Randy Cohen likes to learn about people slant. Instead of asking them about what they do, etc., etc., he asks them about a person, a place, and a thing that are meaningful to them. It was a pleasure to talk with him about girls in India, maps of Texas, and falcons over Cape Cod. Person Place Thing from Northeast Public Radio’s WAMC was produced with Orion magazine. Have a listen here.
The summer Southwest monsoon has brought some rain and momentary relief to Chennai, but the question of how to mitigate water shortages (and excesses) are not gone. After my New York Times op-ed last month, I’ve had a chance to speak about water with others interested in the story. These issues are not disappearing anytime soon. From the World Resources Institute:
New data from WRI’s Aqueduct tools reveal that 17 countries – home to one-quarter of the world’s population—face “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year.
I spoke to Mark Goldberg on the Global Dispatches Podcast. In essence, do all the small stuff first: restore wetlands, enforce rainwater catchment mandates, educate on conservation, fix leaky pipes, capture water across the landscape with small-scale systems that work with nature, and not against it. Can India develop a new 21st-century model of sustainable development? The opportunity is still there, though hard to see evidence of embracing such possibility. Listen to the podcast here:
On the BBC’s podcast Beyond Today, I spoke with host Matthew Price about the crisis. BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan also reported from Chennai directly. Have a listen here.
I also make a cameo appearance in this Al Jazeera The Stream news piece, featuring Veena Srinivasan, a senior fellow with Ashoka Trust, Raj Bhagat Palanichamy, a data manager with World Resources Institute India, and T.M. Krishna, a musician, artist, and activist. Watch the episode here:
And then sit back and watch/listen to T.M. Krishna’s haunting song Poromboke:
Rebecca Conway for The New York Times
While researching and reporting A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India), I explored small-scale, across-the-landscape solutions for water crises in India. Even just a few years later, the world is warmer and there are more people in need of water. When the major South Indian city of Chennai, where my father is from and where many in my extended family live, ran out of piped water during its current drought, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how India might consider a new approach to development that might embrace the methods I wrote about in the book. Here’s how it begins:
India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.
Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the city’s annual rainfall. Last year, the city had 55 percent less rainfall than normal. When the monsoon ended early, in December, the skies dried up and stayed that way. Chennai went without rain for 200 days. As winter passed into spring and the temperature rose to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, its four water reservoirs turned into puddles of cracked mud.
Some parts of the city have been without piped water for five months now. Weary women with brightly colored plastic jugs now await water tankers, sometimes in the middle of the night. On June 20, the delayed summer monsoon arrived as a disappointing light shower.
These water crises are now global and perennial….
Read the rest of “India’s Terrifying Water Crisis” here at The New York Times.
Photo by Norbert Schiller via Wikimedia Commons
I am a half-daughter of India. I have watched the South Asian nation develop since I first visited Madras as a young girl, my Indian father bringing his fair-skinned American wife and my brother and me from America on multiple trips to visit dozens of relatives along the shores of the Bay of Bengal.
In the forty years since that first visit, the country has undergone a whole-scale transformation. Never have there been so many humans with so much elemental need for healthy food, clean water, and dependable energy systems. How will India bring these basics to her citizenry?
In recent years, I have visited as an environmental journalist and Fulbright scholar to seek out the answer to this question, investigating the state of India’s natural world and exploring how the elements – earth, water, fire, air and ether – are faring. I found a subcontinent in crisis, but I also found individuals and organisations reinventing their landscapes and lives.
Whether they will receive support from the government remains to be seen.
More events coming up for Elemental India. Specific details here. Hope to see you and do share the word with others you know in the following cities:
Pune:
• 11 Feb: Fergusson College
Chennai:
• 15 Feb: MIDS
• 16 Feb: IIT-M Research Park
Bengaluru:
• 19 Feb: Azim Premji University
• 19 Feb: IISc Centre for Ecological Sciences
Hyderabad:
• 26 Feb: University of Hyderabad
“We Speak Up: Can a Generation of Indian Girls Find their Voice?”
Another Delhi event coming up on Monday, when I’ll be speaking at Apne Aap‘s Feminism Beyond Boundaries series. I’ll be focusing on the fifth element in my book, in which I traveled to Bihar to explore population growth along with reproductive and sexual health training for teens. One girl transformed her life when she slipped a note into her father’s pocket….
Join me Monday, January 25, 2016 at the Oxford Bookstore Connaught Place (81, N Block, Connaught Place), 4:00 pm, to hear more.
Check out the Facebook event page here.
Bikaner carcass dump, Rajasthan. Photo by Meera Subramanian.
An excerpt from Elemental India / A River Runs Again, featured in The Caravan.
The vultures are gone, but the livestock carcasses they once consumed by the millions remain. Many are collected and deposited at carcass dumps like the one called Jorbeer on the outskirts of Bikaner, where dogs run wild amid an endless supply of food.
As I travelled around India, I kept hearing about aggressive dogs. Soon after I arrived in Bikaner, someone told me about two local girls, eight or nine years old, who were attacked by dogs at night, while they were sleeping. They were such easy prey. “They were hurt so badly, but not killed,” the man told me.
“The police came and took the dogs away, but I was so astonished…how can there be dogs like this?”
Join me, Delhiites! I’ve landed in India for the release of Elemental India: The Natural World in a Time of Crisis and Opportunity, and hope you’ll join me at one of the upcoming events. This is the official book launch, Tuesday, January 19th (tomorrow!) at The American Center at 6:00 pm. I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful Aseem Shrivastava, co-author of Churning the Earth.We’ll be touching upon faith in a seed, vanishing vultures, rivers reborn, choking air, population pressures, and the eternal question of hope. And there’ll be refreshments. Co-hosted by The American Center, HarperCollins India, USIEF (Fulbright) and Caravan magazine. Do come! Details here.
Update: Here’s a podcast of our conversation:
More events in the works for Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai over the next month. Find all details for confirmed events here.
