Much more than a few tents

Old timers say that not so long ago, maybe 15 years ago, the town of Darchen, at the base of Mt. Kailash, was mostly a few tents, most of the year. Permanent houses, tucked near the mouth of the canyon that leads to Mt. Kailash’s sacred inner kora, were small traditional homes. Pilgrims and traders who came for the summer season would pitch their nomad’s tents in the plains, a transient summer mecca.

Today, Darchen is a district capital and slated for new development. This spring, while I was there, a road was being paved through the town and out to the highway that connects towards the west and east. Lower in the plains, new homes, hotels, restaurants, shops, and government buildings rise against the dust of the plateau. The older buildings, closer to the ridges and valleys of Kailash, remain.

Darchen is a staging area for any visit to Mt. Kailash. It is also home to a trio of exciting projects: a traditional Tibetan medicine factory, medical school and clinic. And a small guest house. This spring there were several dozen medical students arriving for class.

For us, Darchen was to be a base for 10 or so days of hiking around the inner and outer kora areas. Dank hotel rooms, electricity from 6-10 pm, no Internet, and no running water, made it not the most luxurious accommodations, but it would do. The locals, called gang ri wa (Tibetan = gangs ri ba), make it an especially interesting place. Many, especially the elders, still dress traditionally and are happy to talk about those good ol’ days when the town was mostly tents. A jovial community, thus, is findable in the winding alleyways of the older part of town.

Water flows around India

[I've returned to the world of home Internet, finally coming out of a week without, after a road crew cut the cables going to the entire village. The week was also visited by a dearth of electricity, so I'm now catching up.]

Water quality, water availability, and water rights are increasingly at risk around the world. Recently I’ve been reading up on new ideas for what to do about it, and have been especially interested in attempts to calculate ‘water footprint’ and to coax ‘virtual water’ to flow in the most efficient directions.

Water footprint formulae, like carbon footprint calculations, attempt to quantify the total amount of resource used in making, transporting, using and disposing of a particular product. You can go to waterfootprint.org and find the total amounts of water used for all kinds of things, from coffee (140 liters/cup) to clothing (2700 liters for one shirt). These calculations are difficult and imprecise, but they’re a start.

As if it’s not complicated enough to figure out the embodied water use of every product, calculating an individual’s water footprint appears to be even more challenging. Not because it’s hard to add up the total gallons used, for every process and product, but because people’s water footprints have different levels of impact depending on the availability of water in their local area.

It seems that a footprint calculation has local and global components: local availability of the resource, plus global trade in the resource. In calculating carbon footprint, I don’t think the local component is taken into account (ie the challenge of procuring petrol in India vs in the United States). But in a water footprint, it is a prominent piece. A farmer in water-rich southern China, who uses x amount for irrigation should, all else being equal, have the same water footprint as a farmer in drought-ridden sub-Saharan Africa, but the impact is less. (Water footprint)-(Water availability)=impact. Or something.

That’s water being used.  Water also moves: it moves across the world in natural form as rivers, lakes and glaciers cross borders, in man-made physical form, and in products that people move across borders. Man-made physical water trade comes in the form of massive projects: China’s South-North is a huge plan to transfer water from to the water-scarce Huang-Huai-Hai (Yellow River area) Plain in the north, from the water-rich south. India’s National River Linking Program aims to build aqueducts and upwards of 25,000 km of canals, connecting 37 watersheds around the country. Globally, projects like these that are already completed transfer around 490×10^9 m^3/yr (pdf) per year. Planned projects, mainly in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, would add 1,150 x 10^9 m^3/year.

Virtual water encompasses the water footprint that moves when a product is transported. For example, a melon grown in California, transported to New York, would carry with it the water footprint of its production. That movement is ‘virtual water.’ These days, virtual water moves around the world in all manner of ways. It turns out the flows are anything but resource-efficient, with virtual water often moving from water-scarce areas to water-rich areas. Some opponents of massive water transfer projects have been pointing toward aligning virtual water flows with the direction of the needed water transfer.

