“Rural reality radio” covers climate change in India -- by Shravya Reddy

photo © 2008 Flickr/Russ Bowling CC CC BY 2.0

Cross-posted from climaterealityproject.org 27 Dec 2011.  
  As we work to build a global climate movement, we often rely on the latest technologies to get the word out fast. Case in point: In September, the Climate Reality Project’s worldwide event – 24 Hours of Reality – reached people instantly in their living rooms via the Internet. But of course, billions of people are not connected to the Internet, and many don’t even have electricity. To reach such audiences, radio is often the best means of mass communication.

Recognizing this, an environmental organization in India has taken to the airwaves to help rural communities prepare for the impacts of climate change – using the format of a reality show competition! Development Alternatives – also known as DevAlt – has rolled out a program called the “Rural Reality Radio Show on Climate Adaptation” (PDF).

To find out more about this, I had a really exciting chat with Zeenat Niazi and Vijay Chaturvedi, both Senior Program Directors at DevAlt [photo at right]. Over the past year, in over 100 villages in India’s Bundelkhand region, they’ve worked with groups of women who have been exposed to impacts of climate change like prolonged drought. These women were encouraged to devise special projects to help prepare for climate impacts, and were given airtime to discuss their projects on local community radio stations in a reality show format. Their projects – designed and implemented entirely by the women themselves – range from improved farming techniques to vermicomposting (using worms to turn waste into compost). The “contestants” were then shortlisted, and are up for winning a grand prize. One of the coolest features is that the judges are their fellow villagers who have been listening to the radio shows all along. Voting will start next month, and I’m already curious to find out who the winner will be!

This program was funded through a World Bank award, and its objective is to help rural communities change some of their traditions and practices in response to a changing climate. The program also aims to prove that simple measures can reduce climate risk.
By the looks of it, the initiative has already started changing attitudes toward climate preparedness. As Ms. Niazi told me, “when we see farmers switch from wheat to barley for their winter crop for the first time in decades, we know that the message is sinking in, and they know they have to be ready for change.” On a hunch that I may not have had much experience with farming (a very good hunch!), Mr. Chaturvedi clarified: “Barley requires much less water than wheat, and water availability has been dwindling in the region.”

DevAlt isn’t working solely on responding to climate change. They have a whole slew of projects that prevent carbon pollution in the first place. These low-carbon growth projects fall under the umbrella of their “Shubh Kal” initiative (which means an “auspicious tomorrow”). Ms. Niazi explained that even though these villagers have a negligible carbon footprint, her group still felt it was “important to demonstrate that they can lead by example,” and prove that communities can improve livelihoods while reducing carbon pollution.

An example of a Shubh Kal project is the building of greener brick kilns that reduce carbon pollution by up to 50%. A second example is the distribution of “carbon cards”, which contain a village’s carbon footprint as well as the amount of carbon prevented from entering the atmosphere though tree planting, forest maintenance and soil conservation measures. Periodically, the village’s performance in lowering its footprint is measured and recorded on these cards.

I couldn’t agree with Ms. Niazi more when she exclaimed: “These communities are showing others that they don’t have to repeat the same mistakes the rest of the world made, and can achieve prosperity without following the old model.” Three cheers to that! Now if only others – in the developed and developing world — figured this out too, and realized that economic growth can be achieved in a low-carbon manner. Hmm … Perhaps I need to get myself on a reality radio show soon and start spreading the word!

What do you think about this approach of showcasing communities’ climate preparedness efforts through radio programs? Would you listen to such a show, or even participate in a show like this in your community? If so, do pitch it to your local radio station. We’d love to hear what you think!

Websurfing through India with Hayley Lapalme

We recommend this blog by a young McGill grad who helped organize the last Quebec peace conference at the Biosphere.

Some excerpts:

Bundi palace, Rajasthan

We negotiate with Indian Railways’ timetables and are bound by the seasons of the monsoons. We’re restricted by ice in Ladakh and by visas that threaten to expire before we’ve seen all we came for. I notice the passing of time through the filling of notebooks, the erosion of my stash of Ciproflaxin antibiotics, and the burning through of camera memory cards... Books newly filled with my scribbles and notes exceed a dozen and are scattered across two continents.

Sunrise at Kanyamakari

Sometimes India feels worlds and lifetimes away from home; when there are dead bodies in the street, children doing back flips in busy intersections for pocket change, disfigured and dismembered beggars yanking at my arm, and people squatting to shit in full view downtown. The colours and smells are more vivid and plentiful, the hygiene archaic, the wealth disparity more violent, and the infrastructure more strained. But one on one, we are fundamentally not so different. Sometimes India feels remarkably like home does – just a bunch of people looking out for what’s important to them. Only there are more people but no toilet paper.

Fatima's: photo by Friskodude
Fatima’s [in Goa] is small, squished, understated, and serves fare that would easily go for twenty bucks a plate at home.... The shoebox is contained by cement walls covered with bright posters and packaging. In narrow benches, the locals sit thigh to thigh, sharing tables... we find the only free seat. Come, come, come! There’s room! We’ll share, if you don’t like my company than you can leave! We join Sunny, who sits on an inverted bucket with his back pressed to a tin wall. Three silver platters heaping with rice and fried mackerel are set between us, along with three oval trays filled with five or six smaller vegetable dishes. This is fish thali, and it is exquisite. Eat it with your hands or a spoon, mix the rice with the dhal and the bhajis, or eat them separate. We savour food and company. Sunny pours a thick curry over his rice and motions towards a narrow canvas sack. His flute, bamboo tuned to C. Between mouthfuls, ... he shares his insights into yoga and mosquitoes and music…. And when there are only bones and stray grains of rice left for the dogs to lick, he pulls out his instrument. He plays, he notices me watching his fingers. Was I watching his fingers? Yes I was, I was watching his pinky waver a trill as mine never could, no matter how many times Pachelbel’s Canon pounded out enthusiastically from the family room piano.
At Kanyamakari: Along with the sunrise, I learned: “Love marriages can be good – make sure he is rich and very handsome too.”

