Le Question: What happened to the Sidewinder?

The Sidewinder is a rattlesnake that has adapted to life in the desert with unique sinusoidal-diagonal locomotion that enables it to negotiate smooth sand dunes with ease

This post concerns a certain question asked after a storytelling session at my son’s school, though this could be any child’s question to his or her teacher. 

The story concerned God and his miracles (which, incidentally, are almost always performed for the benefit of Homo sapiens). Here goes: A group of people who lived in a desert were starved of water (for obvious reasons). So they prayed to the rain god and encouraged piety and truthful living among their kin (I am not sure of the details: My son can be notoriously sketchy on the details but jumps onto the core of the matter like a pouncing tomcat). Anyway, the rain god smiled. There were copious rains for many years and eventually the desert was transformed into a lush tropical forest teeming with life. Rivers began to flow again and there were huge harvests. The tribe lived happily ever after. The story would have ended there except for one small question from the back of the class.

"Qu'est-il arrivé à la SideWinder?" (What happened to the Sidewinder?)

Shashwat was not just trying to show off his newfound knowledge of the desert and its denizens (picked up courtesy Sir David Attenborough’s BBC documentary series Planet Earth), the sidewinder being one of the most striking. Its sinusoidal-diagonal traverses across the dunes must have been etched in my son’s memory. But he had a genuine concern: What happens when one species benefits due to an unplanned intervention and others lose out. Or rather, why should this happen at all?

The question was not answered, but therein hangs an ethical dilemma with the anthropomorphic god and biased ethical systems. While we may confuse deserts with desertification, a child’s mind, yet to be clogged with concepts and cares, is perceptive enough to instinctively separate the two. Deserts are ecosystems that have evolved over millennia and their conversion to fertile farmland is akin to chopping down rainforests. It’s our instinctive (or indoctrinated?) association of environment with “green” that tips the odds against the protection of desert eco-systems. Desertification is the result of unsustainable living and often leads to loss of tree cover and arable land.

Demoiselle Cranes in the desert at Kichan, Rajasthan

The sidewinder in question would have endured a slow and agonizing death, its wonderful winding glides across the scorching sands slowly turning into painfully awkward slides on wet sands. A twisted and macabre version of Woman in Dunes played out in water.

Text by Sahastrarashmi

Photo of Sidewinder courtesy DK Clipart

Photo of Demoiselle Cranes at Kichan, Rajasthan by Sahastrarashmi

Let this be the year of...

Acting: Let our actions speak, let our words give them wings Warming: Of our hearts, not of our planet Thawing: Of cold wars, not of our polar ice caps Rising: Of movements for sustainable living, not of ocean levels War: Against poaching, pollution and militarism Seeing and believing: May we be able to tell the fake greens from the real ones Welcome, 2009! And may you bring days of hope and light and nights of rest and healing.

Soil replenishment secrets from ancient conservationists

As someone said, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. The last place to look for solutions is probably right where the problem lies.

PhysOrg reports on how the early inhabitants of the Amazon basin boosted crop productivity by enriching their fields with biochar.

Here's the whole story:

Ancient soil replenishment technique helps in battle against global warming from PhysOrg.com

Former inhabitants of the Amazon Basin enriched their fields with charred organic materials - biochar - and transformed one of the earth's most infertile soils into one of the most productive. These early conservationists disappeared 500 years ago, but centuries later, their soil is still rich in organic matter and nutrients. Now, scientists, environmental groups and policymakers forging the next world climate agreement see biochar not only as an important tool for replenishing soils, but as a powerful tool for combating global warming.

[...]

Technorati Tags: soil replenishment, soil conservation, amazon basin, biochar, global warming

How green is America's first coloured President?

It's a riot of colour out there. A blue wash is spreading over America's electoral map. A coloured man awaits entry to the White House. Democrats are closing in on the Senate and the House of Representatives. At the time of writing this, Barack Obama leads John McCain 338:155. Please welcome America's 44th President! Now, for that other colour: Green. How green is the new President? Some answers are here and here. Now, it's time to live up to those promises. Good show, America! (Weep not, for Sarah Palin will not be your veep.)

How green is tea?

Tea has been on my mind. Mostly because I have spent the last few weeks drinking it guiltily.

Coffee, I am told, is better for our forests than tea. Two NCF researchers I met in Valparai confirm this.

Tea cultivation essentially involves the clearing of large tracts of forest, leaving them bare and devoid of shade trees. Coffee, on the other hand, allows for shade trees and secondary cultivation. Tea offers nothing to grazing animals. It offers some shelter to birds, but nothing they won't find elsewhere. Coffee berries may be eaten by monkeys, civets, some herbivores and even elephants. Since tea picking takes place year round, tea habitats are constantly disturbed. Coffee suffers only seasonal disturbance.

Two weeks ago, I was shocked to see how tea gardens in the High Wavy Hills and Valparai verged upon some of the last stands of inviolate evergreen forest in the Western Ghats. This increases greatly the possibility of human-animal conflict and leaves the environment vulnerable to invasion by exotic plant and animal species.

