Driving westward in Tibet

Dris graze before summer rainstorm outside Saga

Sitting in the quiet world of Vermont, where it rains more than Indian monsoon this year, I turn my thoughts back to dusty, dry upper Tibet.  I’ve been going through my notes, tracing the rough path of the expedition I helped organize to Mt. Kailash.

A drive northwest takes a visitor into terrain made for the minimalist.  High, dry, and isolated.  And stunningly beautiful.  Traditionally, semi-nomadic communities relied on yak (and their female counterpart dris), sheep and (more recently) goat herding, and on trading their produce with farmers.  Products included meat, yogurt, butter, yarn, rope, cloth, etc.  These days, the main road, a dirt track built up and under constant construction, carries products to this area from mainland China and the required funds to create towns along the road.  In this way, villages and meeting places became the modern-day whistle stops of the Kailash route.  Saga and Paryang see, perhaps, the most traffic, as they are logical overnight stops on the tourist track.  Mid-day stops, such as Lagtsang, also are growing rapidly.

Dust comes immediately with the building of a town, or even a homestead or teahouse, in upper Tibet.  A fine, insidious dust that gets into everything before it is noticed, and the whiteness of a wool sweater is quickly forgotten.  Soil is so thin that once it is disturbed for building, it does not regenerate — digging big holes and then filling them in and putting down sod and landscaping as we do in other climes would never work.  This is a treeless environment, for one.  And so dry that grasses, desert plants and scrub brush are the most common flora.  New policies that forbid the cutting of certain brush species are helping in places.

Another migrant to the area along with dust is fencing.  Miles and miles of fencing, given to nomads to demarcate their seasonal pastureland.  An old woman outside one small encampment says she likes the fencing — it keeps squabbles down.  Sometimes, it is clear that the fencing isn’t serving so well, and is then seen to be taken down in places or the wires pushed up to the top of a few fenceposts to allow animals to pass underneath.

The drive westward rewards with incredible scenery.  The Himalaya, to the south, stand high and snow covered.  The Yarlung Tsangpo river valley affords many areas for grazing and for the khyang, Tibet’s sturdy wild asses.  Photos are coming soon.

Waiting for rainy season

[More thoughts and notes from Tibet]

Most pilgrims traveling to Kailash from the subcontinent leave Nyalam after a few days of acclimatization and head for higher ground.  They cross the 5100 m Tong La pass and then leave the Friendship Highway to sneak off-road on a shortcut that goes due west towards Saga, the next major town a day’s drive away.  The drive goes through a range of landscapes — open grassland with vistas of Shishapangma mountain, dry desert-like, rolling hills, and it skirts one whole side of a beautiful lake called Pekud Tsho (pad khud mtsho in Tibetan script).   This lake is a popular stop-and-photo spot for most groups (with the requisite detritus included at the photo-op spot).  A tiny compound with a tea house supports passers-through and is manned by a few local ladies and older men.  It is usually a rather poor area, and especially at the time of year that my group passed through: after winter, but before the rains.  The summer rains, the bits of monsoon that make it over the high mountains, are essential for the health of nomads and farmers on the Plateau.  High grasses can’t grow much, and are low on nutrients, until the rains come.  This means that animals continue to graze the moister winter and spring pastures, instead of giving them a rest by heading for higher, summer grounds.  What does get planted in these areas can’t start growing until the rains come, and the season is so short that late rains are often ineffectual.  Steady rain is needed also — too much just causes swollen rivers, and small showers dry quickly without really soaking the soil.  Rain was late this year, but it was starting to arrive by the end of June.  The grazing areas are huge expanses, high mountain ridges and wide plains, that turn emerald green and fluorescent green when the sprinkles did come.  And the clouds rolling in and out made for spectacular light.

So Far from the Oak Grove

Finger Trees below Nadi

I’ve pontificated on water, global warming, traditional arts and culinary misadventure. Seems, then, like it’s time to talk about wood. The forests around the lower Himalaya are historically lush, ranging from semi-tropical rainforest to high alpine jungle. They boast a wider array of flora and fauna than that seen in most parts of the world. In one day, I could count dozens of kinds of butterflies and insects of all shapes, colors and sizes. Larger animals too, of course — from wild chickens and other similarly sized birds, to no fewer than seven or eight types of wild cats. We may have spotted the fleeing end of a leopard today. Or maybe just a local monkey. There are dozens of varieties of rhododendron, and many many other kinds of trees, undergrowth plants, and flowers.