The great carbon credit con -- by Nadene Ghouri

Excerpts from Nadene Ghouri's investigation for UK Daily Mail Live Magazine 1 Jun 09. Photos: Ash Sweeting. Gujarat Fluorochemicals (GFL) website boasts that it exports to 75 countries, and has a branch plant in China. With World Bank approval, foreign investors have poured $12 billion into Gujarat's 175-mile chemical corridor between Mehsana and Vapi, one of the world's 10 worst-polluted places. Political pull has spared prosecution of polluters. Gujarat's chief minister says carbon credits are "a good business opportunity".

*****

In the fields around this giant chemicals factory in Gujarat, the barren soil smells of paint stripper and the water from the well makes you gag. Radha, a tough, sinewy widow and the only female farmer here, says that the well, which draws from deep groundwater, used to adequately supply the village and surrounding farms. ‘We have plenty of water – but water is the problem,’ she says. As the bucket returns to the top, we can make out a white, almost oily-looking film on the surface of the liquid, which has formed little snowflake shapes.

She scoops up some water and asks us to smell it. It has an odour so acrid it catches in the back of our throats, making us cough. ‘We can’t irrigate our crops with it,’ she says. ‘It’s the water of death. It kills most crops we put it on. A few years ago, I grew spinach, potatoes, lots of different crops. Now… look at my plants. Weak, useless.’

We’re in a field of cotton that should be ready to harvest. But there’s nothing to reap – just a few little tufts that blow mockingly in the breeze. Radha picks up a handful of soil. The surface has a faintly visible white crust, as if talcum powder has been sprinkled over it. Hold it close and it has the same caustic smell as the water, a bit like paint stripper.

Overlooking the fields like a hulking metal skeleton is the factory the villagers claim has polluted their water and land. The plant, owned by Gujarat Fluorochemicals (GFL), produces refrigerant gases for air-conditioning units and fridges. A by-product is a greenhouse gas [one of the worst] called HFC23.... one ton of it is equivalent to 11,700 tons of carbon. Under the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), GFL installed new technology to capture and recycle HFC23.

The technology was provided in 2005 by the UK’s largest chemical and oil corporation, Ineos, formerly part of ICI [Imperial Chemical Industries]. Both GFL and Ineos benefited handsomely. By installing the technology, GFL made €27 million in the last quarter of 2006 – triple its total earnings for the same period the year before due to carbon credits. Ineos was also given a substantial number of credits for helping a company in the developing world cut its emissions, [to "offset" Ineos emissions exceeding] UK government limits....

polluted well in Ranjitnagar

GFL is part of a worldwide carbon-trading scheme, centred in London, which is supposed to be helping to save the planet from global warming. On paper the scheme, which was ratified under the Kyoto agreement and supervised by the UN, looks like an efficient way to cut global carbon emissions. However, a Live investigation has exposed a series of major failings and loopholes in the scheme.

The great carbon credits merry-go-round
-- Daily Mail (click on image to see details)

As you dig below the surface it would appear that the UN programme – with backing and finance from Britain – is as polluted as the questionable companies it chooses so generously to reward. In the middle of the City of London is a large anonymous-looking building, home to the European Climate Exchange (ECX). About 98 per cent of the carbon-emissions trading in Europe is done in this office, with more than 25 million tons of carbon traded daily. Last year this market was worth £80 billion worldwide, and it’s set to grow to £97 billion this year, despite the recession. Here traders sell our planet’s future in the form of carbon credits... each credit represents a ton of CO2. Chief executive Patrick Birley meets us in the glass-panelled reception. He points out where climate protestors camped on the doorstep during the G20 protests in March. ‘I care just as passionately about saving the planet as they do,’ he says. ‘But the difference is that I believe environmentalism and capitalism can converge.’

Companies that cut their emissions gain credits. If, on the other hand, they exceed their [pollution cap] quotas, they have to acquire credits... trading involves Europe’s biggest banks, including RBS and Barclays. Until the global slowdown, carbon was one of the most profitable ‘commodities’, nearly doubling in value between 2007 and 2008.

But concerns are now being raised about this market approach to controlling emissions, with heavily polluting companies seemingly being financially rewarded. The hulk looming above Radha’s fields was the first factory in the world to profit from the UN scheme, and is something of a flagship project. Yet for the villagers, the scheme is rewarding the very factory that’s brought them misery.

Narendra Modi

We arrive in Gandhinagar, the state capital, to meet Gujarat’s controversial right-wing chief minister, Narendra Modi. ‘You can have big industry and be green' ... but he admits carbon credits can be a ‘good business opportunity’. ‘It’s a typical Western capitalist system, cash- and profit-based. In the East we think differently; caring for nature and the environment is something that comes naturally to us. But of course we’ll take the carbon-credits money if it is offered to us. Why wouldn’t we?’

8 year old Nita, born without an elbow joint

In a village near GFL, scores are sick with joint aches, bone pains, unexplained swellings, throat and nerve problems and temporary paralysis. The farmers can’t put any names to their illnesses and, as low-caste dalits (or untouchables), most of them are too poor to access proper medical services.

