Reduce : your agenda for 2012

Sometime in the last quarter of this year, the population on the planet touched seven billion. Many commentators found it an easy subject to speak about, brushing up on their Malthusian economics and making a number of predictions, some optimistic, some dire. Many, in particular, picked on poor Paul Ehrlich, a pioneering biologist and Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, whose only fault was that he errored on the side of caution by predicting doom, caused by a population explosion. He was mirroring the views of Malthus, who had said something similar in the late 18th century, arguing that there were resource limits to growth.

There was, in the media, a sense of celebration about the seven billion figure. Irrefutable data is now available, many said, about how human ingenuinity is solving most of our problems : wars are becoming less, as is cruelty, people have more food per capita and are living longer and there is less poverty than there was, say, a couple of decades ago. The conclusion is that population is no longer a threat to the survival of the planet or indeed our species. Indeed, there is much to agree with in these assertions and the data presented is robust and, hence, trustworthy.

There were pessimists as well. Human ingenuity has its limits, they said, and the stagnation in food production the World over is but an example. Moreover, the population growth is largest in the poorest countries, which only exacerbates conflict, hunger and low life expectancy. It is also a fact that increased populations have put severe pressure on our oxygen tanks,ie, the forests………and so on. There is little to refute here as well.

As you can see, the debate can be confusing and, perhaps, quite irrelevant, since nothing in this is within our control. A good idea then is to speak of just what is within our range of influence and is perhaps a much larger cause for concern : our senseless consumption patterns.

Consider the following :

1. India hosted its first F1 race, a wasteful exercise in wanton consumption as tonnes of material were shipped and airlifted half-way around the World and back again, all for a couple of hours of entertainment for the crowd in the stadium (over 90% of the viewership of the race was on TV, not live, so location does not really make sense).

2. In Kerala, around Onam, about Rs. 240 crores of liquor was sold this year, which works out to Rs. 80 per capita. This does not include the vibrant business of import of foreign liquor through informal channels. Wine is an unusual beverage in India, about which most consumers know nothing, yet its consumption in India in 2010 was about 16 million litres. A significant part of this comes from Australia and the US.

3. A report on the Indian automotive industry noted that the number of car models for a buyer to choose from had exceeded one hundred. There are now 104 distinct models of vehicles in the Indian market. As a result of this bewildering choice, people are compelled to keep up even if they do not really need a new car.

4. The Outlook magazine reported in its latest issue that there were two hundred and fifty two food shows on air across Indian television channels, all espousing the cause of consumption.

5. In a recent issue of The Mint Lounge, a mobile phone by Tag Hueur costing Rs. 13 lakhs was profiled; it had diamonds, mother-of-pearls and white lizard skin.

6. We visited a family who have recently relocated from the United States. In their living room, I saw the largest LCD television set ever. You could lay it on the ground, put a mattress on it and use it as a comfortable bed for a child. They have a second television for their two kids as well.

Such data is cause for despair. This issue of consumption, utterly egregious consumption, is far more difficult an issue than population to deal with, since it involves attitudes, beliefs and, that most indefinable facet of human emotional intelligence, ego.

For the first time in human history, we have a surfeit of products, services and experiences to buy and no shortage of money. This has generated a cycle of economic growth in urban India which is as dissatisfying to consumers as it is environmetally catastrophic – more product sales bring more money to those who buy different products, the sale of which give stakeholders more money and so on – and is best measured by the Gross Domestic Product, a most abused statistic in its use as an index of human well being. As we all know, a smaller and smaller proportion of each middle class family’s income is being spent on necessities and a great deal more on discretionary bits, most of which we could classify as contributing to an unsustainable lifestyle at the expense of the planet. I never point this out to people, since they will in turn ask me to look at all those around them and then say, “ but they are all doing it, so the problem is not with me, it’s with you.” Yet, this is hardly an answer. As Betrand Russell once famously said : “if fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

The consumption in India has gone up so much and so fast that the resultant inequality in society is engendering a mass conflict. The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgement earlier this year, connected the dots between the Maoist conflict in Chattisgarh and consumption. “The root cause of the problem,” it said, “lies in the culture of unrestrained selfishness and greed spawned by modern neo-liberal economic ideology, and the false promises of ever-increasing spirals of consumption leading to economic growth that will lift everyone (out of poverty)….”

