Maldives had their first glimpse of Franny Armstrong’s documentary, The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man left alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-fried world.

The film is scrappy but passionate, a classic example of agit-prop cinema. But in the dripping night heat of Male, The Age of Stupid had a very different effect on its audience than it has had in the west. Its message seemed direct and immediate, a call to arms. Nor is it hard to understand such emotion. The islands that make up the Maldives are threatened with complete inundation, probably by the end of the century, as ice sheets melt and sea levels rise catastrophically, thanks to global warming. More

House flies at 5,000m in the Himalayas

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on October 14, 2009
in Crime and environment
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From the Guardian:

Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. “What the heck is that?” asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 metres.

“It’s happened twice this year – the Himalayas are warming up and changing fast,” says Dawa, who only took up climbing seriously in 2006, but in a few years has climbed Everest twice as well as two 8,000m peaks in Tibet.

“What I do is climb. It’s a family business. And what we see is the Himalayan glaciers melting. It’s not a seasonal thing any more. It’s rapid. It’s so apparent.

“Look at the walls and slopes of the Khumbu glacier [which flows 1.5 miles down from an icefall on the southern flanks of Everest]. “You can see a clear line where the black rock becomes white. That’s where it’s been exposed to the sun. That means metres of thick ice have melted in just a few decades,” he says. More:

Pollution as another form of poverty

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on October 9, 2009
in Economy, India and environment
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Akash Kapur in the New York Times:

This is how it is all around here now days: the rural economy is booming, development is sweeping over the South Indian countryside like a wave, and villagers are being forced into choices they would rather not have to make. Too often, it’s the environment – the trees and the water and the air – that suffers.

Down by the beach, unauthorized construction and a government-built port are eroding the coastline, changing the contours of the Bay of Bengal and disrupting fishermen’s livelihoods.

In the farms and fields that surround my home, farmers struggle with declining yields and land that is turning barren. Decades of chemical pesticides have reduced the fertility of the soil. A new generation of electric pumps has overexploited the water table.

Behind the village of Edayanchavadi, where Murugayian and his uncles grew up, a waste dump spews toxic fumes into the air. Some nights I smell the fumes in my living room. I know the air is filled with dioxins; I worry for my children. More:

Charting change

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on October 3, 2009
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From the Himalaya to Male, there are clear signs that climate change is real. Kunda Dixit at Himal Southasian:

himalayan_glacierNamgye Chumbi was weeding his potato garden in the village of Phakding in Nepal’s Khumbu region below Mount Everest on the morning of 4 August 1985. Because of the monsoon season, there were not too many trekkers hiking up the trail towards Namche Bazaar. It was a brilliantly clear day, unusual for the monsoon season, and he was working by the banks of the Dudh Kosi River. True to its name, the river was milky white and frothing, as the water tumbled noisily over boulders. Yet around two in the afternoon, the river suddenly became strangely silent. The water level went down, and Namgye sensed danger. Much in the same way as coastal dwellers saw the sea recede before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Dudh Kosi was about to reveal its terrifying avatar. “I noticed that the white water had turned muddy brown, and in the distance I heard a thundering sound like an approaching helicopter,” Namgye recalls. “I looked upstream and saw this huge wall of dark brown water approaching very fast.” Namgye indicates the level of the river with his right hand, and raises his left hand high over his head like a cobra to show what he saw.

There was no time to think. Namgye dropped everything and began to run up the mountain. His wife, Sherkima, had more presence of mind, and picked up their two young children, Hira and Tsering, and followed her husband. They reached a ledge as the thunderous flood raced beneath them, lapping at their heels. The ground was shaking like an earthquake, and the sound was deafening. Namgye and Sherkima lost their house and everything in it. If they had been just a few seconds slower, they would have lost their lives as well. Their millet farm upstream was cut in half, as the river changed its course and started flowing through its terraces. Thereafter, the family built a hut, and other families helped them with food. “We only had the clothes we were wearing, but at least we were all alive,” he says. Nearly 25 years later, Namgye has built a new house higher up the mountain, where his married children and four grandchildren today live together. The Dudh Kosi, meanwhile, is still frothing white as it flows past the farm. Namgye points out one boulder the size of his house that was brought down by that terrible flash flood. More:

[Image: Kunda Dixit]

Also read the interview with the Maldives President

Maldives’ dilemma

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on September 26, 2009
in Climate change, The Maldives and environment
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It cannot be carbon neutral without killing tourism. From the Times:

In the 1960s a United Nations report warned the Maldives that, sadly, it was unlikely to attract tourists.