Dr Alison Doig, senior climate-change advisor at Christian Aid, says, ‘Live’s investigation highlights exactly what’s wrong with this flawed system, which is focused only on exchanging carbon credits globally, with no accounting for other environmental or social damage. All carbon credits are doing is making some companies rich, while doing nothing to prevent global pollution. It needs either abolition or total reform.’

‘The carbon-credits business operates rather like the financial-services industry did,’ says Kevin Smith of campaigning watchdog Carbon Trade Watch. ‘Insufficient scrutiny and transparency, dodgy projects getting money when they shouldn’t be. And we all know the consequences of what happened in financial services. But this is potentially much more serious, because unlike the Government, nature doesn’t do bailouts.’

*****

This report is quoted in a new study by United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) Climate Justice for a Changing Planet: A Primer for Policy Makers and NGOs (Dec 2009), fourth in a Climate Justice series: Nick Dearden and Tim Jones, Developing Nations Unite Around Justice In Barcelona Talks; Richard Sherman, Climate and Development Goals: Is there need for a post-Copenhagen Framework?; Natalia Cardona, Placing the Right to Development and Justice at the Heart of the Response to Climate Change.
See also World's Most Polluted Places 2009; Enron's toxic coverup in India by corrupt officials -- Enron was the biggest US corporate lobbyist for carbon-trading; the infamous Summers Memo of 1991 by the World Bank's chief economist, who now heads the US Board of Economic Advisers; criticism of CDM credits for HFC23 by Carbon-Finance Online 15 Feb 07.

How India could lead Asia -- Julian Stargardt

Julian Stargardt is a Quaker and CEO of Cambridge Business Group. See also his article "Global Change: the future of the world economy" in Offshore Investor (Oct 2009).

*****

In Asia Confidential on Bloomberg TV 11 Nov 09, I asked Anan Mahindra, CEO of Mahindra and Mahindra:

"To avoid major CO2 emission increases in India why don't you (and for that matter Tata) produce mass market electric vehicles? Power plants and power outages are an issue in India, but because pollution from power plants is centralised, it is easier to deal with than emissions from millions of vehicles. Could India lead Asia in electric transport ?"

Our ensuing discussion made four points:
1. electric vehicles are the way of the future.
2. Mahindra has some electric vehicles in production and others in prototype.
3. Mahindra produces the only non-Japan hybrid.
4. "highly efficient" light diesel is likely in the near future.

The other guest, Australian financier Shane Oliver of AMP, added:

• Electric vehicles have a much much smaller carbon footprint than petrol or diesel -- even allowing for the "dirty" electricity needed to run them, generated by coal and oil-burning fired power plants.
• China, India and other industrialising countries' carbon emissions are increasing exponentially but they are using less polluting technologies than Europe and the US did.

Speaking as an Asian, I pointed out responsibilities for CO2 levels:

• The developed world gave us the first 50ppm rise above "normal" 284 ppm
• The subsequent 70 ppm (rising fast) comes substantially from the developing world.
• Current production methods are more "energy efficient" (less polluting per unit of GDP) but their scale and growth in Asia are making a difference in kind, not just in degree.
• The greatest danger is attitudes and policies such as those in the India World Economic Forum. [See the previous post in this blog.]

*****

See also numerous ideas by India's green capitalists in India Microfinance.

Indian government denies climate change -- Agence France Presse

India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (above) is being severely criticized by scientists after he questioned that global waming is melting Himalayan glaciers. Ignoring a mass of IPCC reports (whose lowball predictions must be approved by governments), he quoted "junk science" from climate deniers.

His stand is influenced by state-owned Coal India and major polluters. Last year the private Tata Power company got $4 billion from World Bank, Asia Development Bank and other sources for a single mega-plant; India plans to build more than 200 coal-burning plants (some pictures).

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The "denial industry" is a well-funded worldwide campaign by business-as-usual lobbies. For the full story see the new book by James Hoggan & Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2009).

350.org climate protest in Vilandai, India

Biochar - by Joanna Santa Barbara

Joanna Santa Barbara is a peace and ecological activist living in Atamai, a sustainable village in New Zealand which incorporates many of the recommended practices, including biochar and organic gardening. See her Atamai blog and Transition Aotearoa (TransitionTowns NZ). Her article first appeared in Peace Magazine 25.2 (Apr-June 2009)
*****
James Lovelock, remarkable for his just-in-time discovery of the ozone hole, and then for his fruitful Gaia hypothesis (that the Earth is a complex interacting system which self-regulates to preserve life), was recently interviewed on mitigation of climate change.[1] At nearly 90, he pulls no punches. It is too late to contain carbon emissions, he says. Trying to sequester carbon dioxide in underground caverns is a waste of time, and there is little to be hoped for from alternatives to fossil fuel energy.

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste -- which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering -- into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO₂ down quite fast.

What? And we've been agonizing over fossil fuel emissions, carbon tax, alternative energy and so on? We just have to bury charcoal? Let's examine this proposal, beginning with the carbon cycle.

Carbon cycle

Two of the greenhouses gases threatening the health of the biosphere as they accumulate in the atmosphere are carbon molecules - carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its global warming action. The third main component of greenhouse gases is nitrous oxide (8% and 298 times as potent), which we will discuss later. Carbon in various forms resides in the deep layers of the earth; in the surface, biologically active soil; in the ocean, both deep and shallow levels; in the layer of plant and animal material on the surface of the earth; and in the atmosphere.

In the deep layers of the earth and of the ocean, there is little movement of carbon, except when humans unearth it as fossil fuels and send it into the atmosphere. Between the atmosphere and the shallow ocean, the soil and the living beings of the biosphere, there is continual exchange of carbon.