A case study of virtual water trade of agricultural products around the various parts of India asks what it would take to correct these flows, and introduced me to some of the issues. Citing a 2006 study, it says:

North China exports 52×109 m3/yr of virtual water to south China, a volume which is more than the maximum proposed water transfer volume along three routes (38 – 43×109 m3/yr) in the South-North Transfer Project. The study therefore concludes that if the “perverse” direction of virtual water trade in China can be reversed, it can act as a better alternative to physical transfer of water across basins. It is with a similar logic that the idea of virtual water trade within India is being proposed as an alternative to the NRLP.

The study goes on to look at virtual water transfer in India, which mostly flows from the dry north-west areas of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to wetter eastern areas of Bihar, and to the south, to Kerala.  It’s pretty dramatic: In Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, the main water exporters, per capita water resources  2176, 2922, and 3554 cubic meters per year respectively.  In Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa, per capita water resources are 4580, 6898, and 8710 cubic meters per year respectively.

Though it would seem logical that areas rich in a resource would export products that require that resource to poorer areas, it turns out that decades watching international trade show it’s often not the case. The study considers a bunch of other factors, trying to find one that might be driving the exports in the wrong water direction.

The two factors that seem to have the most impact on agricultural produce exports are ‘per capita cropped area (area under agricultural production)’ and ‘access to secure markets’. There are many political, cultural, and economic reasons why this might be.

Perhaps partly because in areas where there is more growing, there is more irrigation and therefore more subsidy, propping up an illusory water availability perception, or driving down water ‘prices’. ‘Per capita cropped area’ may not take into account fallow land (not that there’s much in India), or land that could be productive if given the same level of public infrastructure. Other production factors, like local knowledge, pests, branding/perception, traditions also must play a part. And, access to secure markets is a diplomatic phrase encompassing the buying policy of the Food Corporation of India, which buys a huge percentage of all crops in its massive food security and subsidization projects, favoring some areas (that happen to be more water-scarce) over others.

The conclusion is that water scarcity is not the most important factor. Yet. Until it is, it won’t drive agricultural transport. The study makes some interesting points about the main factors, land availability or access to markets:

By importing food grains from a land rich state, a land scarce region is economizing on its land use. Following the virtual water trade logic, this can be termed as virtual land trade. A land-scarce region (such as Bihar) would import crops from regions where land productivity is higher (for instance, Punjab). In order to produce the same amount of food in Bihar, Bihar would have to employ more land than Punjab (Aggarwal et al., 2000). If, and as long as, land is the critical constraining resource, Bihar would like to economize on its land use, even at the cost of inefficient or incomplete utilization of its abundant water resources.

This study didn’t include the environmental or economic costs of transporting goods, which might change the equation as well. Though that’s another set of thorny issues — trade is a good thing, so is locally produced and consumed food.  There are numerous ways to look at this information as an opportunity to clean up policy, start small enterprises, and educate communities on what they can do.  I’ll be looking into it more, as I am able.

Peripatetic ponderings on tradition

Most afternoons, if there is no need to go to town, are spent taking a walk around the rugged countryside. Yesterday we went a new way for me — down the mountain, towards a village in a saddle between two ridgelines. We stopped on one ridge outcropping and watched the scene for awhile, seemingly idyllic. Late afternoon sun made for rich browns and yellows of the stone and earthen houses, and deep greens of barley fields finally growing, with a little rain from the last few days. Smoke rises — dinner is on, and the sound of a flute filters up to our perch. On the trail, men walk home from the direction of town. They wear smiles, perhaps of a day well done, perhaps of a post-work drink, perhaps just happy to be going home.

(Water is low, but still running in most streams around the village.)

I wonder about this place. I’m sure it’s not so idyllic as it seems, replete with the problems of any community. Yet watching the coming home, end of day routine there, I notice a depth to its roots. Something in my soul identifies with this, like an instinctual response to the call-and-response of heritage. Traditions, gossip, stories, local mythology. These are deep-seated beliefs, and important to someone’s identity — their understanding of self, and an outsider’s appreciation of them. This set of roots could be termed traditional; sometimes, it is backwards, parochial, fearful of intrusion. So I wonder, why might a traditional society come to be seen as parochial?

In America and western Europe, at the beginning of industrialization, the coming modernity was often portrayed as a good thing, a shedding of its parochial layers — an increase of the autonomy of women, the rugged individualism of the Romantics calling to each member of the family to play a role in larger society (ironically, the Romantics, though they advocated a return to nature, were never really ideologically aligned with the traditional farmers, at least as well as I recall my mid-19th Century philosophy).

