Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  There are also seven endangered species of vultures here—red-headed, white-rumped, cinereous, bearded, and Egyptian, as well as both Eurasian and Himalayan griffons—which led WWF to an imaginative solution to the cattle crisis. “We realized,” Lohani explains, “that they all were being poisoned by feeding on the carcasses of old bovines.” It turned out that farmers kept their aging cattle working by applying diclofenac, a painkilling ointment, that proved fatally toxic to the kidneys of carrion eaters. “So we donated ten thousand dollars to set this up.”

  The sign reads, “Old Age Home for Livestock and Vulture Conservation Centre.” Behind it, several senescent, skinny cattle roam peaceably around a former eucalyptus plantation overlooking a dry riverbed. Here, before they get so arthritic that owners must slather them with diclofenac, cows are retired, fed, and finally given a respectful funeral with chanting, flowers, and incense on a ceremonial platform—which also serves as a dinner table for vultures. Because vultures are also venerated in the Hindu pantheon as nature’s cleaner, people here felt doubly blessed when six of the seven vulture and griffon species began showing up for meals.

  Lohani, a stocky man in his mid-thirties with a green bill cap and shirt bearing the WWF panda logo, follows Moti Adhikiri, the elderly Centre director, down to the bombax trees growing along the riverbed. Three years earlier, there were just two vulture nests. Now there are 61. Besides four roosting griffons, Lohani also sees hornbills, drongos, pheasants, and red-vented bulbuls. Adhikiri has seen spotted deer, wild boar, blue bulls, Himalayan black bear, and—“For the first time in forty years, elephants and leopards are here!”

  Lohani congratulates him and heads west, driving past miles of mud huts down Nepal’s two-lane Highway 1, weaving around throngs of people, goats, water buffalo, men on motor scooters with sari-clad wives riding sidesaddle, streams of bicycles, and thousands of cows. He is on a tour of slender landscape corridors that connect protected areas in Nepal and India that are home to Asian one-horned rhinos, Indian elephants, and the world’s highest concentration of Bengal tigers. Two hours later, he is standing in a rosewood thicket in what he calls one of the eleven lifelines keeping these animals alive. This one, the Khata corridor, links Nepal’s Bardia National Park with India’s Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary. Lifeline is not a casual metaphor: In places, the Khata corridor is only five hundred meters wide, and never more than two kilometers. Yet camera traps show elephants, tigers, and rhinoceros passing here between the two countries.

  Keeping these corridors intact isn’t easy. “A few years ago there were twenty-three hundred illegal squatter households here,” says Lohani, leaning against a chipped concrete boundary marker, one foot in Nepal and the other in Uttar Pradesh. Saving nature in the Terai requires wrangling 5 million cattle, untold numbers of goats and buffalo, and 7 million settlers.

  They’ve nurtured community forests around every settlement to replace trees that ended up as charcoal, rail ties, or roof beams. To dampen fuel wood demand, WWF has brought in solar panels, LED lighting, induction stoves, and biogenerators that yield cooking gas from vats of cow dung slurry and people’s privies. In an inspired stroke, they realized that this qualified for carbon offset credits that they could sell in international investment markets to finance more conservation. They’ve taught people to grow and press chamomile, citronella, mint, and lemongrass into marketable oils. They’ve negotiated tourism revenue sharing for people who live alongside wildlife preserves, such as the hundred thousand around the edges of Bardia National Park.

  And they’ve brought family planning, no simple task in a country where a common wedding blessing goes, “May your children and theirs cover the hills.” World Wildlife Foundation isn’t a family-planning organization, but saving wildlife is pointless if humans then push them off the land. So they joined with government and NGO health partners to get funding from USAID and corporations like Johnson & Johnson for programs that help all creatures, human and otherwise. USAID, which had once soaked the Terai with DDT, was persuaded. In less than a decade, average family size in the area dropped from 8.5 children to 2.5.