This is the carbon cycle. Our problem is that human activity has altered the carbon cycle in ways that have increased atmospheric carbon. Carbon dioxide and methane, together with water vapor and nitrous oxide, act to trap radiant sun energy near the Earth's surface. This is causing climate change.

Human impact on carbon cycle

The human activity contributing to this change is:

• Burning fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere
• Deforestation (reduction of volume of trees whose living matter holds a large amount of carbon stable for tens or hundreds of years)
• Exposure of bare soil, leading to soil carbon returning to the atmosphere faster. Tilling the soil speeds up this process.
• Grazing of millions of domestic animals, most of whom produce large quantities of methane due to their mode of digestion. Soil degradation with loss of carbon also occurs.

It looks as if our modes of growing food, feed for animals, fuel, and fibre are part of the problem. It's not only burning fossil fuels. Our forestry and agricultural methods need to be part of the solution. Stopping deforestation, returning land to ecosystem restoration, "no till" agriculture, new methods of grazing and animal management that mitigate the worst greenhouse gas effects, and especially organic methods of food production are important parts of problem-solving. These will all keep more carbon in the soil and in living organisms and less in the atmosphere.

But Lovelock and others suggest we can go much further in restoring carbon cycle proportions (between soil, living organisms and atmosphere) that support life as we know it. The idea is to turn agricultural waste, which otherwise would decay and release carbon to the atmosphere, into charcoal, which is highly concentrated carbon, and bury it. Carbon in this form is relatively non-biodegradable, and remains stable for thousands of years. It would be the equivalent of returning to the earth some of the carbon we've mined and put in the atmosphere.

illustration courtesy of EHP online

Biochar

This form of carbon is called "biochar." It is made by burning organic (mainly plant) material at a low temperature with little oxygen. Pre-Columbian Amazonians made biochar by burning plant material in pits covered with earth. They then mixed it with compost and soil to create what European colonists called "terra preta," or dark earth. They were not attempting to reduce greenhouse gases, so why did they do this?

Biochar has numerous benign properties the Amazonians made use of: it increases availability of soil nutrients, thus reducing the need for fertilizer and increasing productivity; it helps retain water; it reduces deforestation, because by converting from "slash and burn" to "slash and char," soil fertility remains satisfactory in a given site for much longer. And, it turns out, it decreases emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, the other greenhouse gases. In modern kilns, the manufacture of biochar can produce both oil and gas used for energy purposes. Several different technologies are under trial in low income countries to power cooking stoves and ovens, as well as to enrich soil. One type uses gas from the making of biochar to power cooking stoves. Another type uses small household stoves to both make biochar and cook food.[2] These endeavors may increase human health by reducing indoor smoke from inefficient open wood fires.

Beyond soil enrichment needs, can carbon be buried in the earth at a scale that would make a difference to atmospheric carbon? According to Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit in the 2009 State of the World Report,[3]

"There is a global production potential of 594 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in biochar per year, simply by using waste materials such as forest and milling residues, rice husks, groundnut shells, and urban waste. Far more could be generated by planting and converting trees..."

Advocates calculate that if biochar additions were applied at this rate on just 10 percent of the world's cropland (about 150 million hectares), this method could store 29 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent, offsetting nearly all the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Four cautions must be borne in mind: firstly that making biochar on this scale by modern methods would require enormous investment in kilns in all agricultural areas of the globe. Considering the many co-benefits, including poverty alleviation, this could be considered an excellent investment. There are many current projects running on exactly these assumptions (see sidebar boxes). One new idea is to use big microwave ovens. If biochar were made by the ancient methods, some of its benefits would be retained, but the potential for energy generation would be lost.

The second caution is that continued soil fertility depends on nutrients being returned to the soil that would be burned in biochar production. There is current research aiming to understand what proportions of plant material can be turned to biochar without incurring deficiencies. The New Zealand government has funded two professorships in biochar, one to pursue its behavior in soil, and one to study the process of turning plant material to biochar. The long-term soil fertility effects of modern biochar are not yet known.

Thirdly, the dynamics of charcoal-humus mix are not well understood. A ten-year experiment with buried carbon in boreal forests showed more rapid decomposition of humus and release of below-ground carbon in carbon dioxide, thus partially offsetting the benefits of biochar as a long-term carbon sink.[5] In addition, it is not yet clear that modern biochar remains as stable as Amazonian biochar.

Fourthly, to produce enough biomass to make a difference to atmospheric carbon may mean land use conversion, for example, forest clearing in order to plant "energy crops."

Clearing of forests or grasslands to make way for energy crop monoculture results in large quantities of emissions, reduces future sink capacity and causes further collapse of ecosystems and the biodiversity on which we depend for climate regulation. As widespread freshwater shortages are predicted, the regulation of rainfall by healthy forests and soils becomes increasingly critical, and the allotment of water for irrigation of energy crops more unsustainable.[6]

In addition, such land conversion may displace indigenous people from so-called "marginal lands."

Biochar has some prestigious supporters. Besides Lovelock, Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and author of The Weathermakers said,

"Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future."[7]

Atamai: Joanna's home is at centre left (click to enlarge)

Nitrous Oxide and the Nitrogen cycle

Now we must return to the third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. It is nearly 300 times as potent in climate change effects as carbon dioxide but is present in smaller quantities. Fossil fuel burning has resulted in a 6 or 7-fold increase in oxides of nitrogen (including nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Other increases have been caused by manufactured agricultural fertilizers (a major effect), burning plant material, and cattle management methods. Nitrous oxide not only acts as a greenhouse gas, but affects human health in two other ways. It depletes the ozone layer (thus causing skin cancer) in the upper atmosphere, and in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, it increases ozone concentrations (thus contributing to respiratory illness.) This is a pretty bad actor. How do we respond?