Not much grows on lumps of coral in the Indian Ocean apart from coconuts and fish, the report pointed out: the Maldives is largely dependent on imports and the nearest ports are hundreds of miles away. Few of its 1,000-odd scattered islands even had electricity. Yet within ten years, the Maldives had established the reputation it has now, as a holiday paradise for honeymooners, scuba divers and the super-rich.

On Tuesday, the tiny country of 350,000 people once again showed it can punch above its weight. The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, shared a billing with Barack Obama and Hu Jintao at the United Nations General Assembly, where he pleaded the cause of small island states at risk from climate change. In many news outlets, it was Nasheed who made the headlines.

In many respects the Maldives has always been the little nation that could. Despite its minuscule population and strategic location, it has never been colonised (it peacefully dismissed the British, who had made it a protectorate, in 1965). It has retained its unique language and script, and hung on to its cultural identity while incorporating Islam, elements from African religions, black magic, Indian cooking and the occasional British naval tradition. In 2008 it made a peaceful transition to democracy and was hailed as an example to other, more troubled Muslim nations. More:

Shekhar Kapur: Act now on global warming

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on September 22, 2009
in Climate change and environment
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From the Hindustan Times:

shekhar-kapurWhen you read this I will have returned to the Himalayas once again to try and highlight the dramatic changes that are taking place in our mountains as a result of climate change. These lungs of the world are clogging with the noxious fumes of our carbon emissions, and the slow crawl of poison must be checked before it is too late. The Himalayas are the largest concentration of glaciers outside of the polar caps, and they are also receding faster than any other in the world because of global warming.

I have always felt a connection with the mountains. I’m not sure where exactly that connection comes from, but I know it is something I have in common with thousands of others who have been as lucky to visit them. I think it’s the sense of humility they impart to you: to stand there and face the immensity of nature and try to be at one with it is a great and humbling experience; the effect it has on you is unique.

Of course, the spirituality the Himalayas provoke isn’t just consigned to the mountain ranges: the Gangotri glacier is the source of the Ganga, the holy mother of India. It is also shrinking at a rate of 34m per year. That means that, by tomorrow morning, as this paper lies outside and a fresh copy is in your hands, another slice of glacier the thickness of your thumb will be gone. My daughter is nine now. If we allow the retreat of these glaciers to continue at the current rate, they’ll be gone by the time she’s in her thirties. There’s a real chance her children will not experience the beauty of the Himalayan ranges and rivers. More:

Climate change: We are in it together

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on September 15, 2009
in Climate change and environment
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Shiban Ganju at 3quarksdaily:

climatePuja, a small woman sitting near the window, stood and said she had just composed a poem, which she wanted to recite. The group shouted a noise of approval. She began. She had captured the essence of maternal and child health in rhyme. Trainees murmured appreciation; she was their resident poet.

The girl in yellow Sari, sitting on the opposite side, rose. She introduced herself, “My name is Mehrunissa. I want to express my gratitude to all of you and the organizers to let me participate here. I joined the women’s group one year ago. I started attending their meetings. Till that time, I had never participated in any group. For the first time in my life I started stepping out and this is the first time in my life that I have stayed out of my house on my own for seven days.”

“Did your husband or mother in law object?” asked the moderator.

“In the beginning my mother in law asked some questions but now she is used to it. My husband has supported me.”

The group cheered – men a little louder than the women – for this empowerment in action!

The attitude of these people had changed since the program started about two years ago. An internal transformation was happening. Personal responsibility for health was seeping into their awareness , which was an assurance for good health but not a guarantee. They could still lose the war, just when they were about to win the battle. They were vulnerable to external forces of socio-politics of man and nature. Unknown to them and beyond their control, people of the world, who had already “progressed” were collectively already destroying their future. The bellowing industrial carbon dioxide had already made the planet into a hot green house and punched a hole in the protective ozone layer. Heat could not escape and ultraviolet rays rushed in, unhindered. More:

Flying frogs and the world’s oldest mushroom: a decade of Himalayan discovery

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on August 18, 2009
in Climate change, Wildlife and environment
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From the Guardian:

A pretty ultramarine blue flower which changes colour in response to temperature, a flying frog and the world’s oldest mushroom preserved in amber are among the 350 new species discovered in the Eastern Himalayas over the past 10 years. But experts warn the new discoveries are under pressure from demand for land and climate change.