  Yet more arrive weekly, especially refugees from mountain communities washed away by melting glaciers. “We can’t eliminate overpopulation anytime soon, any more than we can get rid of greenhouse gases tomorrow,” says Lohani. “Both have been growing for a long time, and we’re bound to add more before we finally stop.”

  Especially since, for all that they might accomplish in Nepal, they really have no control over the fate of this land. That resides at the other end of these corridors: in the country that in the next decade will surpass China as the world’s most populous. Lohani peers into India. Lately, its far northern reach is filling with Bangladeshis, whose own land is disappearing under rising waters. The refugees tell him they’ve come to this periphery to clear some forest and make a life.

  “My dream,” he says, “is to have a landscape like in the Buddha’s time, when people and wildlife lived in harmony.”

  In Nepal alone, that would be a challenge. But ecosystems know no borders, and what happens south of this boundary, Lohani knows, will determine Nepal’s future—and quite likely, the world’s.

  ii. Celphos

  Dr. G. S. Kalkat was speaking at Guru Nanak Dev University in the Indian state of Punjab when a student asked, “What do you consider the three biggest problems facing India?”

  “Population, population, and population,” he replied.

  Yet that would not have been the answer given by the worried people who, five years earlier, brought him back from retirement after a distinguished career at the World Bank and as a university administrator, to chair the Punjab State Farm Commission—exactly where he’d begun in 1949. To them, Problem No. 1 was what hydrologists were saying: that the water table below Punjab’s central wheat and basmati rice area in places was dropping ten feet per year. Wells that were 100 feet deep in 1970 had been rebored to 300 feet, then to 500 feet. New ones were going more than 1,000 feet down.

  Monsoons that once lasted thirty days or more were down to ten or fifteen. Soils were turning saline. Although Punjab, the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, makes up just 1.5 percent of India’s total land area, it is the nation’s pantry, growing 60 percent of its wheat and 50 percent of its rice. “We’re desperate,” say the three farmers in Dr. Kalkat’s office, two in purple turbans, one in yellow. What are they going to do?

  They are going to do what their fathers did, he tells them: diversify their crops. Before 1970, in summer farmers grew corn, peanuts, a little cotton, some rice. In winter, wheat, legumes, and chickpeas. Back then, however, the population of India was less than half what it is now: 500 million, versus today’s 1.1 billion. Even then, many Indians were starving: they had exceeded the land’s carrying capacity. Kalkat was then Punjab’s deputy director of agriculture, having returned in 1964 after a doctorate at Ohio State, courtesy of a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. That was just before Rockefeller scientists arrived here from their wheat improvement center in Mexico with new high-yield seeds.

  They were calling the project, of which Kalkat became joint director, a “green revolution.”

  “Our first crop season with the new wheat was 1968. We planted 1.6 million hectares. In 1969 came what IRRI called Miracle Rice. Before, we would get a ton of rice and 1.2 tons of wheat per hectare. Suddenly, our harvests were 4 tons of rice and 4.5 tons wheat. The only thing needed was irrigation. We sunk wells, because it was much faster than putting in dams and digging canals, which take ten to fifteen years. We could dig wells in one week. And that’s what we did, from 1968 to 1970. We still do.”

  His voice grows softer as he reflects on what resulted from perforating the Punjab with 1.2 million wells. “We have 2.6 million hectares in rice. With the water table dropping so fast, we calculate that we must move a million hectares of rice into low-water crops: maize, pulses, and oil seeds like soy. Soy isn’t as high-yielding, but it’s priced higher. With luck,
the farmers will be compensated. India is short of edible oils for cooking.”

  His gaze rises toward his pale blue turban, as if to retrieve a thought.

  “Stabilizing the water balance, so that what we use equals the annual recharge from rainfall, will take ten or fifteen years. But if we don’t also control population and bring ourselves into balance with natural resources, we’ll have a serious problem. Farmers will suffer. We’ll have social upheaval. Our immediate concern is water. But unless we do something in the next decade about population, we will have decided, en masse, to commit hydrological suicide.”