Getting nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and stop making artificial nitrogen fertilizers. Once again, organic horticulture practices come to the rescue. They greatly cut fossil fuel use in growing food, and entirely eliminate artificial fertilizer use. Biochar production would replace the high oxygen burning of plant material which sends nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

Implications for the ordinary worried citizen:

• Stop using fossil fuels and keep on with political advocacy in this area.
• Buy organic food. It could be proposed that the health of the planet is a much more important reason to do this than individual health benefits. Better still, grow your own and add biochar to your soil.
• Stop eating meat, or choose meat, such as chicken, whose production causes less greenhouse gas emissions.
• Cut back on dairy products.
• Support forest protection and restoration, locally and in other countries.
• Support small-scale biochar projects where you can find them.[8]

Although burying biochar as a climate change mitigation project seems both closer to natural processes than other "geo-engineering" proposals, and has more long-term evidence behind it, there are still many unanswered questions about its sustainability. We need to watch closely as this knowledge emerges and to apply what is useful as soon as possible. The time is short. Let's hope the knowledge emerges soon.

Case studies

In Egypt, over 20 million tonnes of rice straw are burned annually after the harvest, contributing to air pollution. The ash residue increases soil salinity, decreasing fertility. Researchers from the University of Mansura in Egypt and the University of Copenhagen are working on a rice straw gasifier which will produce fuel gas (syngas) and biochar. The gas will power flatbread baking ovens, and the biochar will be returned to the fields to increase soil fertility and water retention. This project will involve five villages.

The Mongolian Biochar Initiative is working with small-scale herders, vegetable growers, women farmers, and forestry workers at an individual and community level. The aim is to produce biochar to increase income, improve soil fertility, and combat global warming. They are using family-level low technology biochar production units based on feedstock common to rural Mongolia. The hope is to reduce desertification currently affecting the land. There is also the intention to make the stoves suitable for cooking and to replace current methods of using wood and dung for cooking and heating. The cleaner-burning stoves will also be introduced into urban areas where currently wood-burning causes serious smog in the winter months.4

Metta Spencer has pointed out the huge amount of wood biomass (living and recently living material) in trees destroyed by the pine beetle in western Canada and the US. Their conversion to biochar and use as soil amendment would be a big process that could be contribute significantly to mitigation of climate change and to impending unemployment with the global economic recession.

Notes

1 Gaia Vince. One last chance to save mankind: an interview with James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis. New Scientist Jan.21, 2009.
2 The International Biochar Initiative: www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
3 Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit. Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet. In State of the World: Into a Warming World. 2009:Worldwatch Institute.
4 www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
5 Wardle DA, Nilsson M-C, Zackrisson O. 2008. Fire-derived charcoal causes loss of forest humus. Science 320:629.
6 Ernsting A, Smolker R. Feb., 2009. Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction? www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/biocharbriefing.pdf. This is a major critique of what the writers call the "biochar lobby." They liken it to the intense and premature enthusiasm with which large-scale biofuel manufacture was adopted, only to have it recognized, some years later, that this is a serious ecological and economic mistake. See "additional info" below.
7 www.biochar-international.org/timflannery.html
8 www.biochar-international.org

Additional info

147 environmental organizations are protesting the danger of biochar megaprojects: See this article on the megaprojects. IBI lobbyists urged negociators at Bonn talks in April leading up to Copenhagen COP-15 to allow industrial biochar projects under CDM -- part of the new round of "casino capitalism" that cap-and-trade threatens to unleash. Ecologists warn that

• vast areas of land could be converted to new plantations, repeating and deepening the agrofuel vs food crisis,
• small farmers would be driven off their lands, and
• major polluters will continue their earth-threatening activities, while collecting carbon credits.

The "industrial-biochar" lobby includes IES, GLOBE-EU, GLOBE-EUROPE, the European Economic and Social Committee and EurActiv, Biochar Europe (which includes Shell, JP Morgan Chase, a carbon offsetting company, and the Centre for Rural Innovations), Dynamotive, Best Energies, Eprida, Heartland Bioenergy. Friends among the COP-15 states are the business-friendly Australian Liberal opposition. governing NZ Nationals and Canada's Conservatives, Brazil's Embrapa, the Indonesian palm oil association (GAPKI), and the Bolivian Agribusiness company Desarollos Agricolas.

Unfortunately, university researchers with eyes on large corporate funders, as well as climate scientists James Hansen, Johannes Lehmann, Peter Read, and Tim Flannery also support the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), which uses small projects to camouflage its mammoth geo-engineering plans.

Small is beautiful: One alternative is small-scale biochar produced in smokeless kitchen stoves, and thus reduces respiratory disease among women children and "brown cloud" pollution while improving small farms. James Bruges (architect, eco-village planner) in The Big Earth Book (2nd rev ed. 2008, Sawdays ISBN: 978-1-906136-12-3) recommends SCAD: a biochar project in Indian villages, led by Prof Ravi Kumar of Mysore University, supported by Schumacher College and a small UK charity Salt of the Earth (SOTE).

Earth Democracy - by Vandana Shiva

Excepts from an interview by Sarah Ruth van Gelder in Yes! magazine (Winter 2003), with Vandana Shiva: scientist, feminist, author, founder of the nonviolent “tree-hugger” Chipko movement in the 1970s, of Navdanya, of the organic agriculture college Bija Vidyapeeth and (with others in 1994) of the International Forum on Globalization whose principles include living democracy, subsidiarity, ecological sustainability, fair sharing of the commons, diversity, human rights, jobs and livelihoods, food security, equity, and the precautionary principle. By earth democracy she means right sharing of seed, food, water and land.

