Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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connectivity. His plan leapfrogs the traditional model of connectivity – improved roads followed by landline connection – and exploits the atmosphere instead.
Nangi village, home to around 800 people of the Pun tribe, has no telephone line or cellphone reception and consists mainly of subsistence vegetable farmers, yak herders and those who leave to seek their fortune as Gurkha soldiers. Mahabir was taught in the valley by retired soldiers who had never been to school themselves. They used wooden boards blackened with charcoal, writing with soft limestone from the local cliff. He first used a pen and paper in seventh grade (age 13) and a textbook in eighth grade, but even these rudimentary lessons were expensive for his father, a retired Gurkha from the British army, who had to sell all his land to pay for them. So Mahabir left school at 14 and worked for twelve years as a teacher, supporting his family and helping his brothers through school.
It took two years of writing daily application letters to universities and institutes in America before Mahabir was finally accepted with full scholarship on a degree course at the University of Nebraska in Kearney. ‘I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I wanted to bring an income in and better education and medical facilities,’ he says. Twenty-odd years after arriving in America he returned to Nangi with his dream and an equally important folder of contacts.
It is dusk and we have climbed 2,500 metres higher by the time we are greeted with an excited rush of village children who present us with garlands of sweet-scented marigolds and escort us the last few yards to Nangi. Mahabir shows me to my home for the night: a small round wattle-and-daub hut with a stone roof. I make my introductions by candlelight and share a tasty curry of home-grown vegetables cooked on a smoky dung-fuelled stove by the school’s science teacher, before falling into exhausted sleep.
In the morning Mahabir leads me through the small village, past women grinding masala spices and kneading dough for chapatis on wood and stone, past a circle of community leaders and elders sitting cross-legged and deep in discussion on the cold ground, to the school. Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles and greetings – everyone is glad to see Mahabir. He points out a rather grand, newly finished hut. ‘Girls’ composting toilet,’ he says, taking me inside. He smiles and pats the internal wall approvingly, as I stand awkwardly either side of the hole, trying not to notice the smell of, um, toilets. ‘The compost works very well for growing vegetables,’ he says.
As nations develop, societies work in increasingly technical, mechanised and complex ways, and entirely new jobs emerge to support these industries, most of which demand literacy and numeracy. Globalisation favours those who speak international languages, and the people who will shape our lives in the Anthropocene will be those whose understanding and experience goes far beyond small village life, and those who are able to negotiate the accumulated learning, wisdom and knowledge generated by millions of global citizens via the hive mind of the worldwide web. It starts with school – with reading and writing and the self-confidence and awareness that sprout from those uniquely human skills. Done effectively, education is the bridge out of poverty, and educating girls is now recognised as a transformative development goal. Educated women marry on average four years later, have at least two fewer children and provide better health care for their families, for example. And not only is the income generated by an educated person higher, the average income of the community is also raised. ‘When you educate a girl, you are educating a nation,’ a 6-year-old girl once solemnly recited to me in Uganda. So what stops girls being educated? I’ve heard everything from worries she’ll be too clever for marriage, to worries that she’ll no longer be ‘pure’ or that she’ll get pregnant. But the biggest factor is poverty – girls are first to be pulled out of class to work when money is tight. And as they get older, it’s a question of toilets. Schools that lack clean private toilets – and many have no facilities at all – lose girls once they reach puberty and begin menstruating, and they also struggle to keep female teachers. Development comes down to the importance of toilets, like the one Mahabir showed me.
Nearby, there is a fenced-off vegetable patch with plastic sheeting over half of it. ‘We started experimenting with growing vegetables later in the year, so that we would have some fresh greens all year round,’ he explains. ‘At first we needed the plastic sheeting as a kind of greenhouse, but the past three years, the warmer weather means the plants have grown perfectly well without it.’
At the far side of a rectangular patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general assembly area for the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts. We walk over to them and Mahabir pulls back the door.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array of computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a startling sight. Girls and boys, many barefooted, sit studiously working away, the only sound the clatter of keypads. ‘You want to check your email?’ Mahabir asks me, grinning at my surprise. The computer and Internet facilities here would be unusual in a school in London – here, they are astonishing.
In the Anthropocene, the world no longer needs to end at the village perimeter. Just as social development goals now include a right to electricity, it is no longer acceptable for people to be denied access to Tim Berners-Lee’s brilliant toy. Through it, we are no longer a few individuals collaborating with a few more. We are a bigger more beautiful creature: the organism of humanity, ‘Homo omnis’. We can communicate not just with remotely located people, but with everybody simultaneously – we’re even attempting to speak to aliens located elsewhere in the universe.
The atmosphere of Earth has been lit up in the Anthropocene by the billions of invisible beams of our communicating devices. And it has happened in a remarkably short time. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent in 1858 by Queen Victoria to the US president James Buchanan, and by 1902, cables encircled the world across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, connecting even faraway Australia. A century later, the phone in my pocket, beaming signals through the atmosphere, allows me to check weather reports and traffic cams, chat to my grandmother in Sydney, broadcast live to a television studio and pay my bills. Smartphones are getting so clever and human-responsive that they will soon be our personal dashboard, telling us how much exercise we do, monitoring our calorie and vitamin intake, our sleep pattern, heart rate, stress levels, cholesterol and so on. Further into the Anthropocene, some researchers believe, we will increasingly think of our smartphone as a partner – even in emotional terms.1
In East Africa, I saw how mobile money services, such as M-Pesa, are enabling phone users to transfer cash and pay for goods with the speed and convenience of an SMS text message.2 A customer pays cash to his local corner-shop agent, who then tops up his mobile money account using a special kind of secure SMS. He can then transfer money to another person or pay for something by sending a text to the recipient’s mobile phone account, which transfers the money straightaway. Even people without mobile money accounts can receive payments in the form of a text code, which can be exchanged for cash by their local corner-shop agent. For the millions of Africans who don’t meet the criteria for a bank account, or who live too far from a branch, mobile money presents an opportunity to save securely for the first time. Kenya’s M-Pesa is now used by over two-thirds of the adult population (more than 17 million people) to pay for everything from school fees to grocery and utility bills, taxi fares to airline tickets. It allows people in remote, rural areas to trade their wares in markets thousands of kilometres away, urban migrants to send money rapidly to their families in their home village, and for the government and aid agencies to distribute timely emergency cash to starving people living in slums.
Mobile phones aren’t just bringing access to money, though. A Nepali peasant with a smartphone on Google, now has more access to information than the president of the United States did fifteen years ago.3 In the Philippines most communications between the government and citizens take place by SMS texting. In Malaysia, flood warnings are sent by text message, and across the world, from quake-struck Haiti to the famines of East Africa, evacuations and relief for natural disasters are coordinated by SMS. In India, tribal groups are using mobile phones for ‘citizen journalism’, spreading information and giving voice to disenfranchised groups.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, citizens organised themselves to fight oppressive regimes using mobile phones, even bypassing government Internet and network clampdowns by