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!

Imagination, Climate Futures, and the Politics of ‘Positivity’

I have the honor of being one of four international writers as part of the Climate Imagination Project of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, in collaboration with the upcoming UN Climate summit COP 26 in November of this year.  My colleagues are:  Libia Brenda, a writer, editor, and translator based in Mexico City; Xia Jia (pen name of Wang Yao), a speculative fiction author and associate professor of Chinese Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University; Hannah Onoguwe, a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in Yenagoa, in the Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. Read more about them here!

Since we are charged with creating, through fiction, ‘positive’ climate futures, and because ‘positive’ is used in so many senses, I want to interrogate the term ‘positive’ here, in the light of the new and unsurprisingly dire UN Climate report, IPCC AR6. 

Above: Global Warming from 1880 to 2020. Animation by NASA

What does it mean to even talk of positivity at a time like this, when people less privileged than global urbanites are already experiencing various degrees of apocalypse?  As Barbara Ehrenreich so eloquently articulates in this animated video, the term is loaded.  “Be Positive” has been used by authoritarian governments to suppress dissent and distract from their failure to deal with real problems.  When the second wave of the pandemic hit India, government leaders pushed positive thinking even as the crisis revealed the lack of proper planning and preparation.  A hollow ‘Positive thinking’ is a luxury afforded to the privileged, who are insulated through wealth and power from the worst effects of pandemics and climate change.  At best, such positivity is delusional in a world of vaccine discrimination, melting ice sheets, deadly heat waves and disappearing species.  At worst it is cruel in its dismissal of the real suffering of real people and nonhuman species, and harmful because it distracts from meaningful action.  This kind of empty positivism may well be how politicians and billionaires anaesthetize their consciences in order to sleep at night, as a source of comfort, an alternative to taking a good, hard look at themselves in the mirror.  I want no part of that.  I’d rather be a thorn in the side of such people. 

The kind of ‘positivism’ I want to talk about in the context of climate fiction is much more in line with the ‘optimism of the will’ attributed to Antonio Gramsci. The kind of positive future I want to imagine does not shy away from real problems of the world, nor does it look beyond or around them. Instead, it engages with real problems in an imaginative way.  Our present is already dystopic for billions of people and millions of other species.  We can’t usefully imagine ‘positive’ futures without first acknowledging this, without attempting to walk through – not around – the valley of despair and suffering with all who are forced to do so by the powers that be.  What dystopian stories do is to walk into this valley and stay there.  While dystopias are often necessary as warnings and wake-up calls, an overabundance of them can stifle and constrain our thinking by evoking fear and despair.  Fear is useful and necessary, but when we are stuck in it, it can paralyze us into inaction; worse, it is hackable, as one might ascertain from the rise of populist authoritarian leaders around the globe.  A certain kind of fear response seems make us more likely to give up our power to others, to seek ‘strongmen’ to lead the nation, or to surrender agency to technobillionaires. 

So what I would consider ‘optimism of the will’ in the context of climate change, biodiversity loss and our various other social-environmental crises would be to use the power of speculative fiction to do the hard work of imagining ways to engage usefully with our current crises.  To avoid becoming pointless escapism or heartless dismissal of stark reality, such an approach must be grounded in place.   After all, climate change is a global phenomenon, but it manifests locally as changes in temperature, precipitation, and the like.  Abstractions like a target of 1.5 ⁰C global average surface temperature are important and necessary in certain contexts, but used carelessly they can obscure the fact that some places will be quite a bit hotter than others even with such an average being maintained globally. Similarly, the term ‘net-zero has been co-opted to allow business as usual – if you are an industry emitting carbon dioxide, no problem, you just have to offset your emissions by planting trees (no matter that a plantation isn’t a forest and trees take time to grow) or capturing carbon through still-unproven technologies.  Or, you can go for the brilliant illogic of the US and the EU that promotes burning forests as a net-zero technology. You can always hide carbon excesses through global accounting tricks.  Then, net-zero becomes a smokescreen that allows the very same socio-economic structures to continue to exist that caused the problem in the first place.  You can pollute here, and claim to offset emissions over there. 

