Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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Africa, voting in national elections with a smartphone can cut election fraud by 60%.4 In Afghanistan, the police receive their government salaries through mobile phone banking because it cuts down on fraud. Into the Anthropocene, mobile phones could even start to democratise markets. Enterprising individuals using crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter have a way to access markets that have been the exclusive domain of big corporations since the days of the East India Company.
It’s no wonder that the way our species communicates globally has become fundamentally different in the Anthropocene. In 2012, the UN telecoms agency predicted that by 2014 cellphones will outnumber people on this planet, with 70% of new phone subscriptions coming from the developing world; by 2017, there will be over 10 billion networked mobile devices around the world, carrying 130 exabytes of data a year. Up until 2003, humans had created 5 billion gigabytes of digital information. In 2010, the same amount of information was created every two days; by 2013, it was every ten minutes. By 2020, 5 billion people are expected to have access to the Internet via mobile devices, an extent of connectivity that governments and development organisations couldn’t have dreamed of just twenty years ago.5
This is made up of users in the poor world becoming part of the collective human conversation, where they can have influence beyond the restrictions of wealth, geography, caste, gender or other ways people have traditionally been stifled. The human species in the Anthropocene is a changed, networked animal. With this technology we have exceeded the limitations not just of our human body but of our hive – we’ve become a global community. The secret of our enormous planetary influence is our cooperation as a species, and our technological exploitation of our atmosphere-based communications system takes this cooperation to a new level. It is an accelerator of humanity’s impact, and as such can be used to increase our destructive traits, or it could prove our salvation: a tool that enables development and human progress, showing us in real time how we are affecting other humans and the rest of the biosphere.
Mahabir well understood the opportunities that communications technology could bring to remote villages when he set about transforming Nangi.
At the end of a line of regular-looking computer hardware, I spot something a little different – a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards. ‘Ah, these are the first computers that I built with recycled parts donated from old computers, because we couldn’t afford new ones,’ Mahabir explains. In 1997, Australian students donated the four adjacent computers, and the rest were sent over subsequent years by people in the US and Europe. Without a telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realised that to bring twenty-first-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to be imaginative. In 2001, he wrote to a BBC World Service radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home Wi-Fi technology to connect his village to the Internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.
Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station using television antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak – and from there sent the signal more than twenty kilometres away to Pokhara which had a cable-optic connection to the capital Kathmandu. Nangi was on the Internet.
‘I used a home Wi-Fi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of four metres,’ he says. ‘I emailed the company and told them that I had done twenty-two kilometres with it – I was hoping they might donate some equipment, but they didn’t believe what I told them.’
One of the advantages of Wi-Fi is that it doesn’t require costly and resource-intensive infrastructure – mile upon mile of cables and copper wires do not have to be laid over complicated terrain. Development in the Anthropocene need not be as dirty and as invasive of the natural world as it has been to date. More than forty other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the Internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. ‘The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] phones,’ he says. ‘And they can talk for free within the village network using the local VoIP system.’ I realise that Mahabir and the kids have been using VoIP for longer than me. Having always had access to a landline phone, I’ve only started using VoIP – Skype – within the past couple of years to make cheaper overseas calls, whereas the village adopted the technology a decade ago.
Teachers are a rare commodity in this part of the world, but the children are no longer being taught by barely literate soldiers. The Wi-Fi network means that a teacher, based here or even in Kathmandu, can teach classes across many villages, face to face with students via the monitors, answer questions and receive and mark homework. Mahabir’s ‘tele-teaching’ network also allows the few good teachers in the region to train others. He is also developing an e-library of educational resources in Nepali that will be free to use, and working with the One-Laptop-One-Child organisation, which he hopes will provide laptops to children in the region. Thanks to Mahabir’s work, a generation of children that would otherwise miss out on an education until the country gets around to training some teachers, instead have unprecedented opportunities to learn and discover a world beyond the dreams of their parents – it’s a good definition of development.
But how does he power such a system so far from the grid? ‘We built a hydropower generator in the stream at the bottom of the village,’ he says. He wants to install another, bigger turbine when they can afford it, so that the entire village has power – at the moment, the precious electricity is reserved for the computers and server.
As we embark on another full day’s climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component there, we come across another of Mahabir’s networked villages. Here, towering incongruously among the simple stone-roofed huts is a huge white satellite dish. ‘We tried for years to get some sort of phone system here,’ Mahabir explains. ‘Then a few months ago, we got sent this dish by an NGO for a satellite phone and television. By then of course we had the wireless network Internet phone so we didn’t need it. Anyway, it would be far too expensive to make calls on that.’ Still, the villagers have erected it on the roof of the school where it sits like a totem to the useless. Nobody in this village has a television set, let alone the electricity to power one.
Mahabir was quick to realise that the connectivity had numerous other important applications. In the past year, the village has built a telemedicine and dentistry clinic, in which village midwives and nurses can talk using the webcam directly to doctors in a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses have been trained in reproductive medicine, childcare, wound and accident management, and basic dentistry.
The Wi-Fi has also improved livelihoods here, allowing yak farmers to talk to their families and dealers several days’ walk away, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to home-made paper, jams and honey. Finding a sustainable income stream is key to keeping the other social development projects going, and Mahabir is betting on tourism. Many of the villages are located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes in the Annapurna mountain range, and they have started advertising campsite facilities and trekking guide services for tourists. The local teenagers and adults know the routes well, and Mahabir is organising training for them, including some rudimentary English. And with the help of Western volunteers, the villages have come together to build their first tourist hostel just below Relay No. 1, on a remote stretch of the mountains. ‘We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the Internet so that more tourists will come, which will help finance the education and health projects,’ he says.
Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to transform the village, including a yak cross-breeding farm. The warming rate here in the Himalayas is five times higher than the global average and it’s forcing yak farmers into ever more remote and dangerous locations, because the thickly coated animals can’t live below 3,000 metres. Mahabir is trying to cross the yaks with cows to produce a useful pack animal that is hardy, can live at lower