  Sheela Kaur, her blue batik chunni framing a face hard as a mask, knows about hydrological suicide. Her husband, Prakash Singh, was only twenty-seven when he walked into their wheat field and opened a new can of Celphos. When he failed to return for lunch, his brother went to look and found his body.

  Celphos is a trade name for aluminum phosphide, a fumigant for grains that is lethal to insects and rodents. It comes in powder or tablets; when exposed to moisture or humidity, it releases a colorless gas that smells like garlic. If that release occurs inside someone’s stomach, within minutes most internal organs fail. No one witnessed how much Sheela’s husband took, but four tablets is the customary dose in Punjab, where, according to Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, the Indian farmers’ union, forty to fifty thousand have similarly taken their lives in the past two decades. (Nationwide, reports India’s National Crime Records Bureau, 270,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995.)

  “It is common,” Sheela says tonelessly, slumped on her woven cot, turquoise paint peeling from the walls around her. In her village, Kurail, some of her neighbors’ husbands have flung themselves in front of trains or off roofs, but ingesting pesticide is the symbolic death of choice here.

  His watch hangs from her left wrist. The photograph she holds shows a slim, smiling youth standing by a river, wearing jeans and a jacket over a red shirt. Like many Punjab farmers, Prakash Singh had gotten into debt. Sheela had seen him grow worried as loans he took deepened along with the well he was digging. He had calculated costs for a 300-foot well, never dreaming that he would need to go 500 feet. Back in his father’s time, 45 feet would have been plenty.

  Soon the moneylender, who charged 24 percent, was showing up early each morning to humiliate him in front of his family. He intercepted their three children on the way to school and asked for money. Another loan, with a bank, was secured by property Prakash owned with his brother, but men still came demanding payment, sometimes three times a day. Prakash promised to pay everyone when the wheat was in. But the harvest was disappointing.

  “I never knew how much the well cost—men usually don’t tell women,” says Sheela. “Or they say it’s less than it really is. When he said that the only way out was to drink something and die, I told him that his mother and sisters and brother would stand by him. But they had their own debts, he knew. By the time he did it, I expected it. When someone gets like this, nothing can be done.”

  She told her children that their father had an accident. Now her eldest son says he wants to farm. But with Prakash gone, he will have to marry off his sisters, so the debts will go on. Although dowries now are outlawed, every groom’s family still expects one. At the very least, some gold and a vehicle. Then there are clothes and jewelry for the bride, and a feast for a hundred neighbors. The fact that daughters are so expensive in northern India is one reason why, like India’s population growth, illegal ultrasounds and aborted baby girl embryos are surpassing rates in China. In the neighboring state of Haryana, the ratio in one town was down to 590 girls per 1,000 boys.

  Suicide-by-pesticide widow, Punjab, India

  In a way, says Biku Singh, it was easy to get farmers like himself indebted to the Green Revolution, because Punjabis already had a tradition of social debt. But going into hock for a few years to marry off a daughter was nothing like this.

  “The price of everything is now ten times what it was, while the amount of water is ten times less.” By everything, he means labor, seed, pesticide, and fertilizer. Fertilizer keeps going up because the land needs more all the time; pesticide because insects develop resistance, so farmers must buy new kinds.

  “And electricity: the deeper the water, the more you need to pump. It used to cost 200 rupees per acre. Today it’s 2,000.1 So you need a twenty-horsepower pump instead of ten. Half our people are sick from pesticides: heart attacks, high blood pressure, cancer. Our kids have skin diseases and bad eyesight. No matter how much they eat, they’re anemic. Their teachers call them slow learners. And their fathers, all of them two hundred thousand rupees in debt on every acre, are all suicides-in-waiting. We’re all on each other’s suicide watch.”

  It is late May, a week shy of the monsoon that so far shows no sign of arriving. Biku, who has a dark, shaggy beard, is driving a dirt road along an irrigation canal choked with brown phosphate foam. Next to him is Labh Singh, a generation his senior. Both wear long white kurtas and billowing white pants. Biku’s turban is orange; Labh’s is smoky blue. They stop to inspect a field of sorghum fodder; the other fields are bare, their winter wheat harvested a month earlier. The 2011 yield was decent, but not enough to make up for a terrible 2010, when it was too warm. Now they await the rains to plant the flat, dusty land in rice.

  There are no birds nor insects. In the corners of fields are mud-plastered cone-shaped silos for storing cow dung, which is used for fuel: there isn’t enough manure to fertilize all the crops they must grow to be Green Revolution farmers.

  “Before the Green Revolution,” says Labh, “when we depended on nature for everything, we were more prosperous. Since the introduction of petrol and pesticides, our fortunes have fallen. In our subdivision, we have eighty villages, and we’ve had seven hundred suicides.”

  As more farmers abandon their farms by abandoning their lives, land is being converted to housing, as ever more populous villages spread and merge with each other. Per capita alcohol consumption is among the world’s highest. By many accounts, the most lucrative business here is no longer agriculture but heroin grown in Afghanistan and smuggled over the border with Pakistan’s Punjab. When recent state government studies declared that nearly 75 percent of Punjabi youth were addicted, no one challenged them.

  The Green Revolution made Punjab one of the wealthiest states in what is set to become one of the world’s wealthiest countries. But its legendary grain-based bounty, extolled in Bollywood the way cattle ranching was mythologized in Hollywood, is now collapsing. In a given year, harvests may still even set records. But every year, the water is farther away, and few are changing to heat-tolerant, low-water crops. “Nothing else pays enough,” says Biku.

  “We’re stuck,” says Labh. “The more we have produced, the more our debt has risen. Our expenses are higher than our returns. And we’re all poisoned.”

  The Green Revolution was never for farmers, they believe: it was for the rest of the country. Until the water started to vanish and accumulated chemicals and debts overwhelmed them, they were proud to be feeding their nation.

  “Not just India: we fed the world,” says Labh. “Forty trains a day left Punjab carrying thousands of tons of grain. We grew enough to feed everybody. But now there are so many. And every year, we will be able to feed fewer.”

  The neighboring state of Haryana was once part of Punjab. Just as the original Punjab was cleaved in two in 1947 when Muslim Pakistan broke from India’s western flank, in 1966 it divided yet again along sectarian lines, leaving Punjab populated mostly by Punjabi-speaking Sikhs, and Haryana mostly by Hindi-speaking Hindus. Yet another reason for the preternaturally skewed sex ratios in Haryana is a widespread belief among Hindus that passage to heaven depends on having a son to light his parents’ funeral pyres. Since the invention of ultrasound imaging, that has translated into vans equipped with portable machines driving from village to village in Haryana, and a robust trade in illicit abortions.

  Although abortion has
been legal in India since 1971, sex-selective abortion is punishable by both jail and fines. Enforcement, however, is so lax that by 2030, India could have 20 percent more men than women—a deadly prescription for, among other problems, jealousy-fueled violence and escalating rape. Although abortion preempts the killing or abandonment of unwanted baby daughters, mortality statistics reveal indirect infanticide through neglect: According to the United Nations, Indian girls are 75 percent more likely to die before their fifth birthday than boys, suggesting that they’re fed what’s left after their brothers have eaten.

  Fertility has dropped in India in the new millennium, but Haryana is among ten of twenty-eight Indian states that remain well above replacement level. Unfortunately, those ten states contain half of India’s population. Another baby is born every two seconds in India, more than forty-three thousand a day, and more than 15 million a year: nearly two more New York Cities. Recently, government demographers revised their prediction that India would achieve stable population in 2045, with 1.45 billion people. They now say that population will keep growing until 2060, peaking at 1.65 billion. Given growth rates that even government cash incentives for delaying childbirth have failed to stem, few are convinced that this prediction will hold any more than the last one.

  One simple thing might make a difference, however. Indian women who make it to secondary school average 1.9 children apiece. For those who graduate, it’s 1.6. The fertility rate among women with no education is 6.0.

  And for decades, India needed to look no farther than its own southern tip for a remarkable example of how education and equality for females can change everything.