Hence the importance of place, localness and community control over resources.  It’s not that local and global are in opposition here – both are important, and we must connect one to the other. Because we are in a planetary crisis, I believe we need stories from multiple places, with multiple voices so that we can make connections across scales.  Imagination inspired and aided by reality can be a powerful instrument.  Consider for example what communities around the world are already doing, in their distinct geographies and cultures, to deal with their problems.  There is a lot that speculative fiction writers can learn from real people. Consider Parvati Devi, a woman from an impoverished village in Jharkhand, India, who, along with several other women, regenerated their degraded forest over twenty years of protection and care, thus regaining some measure of water security in a land desertified by forest destruction for development projects. The women who saved their forest have no formal education, and live hard lives.  There is no doubt that they have multiple reasons to weep, to mourn, to suffer, and they do.  Yet when I got the chance to speak to Parvati Devi (she had to travel 5 kilometers to speak to us via a borrowed phone) she was passionate, articulate, ebullient, determined.  This is, to me, what climate action should look like – communities deeply engaged with crisis, drawing upon collective intelligence, mourning, grieving, celebrating and working through problems together, informed by a generous, empathetic, courageous way of being in the world.  

Above: Parvati Devi with other village women in Jharkhand. Photo Credit: S. Mukherji

A misalliance between the complex, nonlinear nature of climate reality and our simple, mechanistic frameworks of thinking is likely to encourage false solutions and false optimism. Mainstream paradigms can be challenged by the ideas and actions of people marginalized by modern industrial civilization, which may give rise to new and better ways of working through the apocalypse.  This is one reason why Indigenous epistemologies are so crucial. Some of them point to an entirely different, even revolutionary way of being in the world, see, for example Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay on an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, or Kyle Whyte’s notion of Time as Kinship. In my new to-read book pile are such works as ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World,” by Tyson Yunkaporta, Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling), Whale Snow: Inupiat, Climate Change and Multispecies Resistance in Arctic Alaska by Chie Sakakibara. In all these readings are currents of possibility, and a kind of ebullient, restorative, joyful positivity that can only be wrought by those who have walked through, and are still walking through the hell of colonialism, precarity, and climate impacts, and surviving.

One of the great comforts we have is that there is no lack of people with good ideas who are active in the world. Parvati Devi isn’t an exception – there are hundreds of such initiatives led by so-called ordinary people all over India and the world. The denial of their intelligence, creativity and agency is one of the biggest mistakes that the privileged of the world can make.  Top-down approaches are likely to fail without the crucial information and action that comes from the ground up – the former must be informed and animated by the latter.

This is why I am glad to note that the description of the Climate Imagination project specifies stories about “collective action, aided by scientific insights, culturally responsive technologies, and revolutions in governance and labor.”

Onward!

The World’s Still Here

Well, it looks like the world is still here.  I’ve been so busy that it has been hard to find a moment to breathe. Much of the busy-ness is good, there’s just too much of it!  So this moment represents an attempt to breathe, and what better way to do that than to write a short, reflective post?  

Snow has fallen after months here in the Northeastern US.  It is at the moment just a thin blanket but I am still astonished at how a snowfall changes everything.  Sounds are muffled and the world becomes luminous.  My appreciation of snow is tempered by the need to shovel it when it is above a couple of inches, but for the moment it is nice to watch it falling outside my window.  Over a cup of tea and samosas it would be perfect, but I have no milk and no samosas.  Sigh. 

There is an interesting discussion about Climate Change over at Strange Horizons to which I’ve contributed.  Worth checking out. See here for a roundtable with some pretty cool authors and here for my article on the Durban talks in December.   

That’s all, folks, for now. 

 

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