Vandana: There is, I think, a spontaneous resurgence of thinking that centers on protection of life, celebrating life, enjoying life as both our highest duty and our most powerful form of resistance against a violent and brutal system that globalizes not just trade, but fascism, and denies civil liberties and freedoms.

[The Earth Democracy movement] comes from a very ancient category in Indian thought. Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human—we are a continuum.

When the issue of the patenting of life emerged, for example, there were two levels of response from those opposing this practice in India. The one level was resistance: “This is immoral. Life is not an invention. Life cannot be a monopoly. You cannot sell us the seeds you stole from us, and you cannot charge us royalties for the product of nature's intelligence and centuries of human innovation.”

The second level was the reclaiming of democracy: people claimed the right to look after their biodiversity and use it sustainably. This came out of discussions among the movements we've been building at the grassroots.

I remember one meeting of 200 villagers who had been involved in seed saving and seed sharing with Navdanya, the trust that I founded to save seeds and promote organic agriculture. These 200 villagers gathered on World Environment Day in 1998 and declared sovereignty over their biodiversity — not sovereignty to rape and destroy, sovereignty to conserve. These 200 villagers, gathered in a high mountain village near a tributary of the Ganges, said, “We've received our medicinal plants, our seeds, our forests from nature through our ancestors; we owe it to them to conserve it for the future. We pledge we will never allow their erosion or their theft. We pledge we will never accept patenting, genetic modification, or allow our biodiversity to be polluted in any form, and we pledge that we will act as the peoples of this biodiversity.”

[Letters were written all over India] under the village trees and addressed to Ricetec, Inc., which patented Basmati rice, and to the Grace Corporation, which patented the name. The letters said, “We've used Basmati for centuries. ... Now we hear you've got a patent number for this, and you claim to have invented it. This kind of piracy and theft we know happens. There are people who steal in our village, and we treat them with understanding. We call them and ask them to explain what is the compulsion that led them to steal. So we invite you to come to our village and explain to us the compulsion that made you steal from us.”

These communities started in years past by saving locally bred seeds and saving biodiversity. Now they are seeking self-governance over food systems, water systems, and biodiversity systems.... Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living wealth on which people depend.

Sarah: You've written about four types of insecurities— ecological, economic, cultural, and political—and how each results in violence.

ecological insecurity

Vandana: The ecological crisis is a severe form of insecurity, especially in conditions of poverty when rivers are polluted and you have no clean drinking water, when groundwater is exhausted and you're forced to migrate. There couldn't be a deeper insecurity than this. Many conflicts within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other.

Sarah: Many people assume that scarcity has always been part of the human condition and that scarcity is closely related to population increases.

Vandana: In my 25 years of work on resource and environmental issues, one thing I have learned is that different parts of the planet are endowed in different ways. There may be little rainfall in the deserts of Rajasthan, but the culture of Rajasthan evolved to manage that amount of rainfall, and they have developed miraculous technologies for harvesting and storing what rain they get. They have sophisticated underground storage systems and water-harvesting systems so that not a drop is wasted. These technologies still sustain cities like Jodhpur and Jaipur. They have enough drinking water because they've developed a conservation culture, and they grow crops that don't need much water. The moment you think the desert of Rajasthan should be growing rice paddy or cotton, you create scarcity.

economic insecurity: theft of the commons

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments—that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

There is no society in which you've had so-called population explosions as long as societies have lived within the context of their rights to the resources and the ability to conserve those resources for the future. Just look at two situations. In England, the population explosion started with the enclosures of the commons—when peasants were uprooted from the land and had to depend on selling their labor. In India, 1800 is the watershed for the consolidation of colonial regimes. For centuries before 1800 our population had been stable. When you depend on the land, you know there are five people who can be supported. You work your society out so you have five. When you are selling your labor power on an uncertain basis, in an unstable wage market, you know that having ten is better than having five. So dispossession from the Earth's natural wealth is at the root of instability and population growth....

Instead of leaving seeds in the hands of the peasants who co-evolve them in partnership with nature, seeds become a monopoly in the hands of five or six global corporations. Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority. The 80 percent who are dispossessed of the wealth of nature move into economic insecurity, because their livelihood as peasants, as fishermen, as farmers, as tribals, as forest dwellers, all depend on having the fisheries, the land, the forest, to make a living. When those rights are taken away, they become economic refugees — they become disposable people.

This economic model rested on the assumption that the favored 20 percent would gain security as a result of these policies. But recent events on Wall Street show us that this model creates economic insecurity both for the 80 percent who rely on natural wealth and for the 20 percent who rely on virtual wealth, because virtual money is a construct, and that construct can disappear as easily as it is created.

Either way, economic insecurity is the legacy of a finance-driven, capital-driven, corporate-driven economic model that is destroying our natural capital and the resilience of local economies.

cultural insecurity

Sarah: The third type of insecurity is cultural. You've made a connection between globalization and the rise of nationalist violence and right-wing repression....

Vandana: Well I'm a physicist, not a social scientist. But as a citizen of India, I have had to suffer the violence and brutality that comes with rising fundamentalism, and I've asked myself how a society that is the cradle of peace, the land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the most volatile societies in the world.

