From Stone Quarry Workers to Farmers and Forest-Restorers

Women in mustard field, Jharkhand. Photo Credit: AID

I am a writer of speculative fiction; you might say I deal in dreams and nightmares. When I address climate change in my work, it is as a doorway into the complex of crises that confront us: rising inequality, mass extinction of species, nitrogen cycle imbalance, and, of course, climate change.  Climate reductionism is dangerous, because it implies that we just have to fix carbon emissions and all will be well.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The best way to understand that – even for a writer of imaginative fiction – is to pay attention to reality.  I mean, specifically, the real world of marginalized communities where apocalypse has already come to stay.  It is here that we can take the true measure of the great engine of modern industrial civilization.  It is here that our most entrenched middle-class assumptions and entitlements are challenged.

Through a volunteer driven movement called AID (Association for India’s Development) that partners with with grassroots groups throughout India, I get to listen to the voices of the unheard.  So in the hope that you will also want to hear what they have to say, and perhaps support this work, here is an account from a povertized, desertified region of the Indian state of Jharkhand.

Life used to be difficult for Sauhar Singh and his wife, Makhni Devi.  The only way for the middle-aged couple to afford one meal a day for their family was to work in the stone quarries of the region.  What was once a vast, unbroken expanse of forest in Jharkhand is now a desert of stone and mica quarries, overhung by dust clouds that can be kilometers long.  The forest used to be a source of food, fodder and traditional medicine for the villages of the region, but when it was destroyed, the water table dropped, agriculture failed, and villagers lost their way of life, their means of sustenance and their independence.  They became dependent on daily wage labor in the quarries to survive.

It is not just middle-aged small farmers who have become enmeshed in stone quarries and mines.  Child labor is a horrific reality in India’s mines.  Stone quarries swallow young people and old alike, condemning them to diseases like silicosis.  See, for example, Precarious Labour in Stone Quarries of Eastern India, a short documentary.  The construction boom in India and the endless middle and upper class hunger for Western-style living result in sacrifice zones like these.  Real estate developers and the cement industry are partners, along with the mining mafia, in the rise of stone quarries. Many of these quarries are illegal.  They contaminate water sources and make life hell for those who live in the area.  Working in these quarries without protective gear, people breathe in stone dust as they crack stones to feed into the crushers. As Madhusree Mukerjee documents in a photo essay in Birbhum district in West Bengal, these quarries destroy communities, forests, life, and hope itself.

Stone quarry in Birbhum district, West Bengal. Photo Credit Madhusree Mukerjee

But in Sauhar Singh’s village in Jharkhand, something has changed.  I look at a photograph of two women standing in a field of mustard flowers in bloom.  Many people in the village have left the back-breaking work in the stone quarries and returned to agriculture.  Sauhar Singh and Makhni Devi grow potatoes, tomatoes, brinjals and more. Now there is enough excess produce that they can sell the surplus.  Their grandchildren are able to go to school. 

What has enabled this miracle is the revival of the local micro-watershed.  Through AID, the communities of the region have received guidance and support from hydrological experts, as a result of which they have built farm ponds and check dams to conserve water and prevent erosion, and engaged in ecological restoration of the local forests, including the preparation and distribution of seed balls of native trees.  As the forest is being restored to health, the water table is rising, allowing several families in the village to leave the quarries and return to agriculture.  The communities’ traditional relationship with the forest is being revived.  Through all this, the former daily wage laborers are finding their self-respect and pride in being able to take care of their own lives.

We are working with partners on the ground in several districts of Jharkhand in watershed restoration.  The communities’ concerns guide the work, and their active collaboration is essential.  The transformation has been extraordinary – in one place, the water table rose ten feet.  While challenges are different in different places, it seems clear that addressing the availability of water for people and ecosystems through community collaboration is – for lack of a better term – a nexus solution.  The revival of the forest supports biodiversity and – through enhancing the carbon sink, addresses climate change.  Sociologically we see communities becoming self-sufficient, able to free themselves from dangerous work in the quarries, gaining food security and able to consider education for their children, including girls.  Neighboring villages are seeing these changes and eager to participate.

Photo Credit: AID

From this reservoir (above), barren and dry for 25 years, to this (below):

Photo Credit: AID

Talking to our partners via Zoom across the planet, I am struck by the intelligence, eagerness and resilience of the people of these communities.  There is laughter and humor, creativity and strength.  It is humbling and uplifting to be among them.  Friends who spend months in these villages report a renewed hope and determination in the face of rising odds.  As climate worsens, as destructive ‘development’ runs amok, as mainstream society continues to devour Earth’s resources with exponentially increasing hunger, I find in these stories of resistance and change, renewal and regeneration, reason to believe that another world is possible.