Modernity can, conversely, turn traditional into parochial, via fear of the other. As long as there has been modernization, there has been deep discomfort about the erosion of cultural ways of life. Yet like the optimistic attitude of the 19th Century, perhaps there are still benefits to modernization in a traditional society. I’ve been thinking about the fact that modernity may provide some common ground for understanding between cultures. Rhetoricians speak of finding the common ground in an argument or audience in order to fuse understanding. When two different people come together, there must be something for them to meet on. Is this why, say, a younger generation might have an easier time finding common ground than their parents? (It gets much more complicated, certainly.) But there may be a simpler way.

Today the world is moving. Around here, the different groups of transplanted people, Tibetans, Kashmiris, plains Indians, visitors, do get along on a surface level, but they are also quite predatory of each other. Everyone is transient; so nobody invests in community. Yet people pine for roots, even as they give them up. My travel partner John pontificates about kosmopoli, being a citizen of the world, about his not having the typical sense of roots but instead cultivating roots and understanding that go deeper than tradition. What are the universal things that go deeper than the obvious common ground? Compassion, caring, a sense of responsibility or duty to others. I think that if, as travelers, we cannot place at least this much in the way of roots, it’s easy to do damage to the communities through which we move, as well as to ourselves. It seems instinctual, as I said above, so if uprooted from home, the roots must go somewhere. Otherwise, we’re like stones skipping across the world like across a still pond, making only ripples.

What does this all mean? I’m still working that out. But I’m curious to sort out more more of how these ideas fit into some of the larger things I’m thinking about, cultivating leadership, entrepreneurship, and environmental sustainability at the village level. Will have to take another walk and see what emerges.

High and Too Dry

mountains and forest around dharamsala

The days here dawn sunny and warm, a bit too reliably for this time of year. Though spring comes early in the lower Himalaya, the area around Dharamsala is meant to be one of the wettest areas at elevation in India. This past winter, apparently it only rained once.

Since my arrival, a few days have shown enough thunderclouds and rumbles to make us unplug the DSL modem, but not even enough raindrops to wet all the stones on the patio. Springs, the water fountains of the area, are all running at a trickle. There are several stone washing-places, some built decades ago, that are now mostly unvisited. It’s not surprising when one looks up at the mountains above Dharamsala — areas that should be covered in snow are brown, and areas that are snow-covered are much smaller than in past years. Historically, some of these have been permanent, year-round snow fields, that provided the reliable water source for springs, streams, rivers, ponds, fields, villages, and the diverse wildlife of the area.

Water scarcity in the surrounding villages is becoming a serious problem, and a main item of conversation between locals. The landlord here mentioned it this morning, indicating that though we were on a privileged water supply, he was still going to add another 10,000 liter tank for storage. A friend who lives up the mountain and relies entirely on rainwater and springs may have to store even more water from monsoon time to make up for the rest of the year.

I understand that monsoon season has lengthened substantially, now languishing over up to 5 months of the year. At that time, of course, rain is plentiful. But the rain is fleeting, it’s not stored high up, and once it runs down the mountain as swollen streams and the occasional mudslide, it’s gone. It doesn’t stay as snow in the mountains or seep down to the level of groundwater, enough to be relied on at other times — unless it’s stored in a huge tank.

And I’ll just mention, but won’t get into, the compounded problem of water scarcity in areas dependent on hydroelectric operations for their electricity.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know enough about the possible solutions. The social dynamics of a village reliant on surface water (that, coming from the high Himalaya, is generally free at least from debris and chemicals if not pristine) would have to change if it were to switch to well water. And well systems have their own environmental questions and may not even be possible. Water tower construction is a possible solution, though would require infrastructure to maintain, secure and dole out water to the constituent parties. I did see one group of men working on a water storage station, enlarging a building in one of the poorer areas.

Years ago as an intern at the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council I worked on a draft water allocation plan for the state that prioritized water rations in times of scarcity. I don’t know what came of the drought plan (except that it became lower priority when the current drought ended), but I do remember many days around the office wondering, tourism or farming? Marine industry or residential lawn watering? On some level, the answers are clear — drinking water over boat washing — but the issue got much more thorny: cranberry bog farmers or farm stand agriculture, shopkeepers or tourism. Which part of the economic ecosystem is more important, and who gets to decide?