One incident that contributed to my understanding of these links was the violence that erupted in the Punjab in the 1980s. As the magic of the Green Revolution started to disappear, as subsidies were removed and an artificial system of prosperity started to decay, the Punjab became the birthplace for anger and discontent. When you look at why people were fighting, you find they were fighting for their rivers, for fair prices, for a say on when dam waters should be released. None of this was decided locally or regionally—it was all decided from the capital, Delhi. So the discontent was against centralized regimes in which people had no share in shaping their future. [For example Narmada Dam, and mass suicides in 2009]

More recently there have been clear indicators of how fundamentalism is growing out of the economic insecurity of globalization. Let me just give you two examples. In the late 1990s, because of the pressures of globalization, onion prices went up from 2 rupees to 100 rupees. The ruling party lost what became known as “the onion elections” of 1998 because they allowed this price increase. The opposition parties used the onion as the symbol of their fight against globalization, and they won in every state. Immediately after that we saw a round of fundamentalist violence.
In Gujarat, we had another set of regional elections, and the WTO, agriculture, and farmers' survival were the major issues. Farmers said they were being destroyed by globalization policies, and they voted the ruling party out of power. Immediately after that the fundamentalist wave erupted, the genocide and warmongering started, and while public attention focused on the violence, the globalization agenda was pushed further.

political insecurity

As decision making is centralized away from local communities to national governments — and ultimately to corporate board rooms, financial markets, institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO — representative democracy loses its base in economic democracy. As local and national governments lose control over economic resources and priorities, elected leaders can no longer build a political base by championing programs responsive to family and community needs. Political demagogues of the far right emerge to fill the void by channeling the anger and insecurity created by empire's program of scarcity, injustice, and exclusion into an us-versus-them politics that blames particular national, racial, culture, or religious groups [for example] Le Pen in France, Fortuyn in Netherlands, Haider in Austria, and Narendra Modi in India.... So there is a strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics of hate that justifies policies of domination and exclusion. So long as people's attention is focused on fear and hatred of foreigners or members of a particular religious group, such as Muslims, they are distracted from organizing to deal with the system of institutional domination and exploitation that is the real source of their insecurity... It's a vicious cycle, and we need instead to create virtuous cycles that allow economic democracy to feed political democracy, cultural identities, and cultural diversity.

earth democracy

It comes back to deepening of democracy. What we have at this moment is democracy reduced to the rule of lies—lies in the way the popular will is being counted, as we saw in Florida in 2000, and lies in the way the people's wealth is being counted, as we see in [2002 Enron] accounting scandals. That false wealth is influencing who will rule—it's all just too false now.

Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name of economic growth and economic liberalization, and people don't have enough food to eat. Our farmers are being ravished by seed companies, being pushed into debt, and committing suicide. This system is going to cost lives even in the US, where people don't know how they'll pay for their health or retirement.

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy — to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility. If a river is flowing through some communities, those communities should have the power and the responsibility to decide how the water is used and whether it is to be polluted. The state has no business giving to Coca-Cola the groundwater of a valley in Kerala, resulting in rich farmland going totally dry. Communities need to take back sovereignty and delegate trusteeship to the state only as appropriate.

What we have now is a regime of absolute rights in the hands of corporations with zero responsibility for the environmental and social devastation and the political instabilities they are creating. If we want to reactivate and rejuvenate democracy, we have to bring back the economic content.

Sarah: Every time I've heard you speak or met you, you've had so much energy, not only intellectual energy, but personal or spiritual energy...what keeps you so alive?

Vandana: I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

*****

Vandana Shiva videos: 15 Apr 2008 on the the world food crisis created by the World Bank, IMF, commodity speculation, Rockefeller-Gates Foundations' plans for industrial farming in Africa, and climate change; the alternative, she says, is ecological agriculture -- and 23 July 2009 The Future of Food on GMO seeds part 1, part 2, part 3. She says, "Finance is not life, but soil and seeds are life. If I were an 18 year old today, I would be an organic farmer -- a scientist, health provider and peacemaker."

See also her contribution in Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century, an anthology by Ranchor Prime; Wikipedia on ecofeminism; and IFG book Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (Berrett-Koehler 2002, revised 2004, online).

Peak fertility passed - new satellite data

photosynthetically active radiation: UNH Global Land Remote Sensing

Poor farmers in Asia, Africa and South America face a double threat: climate change and loss of soil fertility, Alexander Muller of the Food and Agricultural Organization warned 3 years ago.

Food security hangs by a thread: with drought in Africa and China; millions displaced by earthquakes and the 2004 Asian tsunami; the 2008 food shortage, triggered by biofuel speculation, which caused riots in 38 countries. Under-financed like other UN agencies, the FAO has been unable to find permanent solutions for either problem: disaster refugees or the hungry poor.

New satellite-sensing data show that worldwide land fertility has fallen steadily for 20 years, affecting 24% of the earth's cropland and forests -- shockingly higher and in different regions than the 15% estimate by soil experts in the previous GLASOD (Global Assessment of Soil Degradation – see map). The new 20 Mar 2009 report by Bai et al. from Wageningen University warns that unless halted, the loss in NPP (net primary productivity) in these regions – previously productive tropical countries with a quarter of world population – will become an additional driver of global warming.

This loss in ecosystem services is alarming. The Wageningen authors say vegetation loss meant a thousand million tonnes of CO2 was not captured. At a shadow price of $50 per tonne, that is $50 billion. That might be doubled by the unestimated loss of organic carbon already fixed in the soil.

Challenging the usual interpretation of causes, the new study finds only “weak correlations” with traditional culprits: rural population density and drought. Among likely causes are

• industrial: the hamburger connection in Central America, Brazil, now spreading to Africa; other man-made destruction of tropical forests; monoculture, topsoil erosion, forcing crops with irrigation and artificial fertilizers, chemical pollution, and urban sprawl.
• traditional agriculture: overgrazing, deep ploughing, absence of fallow, cutting of fuelwood.

Because all these causes interact, a quick technological fix is unlikely. But because a quarter of the earth's population is at risk, the problem is urgent.

The study shows that the fastest degradation is not in regions already identified by GLASOD as undergoing desertification or erosion, the African Sahel and around the Mediterranean. The worst-affected countries are

• Africa, the Congo, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Asia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Korea and Indonesia, with over 50% of land area degraded
• Swaziland with 95 per cent land area degraded
• rural China (nearly half a billion people), India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil.
  

What is to be done? The FAO urges developing resilience and using indigenous knowledge in livestock, crop and forest practices. But FAO, under-funded, and therefore over-influenced by corporate lobbying, is apt to suggest patented and GMO seeds, particularly in rice farming. Critics also say the much-ballyhooed green revolution has contributed to soil and water degradation, and a human nutrition crisis.
--
See FAO country-by-country GLASOD maps; Wageningen's GlobalSoilMap.net; UNEP Earthwatch; AfSIS; Saba Ganguly's critique of India's green revolution, the most successful; NASA's illustrated explanation of remote sensing and the NDVI vegetation index; the new AgCam which begins operation this year; Encyclopedia of Earth's article on the great transition.

India climate ride 2009

Cyclists Vinay Jaju and Huub Dekkers of Why New Coal? rode 1800 km in 18 days from Kolkata to Delhi to protest the government's emphasis on fossil fuels. Vinay explained on the Eurotope environmental youth blog:

The Government of India has approved 213 new coal plants in the next 8 years. This does not make sense at a time when

• 2/3 of India's CO2 emissions come from coal use in power generation.
• we face a climate emergency and all life on earth is at threat.
• coal reserves finish in 30-40 years, whereas the approximate life of a coal plant is about 50 years.
• renewable alternatives are cheaper, as compared to the massive social and environment cost of coal.

This decision will leave a mess for future generations to deal with -- making India vulnerable [in] energy security, jeopardizing the economy and leaving the planet unlivable. So why new coal, when we have alternatives that exist?

The riders crossed and photographed India's coal mining areas.

Excerpt from their Climate Ride diaries:

We were really pushed - but we ended up doing 165 Km. The first 50 km went well, but the next 40 as we crossed Allahabad and the surrounds were nightmare. It was Uttar Pradesh traffic and roads at its worst - but we managed unharmed, shouting our way out of the hole...

Then we were in for a very strong head wind (we have been getting a moderate head wind through the ride but yesterday was a toughy (it went on until about sunset). i would have never imagined i could do 165 km a day – in fact we exceeded our expectation, our target.

We should not set boundaries for what can be done and what cant be - we can just about achieve anything we want. With india's future energy needs -- if we push ourselves, challenge ourselves and stretch -- i have no doubt that a low carbon even a zero carbon future with no new coal or even no coal is possible.

See also Green-India, Vandana Shiva's Navdanya.org, YP Foundation , Youth Climate Network , Resource Development Center, India Resource Center, YouthClimate.org, and 3 videos by Vinay Jaju's Switch On campaign for renewable energy: one, two, three.

The globalization of toxic waste

Photo: courtesy The Sun (UK)
Mutant births are soaring in China due to pollution, especially in chemical, manufacturing, and coal-mining regions, both rural and urban, reports the China Daily -- accounting for a good part of China Family Planning Commission statistics in a previous study: a 40% birth defect increase since 2001, years that coincided with uncontrolled economic growth.

Worldwide imports of toxic waste, frequently illegal, have caused scandals in the developing world. A Current.tv video shows imported computer waste poisoning villagers in Guangdong. The action group Toxiclinks exposed similar problems with e-waste, child labour, and toxic burdens in India; in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, the 2006 Probo Koala incident 2006 revealed open dumps, illegal imports, and corruption; in 2008, similar problems were found in Accra, Ghana. Pesticide Action Network and Via Campesina are campaigning against continued exports by chemical corporations of banned pesticides to farms in the Third World.

Greenpeace has for years led a campaign against the toxic waste trade, and compiled reports. See also Wikipedia on electronic waste and body burden, Ariana Baliestri's 2006 paper on contraband capitalism, Dr Sandra Steingraber's research into body burdens in US families and  mothers, and impacts abroad due to war. 

Youth Climate Leadership Training - India

350 ppm: April 08 Delhi youth summit: photo courtesy youthclimate.org blog

On 19-20 December 2008, the Youth Parliament Foundation and the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) will hold a two-day Delhi Climate Leadership Training. The two-day training will include basic climate science and solutions, brainstorming national goals, action plans and media skills. IYCN and YP state:

We are looking forward to bring together a strong group of youth leaders -- leaders who will initiate and lead grassroots climate groups in their work, schools, colleges and communities; leaders who will organize and mobilize people and their climate projects at a local, national and international level; and leaders who will spread the message about the urgency of climate change and the great opportunity for each of us to create, communicate, celebrate and be climate solutions.
The only requirement to participate in this program is passion, belief and a desire in making India a cleaner, more equal, wealthier and more forward thinking nation.

Meanwhile, IYCN started a 4000 km tour of India in solar electric Revas (plug-in electric cars) to spread awareness about climate change and solutions. They'll be training environmental leaders at college campuses around the country, conducting green business plan competitions, and dancing to a solar powered band.

For full details of both events, see YP Foundation, founded in 2002 by Ishita Chaudhry and the India Habitat Centre. See also history of YP in Wikipedia, IYCN website.