IF YOU ARE MOVED BY THESE STORIES PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO AID’S WATERSHED RESTORATION PROJECT!

Art Beyond the Human

Well, I’d read about bower birds since childhood, and later about paintbrush-wielding elephants, but the former seemed to be the sole example of deliberate manipulation of the surroundings to create beauty.  Until I saw BBC’s Life Story – here’s a clip from it, a video of a stunning piece of mathematical art created by a puffer fish.  One more nail in the coffin of human specialness!  Although I will put us on the top for destructive potential.

The puffer fish’s remarkable performance reminded me of an article I’d read recently, about mathematics as performance and play, with particular attention to sea slugs – but I suspect one can argue that all of nature is performing what we might call mathematics, or at least that mathematics is one of the things nature performs, embodies, articulates, along with art.

How very fortunate for us humans not to be alone as artists and mathematicians!

Writing on Climate: My Other Blog

Just a note to say I have revived my sabbatical blog, which has to do with my other life (inextricable from this one).  I took a sabbatical last year to learn something about Arctic climate change.  Since then climate change has only got worse, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, and as the world burns, the powers-that-be are focusing their energies on finding more fossil fuels to burn, such as in the until-now pristine Arctic.  (See the breaking news about Shell’s drilling, which has just commenced). I can’t just stand on the sidelines and wring my hands in despair.  I continue to learn, and investigate creative ways to communicate on the issue and to act in ways that make meaningful change.  The revived and updated blog is one small step in that direction.  It is a repository of thoughts, comments and updates on climate, and also includes my scientific-travelogue-style account of my Arctic trip in April 2014.

Speaking in Tongues: Gibbonese, Prairiedogese and other languages

Note: I wrote this little essay about a month ago, when New England was still under a thick shawl of snow.  I lost the essay, and just found it again.  So here it is.  

The day after New England’s first blizzard of the season, I saw tracks on the snow.  The snow was 2-3 feet thick, and except where I’d ploughed a canyon through it, was smooth as a blanket.  Looking carefully, though, I saw a single line gouged in the smoothness, from the elm tree all the way to the covered porch.  There is a space under the porch that is home to a mysterious animal, which may be a possum.  (When my dog was alive I always knew, from his excited sniffing, when our tenant was home).   There were rabbit tracks all the way to the front door, and a more delicate tracery of bird footprints.   These spoke to me of recent histories almost as explicitly as if each track, each footprint, was a letter or pictogram of a language inscribed on the featureless white page of snow.

That Nature speaks – that animate beings and inanimate things communicate – is perhaps no mystery to the scientist or artist.  The world is full of stories, although we humans seem to be disproportionately tuned to the exclusively human ones.  But animals, trees, protons and stars are always telling stories, and it is our loss that our selective deafness shuts out these other tales.  To the naturalist, the nibbled tips of a wild plant, or the change in flow of a stream, hint of certain animal presences.   To a geologist walking through a canyon, the colors, striations and textures of rocks tell a story of the earth’s past.  To a particle physicist looking at particle tracks, the intangible mysteries of the sub-atomic world are, for that moment and context, revealed.  There is an aesthetics of science that is missed by most non-scientists, and sometimes by scientists as well.  Ultimately what pure scientists do is to listen to, and interpret through mathematics and conceptual structure-building, the stories Nature tells us.

The stories told by inanimate things is truly fascinating, and is part of my work on creative new ways of teaching physics, but that is a whole other post.  Today, while snowbound during yet another storm too soon after the last one, I want to think about communication and language in the context of our non-human fellow earthlings.

I’ve seen cartoons about the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, on the “Are We Alone?” theme.  A human looks through a telescope at the stars, wondering if our species is an anomaly in the universe.  What I’ve always found ironic about this trope is that we are surrounded by other beings that are constantly communicating.  I am a fan of the search for life beyond Earth, don’t get me wrong — I think that the huge numbers of exoplanets discovered on a near-daily basis indicate that life, (‘intelligent’ or otherwise according to our standards), may be rather common outside of our little rock – but my point is that we are so arrogantly or ignorantly unaware of all that is being spoken around us that it would be laughable if it wasn’t also sad.