Yet the forests are fragile. Warmer climate has combined with overpopulation in the mountains to place inordinate pressure on the ecosystems. I am learning that felling of trees for timber, cutting of branches for fodder for animals, and construction of roads on steep mountainsides all play a role.

Good grazing ground for cows and other animals is too scarce for the load of the growing population. The popularity of cow breeds (namely the Jersey), deemed to be greater milk producers but actually not so good when not fed their premium diet, have made matters worse. They cannot graze the steep slopes as their more nimble mountain cow counterparts can, and thus their owners resort to chopping branches from trees to feed. Whole forests of oak are slowly dying because of this, over-chopped of their prolific boughs. Government- and privately-controlled lands, and places too far away from villages, are the last vestiges of uncut forest. I’ve started calling them ‘finger trees’, for the way they appear like fingers pointing towards the sky.

Roads, though a boon for development, new forms of livelihood, and communication, are not such a boon to the forest. Since the terrain is so steep, huge swaths must be cut to make switchbacks, and often the re-engineered banks cannot support the old growth.

In the place of ancient forest, many slopes now only support a peppering of large, piney trees — tapped by the locals for the makings of turpentine. These trees do not support the kind of lush microclimates that the old forests did, and they allow for continued drying-out of soils and ecosystem.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are some places that have never seen an axe taken to their old trees. High up and away from the margin of human habitation, virgin forests still exist. And while also affected by climate change, it’s a little less conspicuous.

Vista near Laka

Last Saturday the weather allowed for visit. On a scramble up to Laka, an outlook and mountain saddle at around 11,300 ft, climbing along the ridge from Dharamkot towards the first high range of the Himalaya, ancient herder trails weave from high, lush pasture through gnarled groves of long-standing oak and pine. Snow lingered on the northern slope and I dreamt of skiing. From there, the route to the high range is traceable in one direction. In the other direction, one can see clear down to the plains, to lower Dharamsala, Kangra, and beyond. Yet tucked away from direct sight of the nearest towns of McLeod Ganj and Bagsu, it is quiet. The high perch meadow of Triund, a popular day-hike destination, nestles 1,700 ft below.

This is the abode of passing Gaddi herders, crows, spirits, and the occasional rambler-through. Though I don’t know — but doubt — that these areas are formally protected, they are as-yet unaccessible to the general population, and seem safe for the time being.

[points to anyone who got the obscure reference to the young adult bestseller, So Far from the Bamboo Grove]

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?

Arrival

I arrived safely in India two days ago, and am attempting to settle into a nice routine here in Dharamsala. I am here for the next few months, to study and practice and work, and I am beginning to put together other ideas for things to be involved in during this time.

The area of McLeod Ganj, above Dharamsala and the center of Tibetan life, is always a buzzing place, but is even more so now. This March is a month full of holy days, teachings and anniversaries. Today there will be large crowds and marches, as it is either Uprising Day or Liberation Day, depending on whether you’re Tibetan (the former) or Chinese (the latter). Exactly 50 years ago was the Tibetan uprising and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet and came to settle here. In the bazaar yesterday there was a frenetic flurry of activity, and an underlying tone of dissatisfaction, maybe desperation. The situation in Tibet is as bad as ever, and there is very little hope on the horizon for improvement at this time.

In addition, it seems the transient community is ever-more separated from the long-term populations. So many people come here for a brief stint, to learn, to make money, to advocate, to fall in love, to have a respite from the rest of India, and this wears on the weave of the fabric of everyday life. I am one of these people, and I will do my best to tread lightly here, and to be of some benefit to the local communities.

Flying over Afghanistan

I’ve been going through my notes from my trip and there is a lot here that I didn’t have the time or mental space to write about while I was traveling. Now that I’ve had some time to process, I thought I’d share some of them. Flying from the US to India has hit me both times, a stark reminder of the vast expanses of the world that are deeply troubled.

