What’s on your walk?

Tower Bridge, first night here

Now in London and starting my master’s at LSE, I walk often to school.  It takes about a 35 minutes, from Borough on the south side of the Thames over to campus in the city center.  I pass a lot of famous places, like the Borough Market, the Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Courts of Justice…. and the bar that was used for Bridget Jones’ house, which is apparently one of the most popular tourist stop-offs in the area.

My flatmates and I were discussing our famous-place walk over a pint last night, one mentioning that he had been raving to friends back home about how interesting the route was.  He threw in the views as well: London Eye, Tower Bridge, Big Ben (which is sort of around the river bend, but I guess if you squint?).

It got me thinking about what I really look at when I’m walking.  First day, the big sights.  And my map.  Second day, I started noticing more.  The winding streets of the old neighborhoods offer innumerable sidewalk pubs and cafes, brick residences covered in ivy and potted plants on doorsteps.  Newer parts are a contemporary style, aluminum accents and trendy furniture.  Small colleges, like a school training accountants (whose population seems to be mostly South Asian), and design-oriented businesses occupy some of these newer buildings.  Many are also empty, and the most common sign I see is “To Let”.  Which I invariably skim and read as “toilet” at first.  In this one sense I do prefer the American “For Rent” as a more clear message.

I’m certainly not the first American to be amused by British signs and bulletins.  Signs are something I often notice when I’m traveling, but here — perhaps it’s the coming training in Anthropology — I’m noticing more.  The first is one of my favorites, on a narrow lane I cut through.

By whose definition?

Yeah, I get confused by the left and right here too.

Men's and Disabled. Ladies room?

But the real reason that all of this is here is not for my cheeky enjoyment, it’s for the people.  And the people make the city.

The Millennium Bridge, a footbridge that spans the river between the Tate and St. Paul’s Cathedral, is a particularly good place for people watching. And depending on what time of day I make my pilgrimage to the city center, I encounter any array of characters.  Early in the morning, it’s runners and walkers, a few teenage boys dressed in suits going to the City of London School on the north bank.  A bit later, more suits go to work, women in skirts and walking shoes, heels in handbags.  Mid-morning, are the school groups, the tourists, kids cutting class.  And everyone is just passing through: it’s a transit point.  At most, a quick stop on the bridge for a photo or a chat.  And later on, the runners come back around lunchtime, and the process reverses for the rest of the day.  Suits go back the other way, walkers come out to enjoy the sunset, and so on.

Busker's viewpoint

Like everyone else, I pass quickly over the bridge.  Really, I don’t see much of this movement on any one day.  For that, one would have to stop and observe.  The only folks I’ve seen so far who do this, are the panhandlers and buskers who set up on the entrance to the south side of the bridge.  What a vantage point, to watch the city rush by.

Evening on the Bridge, same (almost) point.

It’s interesting — it’s not necessarily the most famous or the biggest place that can be the most instructive.  And, while I actually don’t think this is the most photogenic place in London… at all… I might consider taking photos here regularly, just to see how this very busy place looks over time.

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.

the etymology of words

With the coming and going of another year’s TED conference (as so wonderfully reminded by Ethan’s fantastic conference blogging), I’ve wasted many perfectly good hours listening to TED talks from past conferences.  Ranging from the musical to the comedic, to the scientific, inspirational and doomsaying, if you have 20 minutes to learn something I highly recommend spending it watching one of these.  Just be warned it’s hard to turn off the TED tube after just one.

One of the idiosyncrasies of these talks is that they’re sometimes posted LONG after they were filmed.  And so some older gems are cropping up now.  I’m particularly taken, at the moment, by this one by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, given in 2003.  He’s a surgeon, but in this piece talks about hope.  Not like Obama’s hope, but academic, 2003 hope.  He pulls out the dictionary and the etymology of the word to make a point about hope.  He says, the indo-european root of the word hope is keu, pronounced coy, and is the same root of the word curve — a change in direction, going in a different way.  (Nuland mentions the convenient association with Kuhnian paradigm shifts — a shift in basic assumptions about science) The willingness to go in a different direction.

What characterizes this willingness?  Nuland goes on to discuss the human spirit: “… this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself or himself, to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something we thought we might not be capable of.  It is an elevation of us beyond ourselves.”  So hope is fundamentally about the spirit.  Moving on,

Nuland quotes romantic poet Percy Shelley’s essay,  ‘A defense of poetry’, where he introduces a concept, ‘moral imagination’.  Here’s what he says (roughly): Man, to be greatly good, must imagine clearly. He must see himself and the world through the eyes of another, and of many others.

Nuland sees us, the American, privileged us, as stepping into the role of the world’s healer.  He says “if we are to be the worlds healer, every disadvantaged person in this world, including in the US, becomes our patient.  Every disadvantaged nation, and perhaps our own nation, becomes our patient.  So it’s fun to look at the word patient.”  And what does he find?  The latin, patior, means to endure, to suffer.  The indo-european stem is paen, the same root as the word compassion.  How nice!