Writing in a World of Sorrows

Living in modern urban culture, it is easy to forget, sometimes, that there is a world beyond one’s ‘narrow domestic walls’ (to use Rabindranath Tagore’s pithy phrase).  I am intensely interested in the world, but the daily circumlocutions of work and home, the breathless rush from one deadline to another, at times distances me from the wider reality we inhabit.  I know full well that the lives we live perpetuate the illusion that the tiny pocket universe of our daily existence is all there is, and all that matters.  We read of school shootings, police brutality, war, oil spills, and the heart clenches for a moment, and for that moment we are lifted out of that illusion.  We are helpless before the horrors of the world.  What’s the point of expending emotional energy on something we can’t change?  When there are jobs to do, and children to raise, and bills to pay?  It is so much easier to run back into the hidey-holes of our lives, especially if we are privileged enough to be far from the scenes of violence and destruction.  Privilege, after all, means we can afford to not think about it.

But I am a writer.  And I like to think of a writer – at least the kind I aspire to be – as a student of the world, immersed in the world.  I know there are writers who believe in cutting themselves off from the world so they can work on their art.  But the writers who have had the greatest impact on me have, in some form or another, been full participant-observers in this world of ours.  So when I am tempted to look away from various external horrors to my own concerns, I remember this — and I remember also what I’ve learned through orbiting the sun for over a half-century: that avoiding or denying painful truths has terrible consequences, personal and otherwise.

Of Whales and Ships and Eskimos: Jean George’s Book “Ice Whale”

When I was a kid, I used to sometimes sneak out of my classroom at my school in New Delhi, and hide in the library.  My school environment was highly disciplined, with a great emphasis on academics and proper behavior.  While this was all to the good, sometimes my imagination needed free rein.  I still remember hiding behind the stacks, a shaft of sunlight coming in through the window, illuminating the page of the book I held on my lap.

It was during one of these escapades that I came across author Jean Craighead George’s book My Side of the Mountain.  I devoured the book, marveling at the adventures of a boy who had run away from home to live in the wilderness.  It had been a dream of mine to do something as bold.  Many of the books I’d read while growing up involved children who ran away from home with monotonous regularity, usually to camp in the wilderness, and it seemed like the thing to do.   My own attempt at it had been some years before my discovery of My Side Of the Mountain, when, as a ten-year-old, I’d run away to the tree outside my grandparents’ house.  For the first couple of hours I had enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversations of mynahs and jungle babblers, and observing buffaloes pass beneath me, but the tree limb wasn’t the most comfortable perch.  To my everlasting chagrin, when I returned to the house in a few hours, bored and hungry, I found that nobody had missed my absence.

But there was something different about this book.  It made the animal inhabitants of that mountainside come alive, in a way that I had experienced in my own interactions with non-humans, but had not been able to articulate.  Later I would realize that this aliveness was really a way of recognizing that animals had agency – they were actors in their own dramas, with their own agendas and worldviews.  Without turning animals into cutesy Disney-style caricatures, without over-sentimentalizing, George had brought forth in her fiction what naturalist Henry Beston had so clearly articulated about animals:  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

Re-Post: The Creatures We Don’t See: Thoughts on the Animal Other

Note: Back in 2008, the incredible Jeff VanderMeer invited me to guest-post on his blog.  Recently I had occasion to re-read this post, and I decided to post it here on Antariksh Yatra, minimally edited.  Unfortunately the post isn’t complete without the discussions in the comments, so here’s the original link.  

 

When I was around ten years old my family moved from New Delhi to the town of Patna, in Bihar, for two years.  Patna was a small, untidy, sprawling little town (relative to Delhi) and the area where we lived consisted of large, old-fashioned houses set among enormous gardens.  We stayed with my grandparents, and a little way from their house you could see fields.  Sometimes my brother and I would wake very early and go on a trek through the fields, pausing to watch a farmer and his bullock drawing water from a well, or looking at pond life in a ditch filled with rainwater.  In the evenings there would be kids playing cricket in the big maidan in front of the house, and my brother and I would be there too (it was in those days that I developed my now-lost skill as a fairly fearsome spin bowler).  Some of the pariah dogs that lived in packs in our neighbourhood would join in, especially if we were playing football (soccer).  Pariah dogs are descended from the earliest domesticated dogs — they are a tribe unto themselves, and live parallel lives with humans in towns and cities in India.  They are also beautiful, intelligent animals — you can see some really nice pictures here. 