A report published today by the WWF, The Eastern Himalayas – Where Worlds Collide, lists 242 new types of plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds and two mammals and 61 new invertebrates. The cache, quality and diversity of species newly discovered between 1998 and 2008 make the mountainous region one of the world’s most important biological hotspots.

The WWF is asking the governments of Bhutan, India and Nepal to commit to cooperate on conservation efforts in the geographic region that transcends the borders of the three countries to protect the landscape and the livelihoods of people living in the Eastern Himalayas. More:

Northern India’s vanishing water

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on August 17, 2009
in India and environment
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NASA's Grace satellites measured the depletion of groundwater in northwestern India between 2002 and 2008. Image credit: NASA/Trent Schindler and Matt Rodell

NASA's Grace satellites measured the depletion of groundwater in northwestern India between 2002 and 2008. Image credit: NASA/Trent Schindler and Matt Rodell

From Jet Propulsion Lab website:

The map shows groundwater changes in India during 2002-08, with losses in red and gains in blue, based on GRACE satellite observations. The estimated rate of depletion of groundwater in northwestern India is 4.0 centimeters of water per year, equivalent to a water table decline of 33 centimeters per year. Increases in groundwater in southern India are due to recent above-average rainfall, whereas rain in northwestern India was close to normal during the study period. Credit: I. Velicogna/UC Irvine

The map shows groundwater changes in India during 2002-08, with losses in red and gains in blue. The estimated rate of depletion of groundwater in northwestern India is 4.0 centimeters of water per year, equivalent to a water table decline of 33 centimeters per year. Increases in groundwater in southern India are due to recent above-average rainfall, whereas rain in northwestern India was close to normal during the study period. Credit: I. Velicogna/UC Irvine

Using NASA satellite data, scientists have found that groundwater levels in northern India have been declining by as much as 33 centimeters (1 foot) per year over the past decade. Researchers concluded the loss is almost entirely due to human activity.

More than 108 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from aquifers in areas of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and the nation’s capitol territory of Delhi, between 2002 and 2008. This is enough water to fill Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the United States, three times.

A team of hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found that northern India’s underground water supply is being pumped and consumed by human activities, such as irrigating cropland, and is draining aquifers faster than natural processes can replenish them. The results of this research were published today in Nature.

The finding is based on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), a pair of satellites that sense changes in Earth’s gravity field and associated mass distribution, including water masses stored above or below Earth’s surface. As the twin satellites orbit 483 kilometers (300 miles) above Earth’s surface, their positions change relative to each other in response to variations in the pull of gravity. More:

The wise tigress and a silly fool with a gun

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on August 10, 2009
in Wildlife and environment
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Sher Khan in Kipling's Jungle Book

Sher Khan in Kipling's Jungle Book

A short story by Bulbul Sharma in the Times of India:

They call me Rani which I think is a silly name since I have no royal blood in me but I cannot do anything about it. Men have their own odd ways and ever since they came to live on earth with us we have had to go along with them to survive. Sometimes we lash out, like my old uncle Sher Khan who turned maneater in his old age. His teeth always gave him trouble after that and his skin began to smell really awful. But he was a rare case. For thousands of years we have hunted our four- legged prey in the grassy meadows and never looked at
man as our next meal.
He was frightened of us even when he lived in a cave and hunted with sharp-edged stones. They say he drew pictures of my ancestors on his cave walls so that he could trap their spirits to enable him to hunt them easily in real life. He loved our skin even then and wore our teeth around his neck. Silly fool.
Later when he grew a little wiser, he started worshipping us and wrote many songs about our great strength and cunning. He stamped our heads on seals and even carved our figures in clay. Later when he built temples he made us stand like guards at the gate and then we all felt so proud when the Goddess Durga chose one of us as her ‘vahan’. Even to this day, you can see her fierce and beautiful form riding a tiger as she slays the buffalo-demon. Though sometimes I see our cousin the Lion with her and then I feel quite upset. We have always been the rulers of the forest and every animal fears us, except the elephant. More:

India should combine tough climate stand with a green policy

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on July 3, 2009
in environment
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Nandan Nilekani in Yale Global Online

_usr_local_y_samba_data_repository__1246551532208_pollutionbig1The emergence of a Congress Party-led coalition government with a comfortable majority could not have been better timed. A government with a strong mandate is well placed to define India’s long-term strategy towards climate change, and to call for the steps that the nation and the world need to take at the Copenhagen climate summit scheduled for December.