I wrote this in 2006 on my way to India the first time:

I once read of an expedition to the North Pole, in which the explorer – exhausted, frozen – looked up at the night sky and saw the lights of an airplane. He imagined the passengers’ tranquility, attendants serving beverages. Tonight I sit in that plane, serene, sleep, mild bounce like a dirt road drive, while I watch our plane’s course charted on digital map skim us along the Zagros mountains between Iraq and Iran. I see Mosul, and Baghdad. If we jerked to the right, would we see the light of bombs or oil fields burning? How many warzones are we flying over? How many people will die while we make this midnight transit overhead?

In October 2008 I wrote about flying over Afghanistan:

The country, from this height, is starkly brown, accented with notes of green – river banks and farmers’ fields. These latter are not round, as in the US. I don’t know what kind of irrigation they use. The electronic travel map on my seat-back screen indicates that we are in between Heart and Kabul. It shows the mountains below as snow-capped peaks, but the ones below me are bare. Tops of mountains appear rounded, as though the wind blows from the west here. Over Iran, striations in the desert went North-South. Here, there is less order, and ridgelines go in every direction. Rivers flow into canyons. A canyon slope is tinged with red halfway up. There are many rivers, but few lakes and no snow and I wonder what the source of these rivers is. East of Chagcharan (according to the map) the mountains are more jagged, multi-colored, and no more rivers. Roads hug the valleys, and only small paths on the ridges. There is almost no vegetation, only in narrow threads. I feel almost brazen flying over this troubled place with such ease.

Flying into Lhasa, the mountains are so high that no matter how high the plane is, things are more detailed and it feels very close to the ground. Not so easy to get away from the landscape underneath.

Pollution intrusion

I wrote about pollution in Nepal and Tibet just before leaving for India. Perhaps I spoke too soon, as the air quality the day I left Kathmandu was the worst I’d seen it so far. Thick smog hangs over the city and mingles with naturally-occurring mists. Arriving in Delhi, the cloud over Kathmandu looked like child’s play. Visibility was a few hundred meters, I’d guess, and exhaust, dust, and smoke clogged my lungs immediately. Dust hangs on every leaf. I don’t know what has made it so bad – the weather of global weirding or perhaps just this dry season? The dreadful combination of increased vehicles on the road (leading to more traffic) and low-quality fuels? Burning garbage? Whatever it is, lungs and throats burn at the first introduction, and the situation is untenable.

Motorcycle Hell

Kathmandu has seen an explosion of growth in the last few years. An expanding population (50% of whom are under the age of 15) and a flood of movement from the villages have swelled an already burgeoning urban population to the highest levels the valley has seen thus far. Development has been rapid and unregulated – land that was very recently rice paddies is now new roads and large brand-new homes. Money funneled into homes does not support the creation of new outlying communities, but instead a wide sprawl.

A serious problem here is that roads are too narrow (even new ones) for all the traffic they carry. If lucky, it is a strip of tarmac barely wide enough for two cars to pass, with a soft dusty shoulder a few feet wide. Very quickly the edge of the road erodes away so cars drive half on the dirt or swerve into the middle of the road to catch as much pavement as possible. People walk in the dirt or on the road, and share that space with the many vehicles, carts, sidewalk sellers, and the other trappings of this developing commercial city.

Motorcycles are cheap transportation (relative to cars) and easier to weave around the bad traffic and roads, so they have become wildly popular amongst the middle class of Nepal. Yet they are terribly problematic – the rules of the road are nonexistent and motorcycles force their way through throngs of people in the old city, irregardless of the safety of pedestrians. At times there have been discussions of banning vehicle traffic in the old city during the day. Unfortunately, these talks broke down and nothing has been done. A ban would help a lot, and would be especially appreciated by those of us who go around on foot. Just as important would be a plan for better, wider roads around the city so people have viable alternatives to barreling through narrow streets. And of course some driver education and simple courtesy. We are a long way from that, but I hope to see some change in this direction soon – it is a serious situation, as all who spend time here quickly learn.

Flashback from Tibet

I was warned that Tibet would fade into distant memory quickly when I left — but compared with the pollution of Kathmandu the fresh thin air of the Changthang lingers in my dreams. Pollution is a growing problem in the TAR cities as well, though, for the first time. The Lhasa valley holds a layer of smog over the urban center — visible from outside the city or above. And cities such as Nag Chu in the north, which have been targeted for industrial development, are faring even worse. It seems to me that there is a real opportunity for the strong regulatory apparatus of the TAR to do some benefit for everyone by helping to control growth and pollution.