 

One of these pariah dogs was a brown and white dog of noble bearing whom we called Moti (the word sounds like “more-thee” without the ‘r’, and means “pearl”).  As he was a regular on the football field, we became friends.  He would come over to our house if he wanted a meal.  Sometimes he would walk me home if I was late returning from a friend’s house.  There was a boy who lived next door who was friendly with Moti too, but he wanted Moti as a house-dog.  So he trapped the dog for three days in his house, spoiling him, feeding him delicacies and playing with him.  But at the first opportunity, Moti escaped.

Why KSR’s 2312 is a Fail on Many Counts

First I want to say that this is not a review, but my personal feelings about some aspects of the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I’m not going to discuss plot points and language and story arc except where they speak to the points I do want to make.  And there are spoilers galore.  STOP HERE if you want to read the book first.  

Vegetative Musings

Contrary to what non-academics think, those of the professorial persuasion rarely have the summers off in any but the most mundane sense of the term.  Being off from teaching generally means that this is your one chance to a) recover from semester burn-out, b) breathe, c) do research or other scholarly work so that you can keep your brain alive and keep your job, d) read about and think about interesting stuff.  The 9-to-5-ers of the world may not understand that those of my ilk cannot draw a clear boundary between work and non-work. 

So I’ve been reading, among other things.  What I’m reading could affect what and how I teach next semester, the essays and other non-fiction I write, and of course my fiction.  No real distinction between work and play for me.  Not being one of those whose life can be divided into neat, waterproof compartments, I rejoice in leaping over divisions, boundaries and walls.

Apparently, so do plants.

Peering Out at the World: Quick Notes & Links

I am peering out from behind a huge pile of undergraduate papers to see if the world is still there.  Looks like it is, for now.  So I’d like to take a few minutes to post some links.

This past week the American Association of University Women came out with a report called Why So Few?  http://www.aauw.org/research/whysofew.cfm

“Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics presents in-depth yet accessible profiles of eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers – including stereotypes, gender bias and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities – that continue to block women’s participation and progress in science, technology, engineering, and math. The report also includes up to date statistics on girls’ and women’s achievement and participation in these areas and offers new ideas for what each of us can do to more fully open scientific and engineering fields to girls and women.”

When pondering this question, which is close to my heart, I’ve always felt that we not only need to change how society views girls in relation to science and science careers but we have to address the internal culture of science in research labs and universities and colleges.   This internal culture seems to be to be oriented toward certain personality types while putting others at a disadvantage — at its extreme there can be cutthroat competition, a confrontational style of dealing not only with people but with Nature, and a narrow, blind, disconnected approach to the problem at hand.  Not everyone thrives under such conditions.  I’ll have a lot more to say about all this in a future post.

And in news from our favourite satellite, it appears that the Moon might have more water than we thought.  600 million metric tons distributed over 40 craters near the lunar north pole.  What this makes possible is: stations on the moon, and a place from which to launch space exploration vehicles — a stepping stone to Mars and beyond!  Water means life resource and rocket fuel.

Somebody needs to write a poem about this.  I mean, all that water on the moon!

All of our spacely adventures can only happen if we have the sense to save the planet by slowing and reversing global warming.  Tomorrow, Saturday March 27, is Earth Hour, the annual momentum-building, consciousness-raising event that is growing hugely every year.  I plan to be one of the millions around the globe participating by turning of my lights for an hour, 8:30 to 9:30 pm.  Last year’s participation was around a billion people and hundreds of cities, organizations and institutions.

This reminds me that I started this blog about a year ago, so this is an anniversary of sorts.  I’ve posted only sparsely but have somehow managed to maintain the pace, however slow, of inflicting my thoughts upon the world.

In personal news, I am surprised and pleased to note that one of my novellas, Distances, published by the good and brave folks at Aqueduct Press, is a Tiptree honor book for 2009, as announced here.  Congratulations to the Tiptree winners (Hi Greer!) and honor list authors, and to L. Timmel Duchamp (Hi Timmi!) who gets special recognition for her tremendous Marq’ssan Cycle.

Also, I have a story coming out soon in Strange Horizons.  It is vaguely related to the first story I published there a long time ago, one called Three Tales from Sky River.  When I first wrote that story, years ago, I imagined a woman who went from planet to planet in a far future starfaring age collecting stories like the three tales of the title.  I wanted to write a story about her, but when I finally managed to write it last year, it turned out that it wasn’t just about her, and she needed a teller as well, and somehow events in 11th century C.E. India became important.  In short, it got complicated, hopefully in a good way.