These climate negotiations are easily the most complex collaborative effort the world has undertaken, and India, like all nations, is being asked to sign on to the deal being worked out at Copenhagen. India is likely to be among the most affected by coming climate shifts – in prediction maps, the subcontinent shows up as dark red, threatened by melting ice caps, shifting rainfall patterns and rising sea levels. The Indian government rightly points out that the burden of cutting carbon emissions should lie with the developed nations responsible for the accumulated levels of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere.

more

British actresses flock to Bollywood

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on July 1, 2009
in Movies and environment
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Young British actresses who have struggled to find work at home are flocking to Bollywood to capitalise on the Indian film industry’s insatiable appetite for white-skinned talent. From the Telegraph, UK:

A combination of both the recession-hit show business industry in the UK and an increasing demand for white skinned performers in Bollywood have spurred an estimated 1,000 white British actors and dancers to move to Mumbai in the past three years, according to casting directors.

British actresses in Mumbai can earn £1,000 a day and say opportunities are plentiful as compared with struggling for auditions and waiting tables to survive in London.

While the traditional roles filled by white women in Bollywood were as the exotic backing dancer, prepared to show off bare skin, actresses are now moving to Mumbai to establish serious film careers.

Hazel, 24, from Tunbridge Wells, has been in Mumbai for five years and is now well established on the Bollywood circuit, where she is known simply by her Christian name. She has ambitions far beyond being the clichéd white girl. More:

India’s disappearing vultures

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on June 13, 2009
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Nava Thakuria at Asia Sentinel:

india-_vulturesThe Parsis, who fled Persia –the present day Iran — centuries back and made India their permanent homeland, practice the religion of Zoroastrianism. About 100,000 live in major cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. According to their religious practice, the dead bodies cannot be buried or burnt because the corpses could pollute the Panchabhootam (earth, water, air, ether and fire). Hence their bodies are left in a high-rise ‘Tower of Silence’ to be consumed by the scavengers.

“Unfortunately the vultures have disappeared from our region and a sustained breeding project for vultures has become essential,” said Khojeste P. Mistree of the World Alliance of Parsi and Irani Zoroastrians, in an interview. “The vulture happens to have been the first scavenger of the world and hence they should be brought back for a sustained ecological balance.”

How long there were will be enough Parsis around to satisfy the vultures is another question. According to “Parsi Khabar,” a website for the Parsi community in India, the Zoroastrian sect’s numbers are diminishing because of self-imposed discouragement of intercommunity marriages, leading to inbreeding. Members of the community from Hyderabad point out that by rough estimates there are just 70,000 Parsis in Mumbai and 1,200 in Hyderabad. More:

Climate change will lead to mass migration in 40 years

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on June 11, 2009
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Seema Singh in Mint:

A report commissioned last year by the international activist group Greenpeace, titled Blue Alert: Climate Migrants in South Asia – Estimates and Solutions, has estimated that 50 million people in India and 75 million in Bangladesh will be rendered homeless by the turn of the century, with the bulk of Bangladeshis likely to seek shelter in India.

“We categorize the poor as the ones who will suffer most, but richer societies will potentially lose as well,” said geographer Alexander de Sherbinin at Columbia University’s Centre for International Earth Science Information Network in New York. Sherbinin has co-authored the report with researchers from the United Nations University and the humanitarian agency Care International. More:

Electrifying women

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on June 8, 2009
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India’s “barefoot engineers” light up the world. From Ms Magazine:

Neither Satyanarayan Sinha nor the four women he introduces as his team look like adventurers. Dressed in clean cotton clothes that have seen better days, they might be a group of peasants in any rural Indian village. And, indeed, they work out of the village of Tilonia, bordering the desert of the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a place where life includes smoky wood fires, poor-quality drinking water and other hardships imposed by climate and poverty. But these women are used to transcending their circumstances: They are “barefoot solar engineers” who bring solar-powered light to rural India.