Here in Dharamsala, where people live both at the edge of survival and in the lap of luxury, this debate is very challenging indeed. Tourism is an important economic driver of the area, yet it’s fueling poorly thought-out growth, including a proliferation of cheaply-constructed and mostly unoccupied hotels. And tourism uses water — tourists themselves, hotels washing the roads and landscaping their grounds, drivers washing cars, etc. A ballooning population is also a large problem. These areas might support sparse habitation, but the towns sprouting up are expanding at an alarming rate. In the traditional villages, where the image of running water invokes streams, not pipes and faucets, and water must be carried to the house or fields, water usage is low and measured. Yet irrigation, infrastructure, health care, and many other signs of development and modern standard of living, increase water use. How can traditional areas benefit from development, without depleting their essential resources? Beyond that, how can local inhabitants mitigate the water shortage that is clearly coming?

Snowland part deux

I left Tibet a month ago, and am back in Vermont contemplating the existential questions of the meaning of “home”, and “purpose” and whatnot.  I’m also enjoying the fleeting ability to look at a usually-familiar place with somewhat foreign eyes.  Things that are accepted here seem unnecessary, and things that are expected here seem special.  This is especially clear to me, as I sit in a comfortably warm home in the midst of a snowstorm.

In Tibet, when it snows animals die and roads are impassible until the snow clears by itself — by wind or sun.  There are no plows, and if there were there would be no heavy machinery to drive them.  In Vermont, it snows for a few hours and then the road crews are out in force.  We are inconvenienced for a day, max.  And then we go skiing.  In Nepal, where I griped about the roads at least once, I saw not one truck or bulldozer, let alone a road crew equipped with more than a few women with baskets to carry dirt.

Roads, in most of today’s societies, are the stuff of life.  We take them for granted in the US but in most of the world they’re polluted, overcrowded, deteriorating, impassible, blocked by checkpoints, under constant construction, or simply non-existant.  Traditionally, we were insular and self-sufficient enough not to need to get around so much.  But that isn’t the case anymore, and many economic development plans wind up coming back to this basic infrastructure — which must be addressed before anything else can be seriously considered.  But the history and politics of road building are colorful and can be quite problematic.

I remember pontificating in my journal in Tibet about the arrival of roads to many of the remote villages and areas.  We were first to drive on a road that was built up to a far-away, high elevation monastery.  What does it mean, to a villager with little contact with the outside world, to have a road appear and then cars and trucks running through, easier access to a market and easier control from the government?  Especially if such a person does not have the means to travel themselves? In the US, a road is seen as such a thing of freedom, of being carefree, going to a new place, on some adventure.  They can so easily be mechanisms for control as well, and being one who can travel quite freely, I am now highly aware of these differences.

I am half a world away from the places where I saw these things.  It only takes a few flights to make the trip from one hemisphere to the other — too quick, I think, for proper adjustment to the change in culture.

Wooden Bike Classic

The Wooden Bike Classic starts tomorrow in Rwanda.  It’s part fair, part race, part showcase of the country — with cycling races and events for tourists, it highlights Rwanda’s development and traditions.  It’s run by Project Rwanda, which was started by mountain biking pioneer Tom Ritchey and delivers bicycles to Rwandans, as a vehicle for economic development.  Donated bikes (some designed specifically for the farmers), replace wooden bicycles.

Wooden bicycles are a poor tool for moving goods around the country, but they are part of the culture and history of Rwanda.  A development project could brush them aside, but I think it’s a great lesson that Project Rwanda embraced the tradition instead.

Progress and tradition have been at odds since, well, for a really really long time.  Perhaps it’s even in human nature to look back nostalgically at the good ol’ days.  (The Romantic poets lamented the advent of mass technology, and the effect it had on the old ways — and on the values they saw to be intrinsic to down home practices.)  In international development projects, bringing new devices or infrastructure often comes at a cost of the old ways and the community quality they often carry.  However, projects that bring traditional crafts and methods to Western markets (like this, and this) have proven that there is not only cultural but economic value to keeping them strong.

What I think is especially significant about the way Project Rwanda has gone about their work is the combining of new things, in this case better bikes and the sport of cycling, with a celebration of the old.  And of course they lay on a healthy plug to get involved with the development efforts there.