Even as we binge ourselves sick on stuff, Earth is paying a heavy price. An analysis by the International Energy Agency recently found emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010, despite the worst recession in eighty years. In that one year alone, the rise in annual carbon dioxide emitted was 1600,000,000 tonnes (1.6 gigatonnes) – this is just the increase, mind you, the total emission was 30.6 gigatonnes. Each one of us – middle and upper-middle class Indians – have pitched in with disproportionate contributions to this in our own way by buying, buying and, well, more buying of goods, services and experiences (such as travel). As more people join the middle class, and newer products load already-groaning shelves in shops, this feeding frenzy will only increase.

The consumption footprint of each of us is now eerily global. To feed our insane demand for things (and hence, their packaging), the supply comes from everywhere on Earth. Just as most of our electronic goods come from China, some of their material come from, well, India – the Bellary mines, for instance, supplied a huge part of the iron needed for the Beijing Olympics’ infrastructure and Goa’s rich forest wealth is being decimated to export ore all over the World to feed the rich World (of which the reader of this note is an intrinsic part). We spoke of wine earlier; a large part of the apples we eat come from New Zealand, US and China, while the fuel that transports them across India comes from Russia and the Middle East. This is asinine, senseless, profligacy.

In September, the Economist reported that Chinese demand had ended a century of steadily falling raw material costs for rich-world consumers. Industrial raw material prices fell by around 80% in real terms (ie, adjusted for inflation) between 1845 and 2002. But much of the ground lost over 150 years has been recovered in the space of just a decade. Iron ore, for instance, now fetched $ 178 a tonne, compared with $ 13 a tonne in 2001, despite the doubling of iron ore production in this period.

China, though, is not the problem.
Our demand for Chinese products is the problem.

Surprisingly, no one wants you to lead a simpler, less consumptive life. The Government wants you to consume more and increase GDP and the corporate sector, which obviously wants higher profits from higher sales, downloads data on us such as, “the per capita consumption of diapers in India is one-seventh that of Vietnam” or some such tripe. The acute pressure, of course, is from peers and your own family would want to keep pace on the consumption treadmill for the rudimentary, temporary joy it offers.

Yet, we must buck the trend. If we chose to not consume and look back at the many many generations before us who made their money painfully and hence consumed wisely, there would be lot to learn. For the future of our planet – which is now in deep peril, make no mistake - there is no solution, no quick-fix, no counter-balance other than scaling back on our lifestyle and leading simpler lives, by thinking a hundred times before we buy and a thousand times before we throw.


Make 2012 a breakthrough year. Reduce.
It’s the least you can do for the planet.