For example, during a trip they took to the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, they cut their way through dense jungles, venturing into remote areas where no government official would go. There, the team trained two women chosen from each nearby village at a workshop in the city of Hyderabad-trainees who in turn taught others in their villages to construct and run solar energy units. One hundred batteries, hung on long poles, were carried through the 20-kilometer-long mud paths to the main post office servicing the region’s villages, and that became the battery pickup location. More:

Third World stove soot is target in climate fight

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on April 16, 2009
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carbon

Scientists say that reducing soot from tens of thousands of cooking stoves — called chulhas in north India — used in the villages  in developing countries is a relatively simple climate fix and should be pursued immediately. From the New York Times:

chulhaKohlua, India: “It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.

As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.

In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot – also known as black carbon – from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.

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The Dal Lake is dying

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on March 16, 2009
in India and environment
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Toufiq Rasheed from Srinagar in The Indian Express:

Photo: Prakhar / Flickr

Photo: Prakhar / Flickr

Imagine the Dal Lake without its houseboats. If that left you with a sense of emptiness, get used to it. The future of the 1,200-odd houseboats, which have been a part of the famous water body in the heart of Srinagar for more than a century now, is under threat. With the houseboat owners not exactly cooperating, a court order has made them inoperable till they find proper ways of sewage treatment.

This icon of Kashmir tourism may vanish from travel itineraries as the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA), the nodal agency responsible for controlling pollution in the Dal Lake, has directed all houseboat owners to stop operation or face closure.

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Maldives first to go carbon neutral

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on March 15, 2009
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From The Guardian:

Photo: Maldives Tourism

Photo: Maldives Tourism

The president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, will today unveil a plan to make his country carbon-neutral within a decade. The announcement comes only days after scientists issued stark new warnings that rising seas caused by climate change could engulf the Maldives and other low-lying nations this century.

The president will formally announce the scheme – and make a plea for other countries to follow the Maldives’ lead – this evening, following the world premiere of The Age of Stupid, a major new climate change film in which a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055 looks at old footage from 2008 and asks why people didn’t stop climate change when they had the chance.

More here and here:

Defending an outcast: The plastic bag

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on February 18, 2009
in India and environment
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Heather Timmons in The International Herald Tribune:

bagJust last month, New Delhi passed a preliminary ban imposing a five-year jail term or a fine of 100,000 rupees, or about $2,050, on anyone caught carrying or handing out plastic bags.

That did not stop 67,000 plastics executives from convening in the city last week for a five-day celebration of all things plastic. The event, “Plastindia 2009,” was billed as the second-largest plastics convention in the world. (The biggest, K Fair, is in Germany.)

The executives came from around the world to look at extruders and polymer additives, printing machines and blown film. They attended seminars on “differentiated packaging solutions with advanced technology resins” and “polyolefin, the changing face of the plastic industry.”

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The Maldives: Trouble in paradise

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on February 1, 2009
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Rising seas are threatening to engulf the Maldives, so the president wants to buy a new homeland for his people. But should he instead be looking to build a new one on the grave of the old? From The Sunday Times:

Green Sea turtle, the Maldives. Photo: Edgar Barany

Green Sea turtle, the Maldives. Photo: Edgar Barany

It is 1990 and a young writer sits in solitary confinement, his hands and feet shackled inside a metal tube, known as the “hot cell”. It is designed to heat up like an oven in the tropical sun. His food is deliberately laced with broken glass and laxatives, and he is repeatedly beaten – he has dared to openly criticise his country’s political elite. Through a slit in the metal walls he can see a sliver of ocean on the horizon. This is his only comfort. It is, he says, what opened his imagination, led him to think about a better future for his country.

Just a short distance from the small prison island where he is held, a paradise is being carefully crafted. The small knots of low-lying islands and coral-reef atolls that make up the Maldives are being engineered into one of the world’s most romantic tourist destinations.

Exclusive resorts are taking over many of the 1,200 tiny isles grouped in 26 coral atolls. Stilted luxury villas snake across translucent waters teeming with exotic marine life; glass floor panels have been installed underfoot in many. The trademark of these tourist oases is that no visitor’s request for pampering is considered too onerous. And the guest books will fill with the signatures of world-famous leaders and celebrities in the years to come. The daily grind for most Maldivians — prohibited from visiting these resorts to prevent what the government calls “cultural contamination” — was different. Little tourist revenue filtered down, and all dissent was brutally quashed. Those who criticised the country’s president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom — who ruled his country with an iron fist from 1978, and became Asia’s longest-serving leader — were beaten and thrown in jail.

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Paani: Rainwater harvesting

Published
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on November 19, 2008
in Movies and environment
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A beautiful short from Shekhar Kapur’s blog: