Shunya's Notes

The Tiger of Jelepara

The amazing Sunderbans, land of superlatives, is where the Ganga River meets the Indian Ocean, a great expanse of flat, mangrove covered islands, and estuaries that change salinity with the tides. Both the world's largest river delta and largest estuarine mangrove forest, it's also home to the world's largest population of Royal Bengal tigers as well as some of the world's largest crocodiles, which can get to be over 20 ft. long, with the girth of two grown men. Every year villagers are killed by the local wildlife. Three years ago, we took a boat ride through the uninhabited regions of the wildlife sanctuary. Since the islands are heavily forested and we were confined either to the boat or to fenced-in walkways on a couple of the islands, we did not see much of the unique wildlife (except baby crocs at a breeding station). No doubt, the water, too, teems with life, including elusive pods of rare freshwater dolphins, but it's too full of silt to see anything at all. The Sunderbans felt wild to me, and mysterious, a place where a thousand eyes peer at us, unsentimentally, though we are blithely unaware.

Here's a recent article on the increasing conflicts between tigers and humans in the Sunderbans. It's a story with a tragic ending, from every point of view, but it brings together several strands of complexity on questions of how people co-exist with nature (or don't), and might have done throughout human history. The people in this article live by forest subsistence in tiger territory, much as people would have throughout southern Asia for perhaps the last 60,000 years, until the tigers (and lions, and forests) were mostly killed off, in just the last hundred years. John Vidal, of the Guardian, vividly recounts the story of one tiger:

Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the river Chunkuri, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400 yards away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out.... But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night....

Now it was the animal's turn to run. First dozens of men tried to corner it, blocking off its escape routes and chasing it away from the village. The tiger was tracked through long grass and rice fields. Finally it leapt on the roof of a house. Film shot on a mobile phone by a villager shows the tiger looking perfectly relaxed.

You can see that video here—it's poor quality and grim, but worth a look. Read the full story, loaded with interesting information (via Asian Window).

Lohmann on Carbon Trading

Larry Lohmann, author and founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, explains how carbon trading works, why it is an ill-conceived response to Climate Change, and why Bush and Gore are not as far apart in their policy prescriptions as some of us believe.

Further reading:

• Al Gore's climate solution - David Morris, Alternet
• 'Obscenity' of Carbon Trading - Kevin Smith, BBC News
• The Carbon Folly - Emily Flynn Vencat, Newsweek
• Smoke Alarm: EU Shows Carbon Trading is Not Cutting Emissions, Guardian
• Carbon Trade Watch Website - various articles
• Emissions Trading - Wikipedia article, with additional links at the bottom

On Nuclear Energy

A compelling presentation on why nuclear energy must be a significant part of a clean energy solution (Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson). What's needed next is a slick production -- "An Inconvenient Truth, Part II" -- to tie it all together using more charismatic presenters.

The Last Empire

August afternoons in Shanghai, ambling down Nanjing Road with posh boutiques blasting chilled air through open doors into the sultry street, one might imagine that energy is free in China. At less than 5c per KWH, it is certainly cheap (10c in India and the US). But the real costs are hidden, though, increasingly, not very well. Most visitors to China are struck by its urban air pollution. A pall of sulphrous smoke hangs over towns and cities and even wafts through the countryside into neighboring countries. One new coal-fired power plant opens each week. Respiratory illnesses are common. In 2006, China surpassed the US to become the leading producer of green house emissions in the world.

This is not breaking news. Much has been written about China's environmental crisis in recent years: vanishing forests, encroaching desert, depleting ground water, acid rain, toxic chemicals in polluted rivers, etc. China has clearly prioritized economic growth over environmental health. But a part of the problem is inherent in the drivers of its economic growth -- China has become the industrial heartland of the world. The developed countries have, in effect, shifted their factories and pollution to China (this is one outsourcing no politician in the US complains about). As a result, as consumers, all of us are now a party to China's environmental crisis. Each time we buy a plastic toy, a blender, or an iPod, we send a puff of sulphrous smoke into China's air. And some of it is coming back to haunt us in our own backyards!

A decent survey of China's environmental malaise by Jacques Leslie recently appeared in Mother Jones:

Camels in the Arctic

Climate change has emerged as a significant issue only in the last few years. Though evidence has been building for decades, it has taken this long to reach a point where Leno & Letterman can joke about it and be understood. Al Gore's remarkable documentary certainly went a long way in building this awareness, but what left me unsatisfied about it was the lack of a plan of action. What are our options now? Their costs. Probabilities of various outcomes. Etc.

Here is a calm and rational survey article, Warmer, Warmer, by John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, on how we got here, the politics of climate change, our realistic options, viable alternate energies, and the various possible scenarios for the future, including one which might include "breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic".

I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was.

Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ‘non-binding’ declaration which reflected ‘a real change of mood’. Just what the world needs – more hot air. And then the news moves on to other things, to contaminated Anglo-Hungarian turkeys and gang shootings and potential schisms in the Anglican Church. There is a kind of falsehood built into this; at the very least, a powerful degree of denial. If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else.

Warmer, Warmer continued