Earth (H)our

At 8.30 pm on March 26th, as we turn off all electrical points in our homes for an hour, we could consider this an atonement, albiet a token one, for the economic runway that we have laid out for ourselves, riding on a blasphemous belief that energy – as much energy as we need - is a birthright.
Most people I know will switch off a light when they leave the room, yet this is hardly conservation; this is decency, protocol, the done thing, just as most people I know would say ‘Thank you’ when they were gifted a present. Conservation begins by questioning what could be done to change a lifestyle that is energy intensive and getting worse by the day.
A few months ago, a young journalist, Namrata Nandakumar, did a short study on electricity consumption in two urban spaces in Bangalore city. She first chose a slum which had ‘authorised’ access to electricity, a slum of three and a half thousand homes called Ullalu Upanagara, that houses about five times that number of people, during a post-monsoon month when there was no significant power cut. The monthly electricity bill for the entire colony was Rs. 2.38 lakhs. In contrast, Bangalore’s most popular mall, The Forum Mall, with a sanctioned load of 4 megawatts of electricity, had a monthly bill of about Rs. 85-90 lakhs (which included its expenditure on diesel for generators) for the energy it used with abandon, including the cooling of an enormous common areas around the day.
Recognise the sobering reality that energy is a finite resource currently in acute short supply in India. As the country’s GDP trots along, much more of it will be needed to supply basic energy needs to millions of our people as well as to meet the consumptive lifestyle of urban India. Energy comes at a cost, a cost well hidden from most of us who live in protected urban India and take planes when we travel : the costs, ecological, psychological, financial and otherwise, of displacement of people, damming of rivers, submergence of land and forests, pollution from thermal plants and carbon dioxide emissions and huge consumption of natural resources. Recognise that this is not a historical cost but a running one - for instance, the origins of the Maoist problem and the slums of urban India can be traced to our energy projects - and the true impact of the Mall’s consumption begins to emerge. Recognise, in addition, that the production of every litre of diesel needs 9,200 litres of water and 2-3% of the diesel that is imported into India is consumed in its own transportation to the consumer.
Yet, none of us would seem particularly perturbed with these numbers, ascribing them to a convenient rung on the ladder of development, for we empathise, not with the slum, but with the mall. It is a lifestyle that, though recent and foreign, is not negotiable. The biggest issue, of course, is that we – literate, well-read, well-meaning, intelligent as we are - do not connect the dots. We cannot, often do not, wish to see the impact of our actions on others. Let us then not blame the Americans for the climate mess we are in. Given an option, we have grabbed the ‘pollute’ lever ourselves for the short term gains that accrue from glamorous living.
I have in front of me, two recent articles that are very recent, yet hardly new in content. The first speaks of the protests last month against the East Coast Energy coal-fired power plant in Srikakulam district in Andhra, during which two people lost their lives, lives that were worth much more than any power plant could possibly match. This plant coming up next to a ecologically fragile wetland has, over the last couple of years, damaged the area and put many fishermen and farmers’ livelihoods in peril as the wetland is excavated and filled up in haste. The police were there, of course, to help push this private project through. This incident was merely a repeat: on July 14, 2010, in Sompeta, where the Nagarjuna Construction Company is building a thermal plant on a wetland, three persons were killed in clashes with the police.
The second article concerns a different source of energy that threatens a different species. If you make your way into the Athirapilly-Vazhachal forests of Kerala, as I have done – dense, wet deciduous forests of breathtaking beauty and surprise – you occasionally hear a loud, pitched call, a distinctive ‘tock-tock-tock’ , or sometimes a heavy whooshing sound. Look up or around (if you are by a ridge) and you might see the Great Indian Hornbill take to the air, the most beautiful, graceful, charismatic, even-tempered bird that has ever been. It is a bird that might see its habitat destroyed with a hydroelectric project proposed by the Kerala State Electricity Board that will generate a measly 160 megawatts, for the forty Forum-Mall-look-alikes that will dot the state to sell the resident Malayalee’s sole fetish: gold. The Hornbill, stunning as it is, is merely a representative species of the priceless biodiversity we stand to lose at Athirapilly, a portion of which is not even known to science as more discoveries enhance our sense of wonder at the mechanics of creation.
To set the record straight, the KSEB is hardly the first State Electricity Board to consider habitat of little use except for submergence, yet it was a pioneer in the destruction effort, with a plan made forty years ago to submerge the Silent Valley. It required the determined effort of Dr. Salim Ali and Mrs. Indira Gandhi to scuttle the project.
The destruction of forests, and the biodiversity within it, is a horrendous cost to pay for our lifestyle, yet it is a cost that few of us understand, even as the decision makers do the hypocritical act of planting the odd sapling to mark an Earth Day or a Wildlife Week. Much before additional power plants of any kind – thermal, nuclear or hydro – are planned, there is need, indeed a pressing, vital need, to use a system of incentives and disincentives to get the energy addicts (that’s us) to reduce our need for the fix. Yet, I have little faith in the Government’s ability to promote a culture of reduction and thrift and a lot more conviction in your ability to reason and conclude.
In my few years in conservation, never have I felt this alarmed at the speed of the consumption gravy-train. On March 26th, therefore, I have a request to make : please switch your lights, air coolers, water heaters and all else off, for just an hour. This, by itself, will make little difference, yet it will hopefully provide the darkness needed for a few moments of solitude.
In those moments, do think of just how you could become part of the solution, just how you could change the way you live your life to reduce, dramatically lessen, the need for energy. I repeat, target, not a 5% drop in consumption but, a 50% reduction in your energy demand. …for unless we press the brake now, the energy gravy train will run over the person on the railway track.
That person is you. And the time to heal the Earth is Now.