Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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got taken by snow leopards, so we’ve had to guard them more carefully,’ he says.
Cattle are vital for the villagers because they produce the dung that is used to fertilise the poor mountain soils, enabling their crops to grow. But the cattle need to eat and, ideally, something other than the villagers’ crops. In another of his inspired projects, while all the villages around have been destroying their sparse forests for firewood, timber and agriculture, Mahabir has fostered a substantial nursery from which he plants about 15,000 trees a year in Nangi, and more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It provides the villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder. While many people in Nepal’s hill villages suffer food shortages, the people of Nangi look well nourished – some of the teachers are even a little plump, which is hard to believe considering the slope they have to conquer just to get from their homes to the school each day.
As Mahabir calls up instructions to a guy at the top of a swaying tree who is grappling with tools to fix the relay equipment, I realise that development in these remote villages need not be hostage to a failed government. For much of the Holocene, people like the residents of Nangi would have been limited socially and economically by the geography of their village. A true visionary with determination like Mahabir can effect change village by village, incrementally constructing a web through the atmosphere. But how much faster and effective Nepal’s development would be if it were backed by national coordinated programmes, good governance and regulated private industry with access to markets, as is occurring elsewhere.
The democratisation of online information, education, communication and markets, means that the Anthropocene has the potential to lead to a more equal global society – a ‘flatter Earth’, in which the dominance of Europe, the United States and a few other rich nations is challenged by eastern and southern rivals, such as China, Brazil and India. At the beginning of the Anthropocene, there are already signs that humanity’s well-being is improving – there are now fewer ‘failed states’, more countries practising a degree of democracy, and a global reduction in poverty compared to just a few decades ago. In 2008, for the first time, the number and proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell in every continent, and the trend has continued since.6 Our exploitation of the atmosphere with mobile and Internet communication – and the entrepreneurship that follows – has played a significant role in this trend.
We humans may have brilliantly exploited the atmosphere to communicate as an interconnected super-species, but at the same time we have been horribly indiscriminate about what else we’ve put up there.
The ugly face of humanity’s atmospheric interference – the many gases we have emitted – now threatens to overwhelm our civilised and natural world. In as much as they have put off the next ice age, perhaps indefinitely, carbon gases have been to our advantage, but the greenhouse effect of those emissions is impacting every part of our planet from farmlands to deserts to oceans. We are dumping so many different pollutants into our aerial ocean that we are not only changing our climate and weather systems, we are also poisoning ourselves.
Air pollution is not new – ancient Rome was notorious for its smoky streets from wood and coal fires, and in 1306, King Edward I of England actually banned coal burning on penalty of death. Needless to say, it was ineffectual. It wasn’t until a London smog of 1952 killed an estimated 4,000 people in just four days (and a further 8,000 in the weeks and months after) that a Clean Air Act forced Londoners to burn smokeless coke rather than coal. Similar acts in the 1950s and 60 s transformed the atmospheres of New York and other cities in the then-developing world – Westerners still breathe a cocktail of pollutants, but they are mainly invisible carcinogens, like ozone and oxides of nitrogen, rather than soot and sulphurous emissions. However, the citizens of the current developing world are now experiencing similar conditions to those mid-century pea-soupers, but on a much greater scale.
The ‘dark satanic mills’ of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the coal stations that powered them, blackened the skies and caused countless deaths – air pollution from European coal power stations continues to kill more than 22,000 people every year, scientists calculate.7 Greenhouse gas emissions from smokestacks and exhaust pipes continue to pump out. But the visibly filthy skies of the past few centuries have cleared because of more stringent pollution controls that have forced factories and power plants to install scrubbing technologies and other practices. And, because the dirtiest manufacturing has moved out of western Europe.
China, where the vast bulk of dirty industry is now based, has an atmosphere so filthy that only 1% of the nation’s urban population is breathing air considered clean by European Union standards, a 2007 World Bank study found, although much of the report was redacted by the Chinese, who feared social unrest.8 Visiting Beijing in springtime, I was struck by the eerie absence of the sun. The pollution, which stung my eyes and throat, shielded the sun so thoroughly that although the cloudless days were light, the source of this light was impossible to see. And that was the city after its ‘clean-up’. China has followed Europe’s example and outsourced its dirty industry from the wealthy cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, inland to rural and less developed central and western areas, as well as to poorer countries, such as Indonesia. In doing so, China’s air quality will improve, just as Europe’s has, while the atmosphere of developing countries will worsen. Ultimately, the only way to halt the filthy process is to clean up industries such as construction and manufacturing, by using the latest plant designs in the poorest countries – and also to vastly improve efficiencies and recycling. Eventually, many dirty industries will become obsolete and be replaced by newer ones, providing an opportunity to design pollution avoidance from the outset.
The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is remarkable not because it is infused with a range of chemicals and particulates – natural events such as volcanic eruptions can produce that – nor because it is the first time humans have produced their own emissions, but because it is the first time that humans have done so on the global scale of the planet’s biggest natural events.
Our vast population – already more than 7 billion – is part of the cause. An increasing proportion of humanity relies on the goods, services and energy produced through dirty industrial activity. And on top of this, people are producing their own home-made pollution, the combined effect of which is turning the invisible air brown.
Kathmandu, Nepal’s only real city, is inscrutable through thick acrid smog. Pollution and dust generated in the bowl-shaped valley is not easily dissipated – there is limited rainfall to wash it away and little wind. The air is so laden with dirt that the shopfronts all wear a film of grime. Lacking customers, underemployed staff spend their hours pointlessly dusting and sweeping – shifting the miasma, which resettles in seconds. Visibility is so poor that flights are often cancelled or delayed, but perhaps not as often as they should be: there were five plane crashes here in 2012–13 alone, killing more than sixty people. Most of the haze, around two-thirds, comes from burning biomass for cooking, like the dung fires I saw in Nangi, with fossil fuels supplying the remainder. Plumes of smoke rise from the wood and dung fires burning in every household and merge with the emissions of factory chimneys and agricultural clearance fires. In the streets, motorbikes and cars with badly tuned engines crawl bumper to bumper, farting out sooty black puffs. The resultant fug hangs over the region for the entire season and well into the spring. It spreads in mile-long clouds of brown haze for thousands of kilometres from the Yellow Sea to the Arabian coast, and its sooty particulates have even been discovered in the Arctic ice at Svalbard.9 The brown cloud can be seen as a stain over Asia in satellite images, but it has become a highly emotive issue. When the pollution layer was at first called the Asian Brown Cloud, India complained, and so the United Nations Environment Programme renamed the haze ‘Atmospheric Brown Cloud’ during its follow-up study.
The warming effect of the brown haze adds to that of the greenhouse gases, and is hastening the retreat of the Hindu Kush glaciers and snow packs, including the snow that melts to drive Mahabir’s turbines, partly because rising air temperatures are more pronounced in elevated regions. And black unburnt carbon in the filthy clouds is being deposited on these white peaks, reducing their reflectivity and exacerbating ice melt. It’s a reason for the five-times-higher warming rate seen here, oranges growing higher on the slopes towards Nangi, and Mahabir’s overheating