These are not exactly great times for tea the product, so managements are opening up tea gardens to tourists who, having fooled themselves sufficiently that acres and acres of countryside bejewelled with tea bushes are an authentic imitation of paradise, will pay to stay in a guest house and be pampered with a whiff of colonial nostalgia. Along with a little rum and water in the evenings to wash down any chance feelings of guilt that may have pricked their consciences.

I wonder what my friend God, who until recently lived on a tea estate and worked in a coffee plantation, would have to say about this quandary of the cuppa.

On a lighter note, for those like me who still love their tea, this much has to be said: there are green ways of making it.

Like our guide Devidutt did up at 7500 feet in the Himalaya.

From HIMALAYA-GARHWAL-APR-MAY2007

From HIMALAYA-GARHWAL-APR-MAY2007

Seven Eco-Friendly Products, via SciAm

A hybrid bike, a new brand of toilet paper, reusable tote bags and a water-powered clock are among seven eco-friendly products listed by Scientific American.

The bike, manufactured by a Taiwanese company, is pegged at $2000. Who's buying? The water-powered clock sounds cool - all you need to do is fill the reservoir with water, add a pinch of salt and the chemical reaction that takes place powers your watch. If only this technology could run buses and aircraft! It costs only $16. But then, time is money. Of all these products, my heart went to the 'disposable cutlery'. What's new, you may ask. Imagine cutlery made out out of 'vegware' - 80% potato starch and 20% soy oil! What sounds truly amazing is that these products reportedly handle heat and washing very well. And they're priced right - $6 for 50. Hmmm... And just a few days ago, I mused about making plastics edible. Image - from sciam.com Technorati Tags: eco-friendly, biodegradable, scientific american

Paper and plastic - kicking the habit

Over at Life Less Plastic, Jeanne Haegele writes: And I still buy milk (in a glass container) and meat (wrapped in paper at the deli), and use my own cloth produce and grocery bags. In my three-decade-plus lifetime I have seen my parents do the same. Why, only about 15 years ago I have bought milk in a steel container. And I have shopped veggies in a little cloth bag emblazoned with a kitschy reproduction of a Mughal painting. As for meat and chicken and fish, we got them wrapped in sheets of newspaper - it was morbidly comic to see the 'killed' and 'dead' so ubiquitous in our headlines clinging to the gills of mackerel or slapped to mutton ribs. Somewhere along the way, plastic took over. First, as a fad. Then, as an excuse for convenience. Now, it has become a scourge. Haegele's article in the Dallas Morning Post was honest in that it dissected the quandary that some of our more discerning shoppers face every day - to plastic or not to plastic. Offered no choice by retailers, most go with the first option (no choice = no option, innit?). Ergo, along with the veggies and cartons and the ephemeral guilt come strips of shrink and bubble wrap, and plastic bags of varying micron thickness. Since we don't eat them, where do they go? Into the trash can. And then? Does anyone care? It's not about plastic alone. At Infosys, where I worked until August, green consciousness is afoot among the employees. How deep this runs is debatable but even a move from ecological nihilism to environmental lip-service is undoubtedly a start and deserves a round of applause, however feeble. At Infosys, plastic bags are being phased out - the bookshop and supermarket at the Bangalore campus have been wrapping their ware in brown paper bags for more than a year. Noble. But what of paper itself? An interesting opinion piece by Stanley Fish ran counter to Haegele's. Of course, the Fish eye-view comes across as anti-environmentalist posturing of shaky credibility - he takes on the greens but it's clear soon enough that he is a renegade green himself. What stayed with me was the reference to toilet paper and that oh-so-familiar name among all ye who paper thy behinds. Kimberley-Clark. If you live in a Turd World Country (like moi) and have trouble placing that name, allow me to help. Think of the last time you used a public loo at a hip software company or at any of our new temples of modern India - the newfangled international airports, eco-sensitive hotels, liver-protecting pubs, etc. The brand name that you smeared your poo with was Kimberley-Clark. Toilet paper, or just paper in the form of napkins and face tissue, has become an addiction with us children of the night-soil. And it is the sole reason why I choose to patronise the pain-in-the-butt salesman touting cloth handkerchiefs at Shivaji Nagar bus stand over the waif at traffic signals selling boxes of paper napkins for your car. But what's galling is the sight of people using whole wads of paper to wipe their faces - it leads me to ponder the unsanitary question: How many reams of Kimberley-Clark does it takes to finish up after they take a dump? Do they know that they are wiping their arses with strips of hoary boreal forest? And just one generation ago, these very people barely had water to use after a trip to the john (which was more likely than not of the clean and hygienic Indian-style sit-down-and-go variety). You didn't know?! There's evidence here and here and here. Back to plastic. The only option we are left with, if not for Alka Zadgaonkar's ingenious idea, is to make it edible. As for paper, why wipe when you can wash? It's time the rest of the world tore a leaf out of the toilet roll of the Turd World.