by Amy Stewart
Because India is a democracy, people can resist such government plans. The de facto leader of the local anticoal movement is a middle-class businessman named Ashok Agarwal. A member of the Dhanbad chamber of commerce, Agarwal lives in a pleasant two-story structure built by his grandfather. His machine-parts business is on the ground floor; his struggle against BCCL, which has lasted through 20 years of protests and litigation, is headquartered in his home, amid patterned rugs, cheerful paintings, and photographs of family members. Indian law requires that BCCL relocate not only the villagers already displaced by fire but all the people who will be affected by the mine’s expansion, he tells me. “It’s seven hundred thousand families,” he says. “More than two million people.” I ask if the Indian government has ever constructed an entirely new city of that size overnight. “I don’t think any government has,” he says. “When they talk about doubling coal output, they don’t mention this part.” The part about moving an entire city? “Yes—that part.”
Similar efforts must occur in many other places in India to fulfill Modi’s goal. Unfortunately, about 90 percent of Indian coal is not Jharia-style coking coal but low-quality, highly polluting thermal coal. Outdoor air pollution, most of it due to coal, is already responsible for 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a study published in Nature; New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world’s most polluted air. Burning more coal will only make the situation worse. Already India has a high rate of chronic respiratory disease. “Success would be a disaster,” Agarwal says to me. “I don’t see how they get to a billion tons.”
Even the smallest Indian villages I’ve seen have a store or two, and Luckman, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, is no exception. At the edge of town stands a single kiosk, no bigger than an old-fashioned U.S. city newsstand. Basic supplies fill its unpainted shelves: rice, lentils, oil, chickpeas, bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes made by wrapping leaves around tobacco flakes). At night it has Luckman’s only electric light: a 6-watt LED lamp, powered by what looks like an old car battery. From the battery dangles a cable that leads to the kiosk roof, on which sits a battered solar panel about the size of a cafeteria tray. This is what solar power looks like in much of rural India.
When I walk over at about 8:00 p.m., the owner is asleep with his head on the counter. Still, the store is open—the illumination allows him to keep the kiosk going after dark. Behind the clerk, a small girl crouches on the floor, doing homework in the pool of light. And behind her is an old woman, methodically rolling bidis for sale. The extended hours, the ability to do homework after chores, the chance to earn extra income—all of it comes from a single light.
Enabling even this small amount of electricity has long been a struggle. India’s villages can be astonishingly remote by Western standards; a hamlet may be only 50 miles from a city but next to impossible to reach, especially when the rainy season makes roads impassable. Stringing and maintaining transmission wires in such circumstances is a nightmare.
In network jargon, India has a last-mile problem, referring to the way that bottlenecks are often found in the link that physically reaches the customer’s premises. Because of this challenge, the cost of building India’s electrical grid was so high that rural farmers often couldn’t afford to pay for their connection. To solve the problem—and to shore up sagging popularity among poor voters—the government launched a program in the late 1980s to provide free power to low-income tribal families. Unfortunately, over time and at great expense to utilities, the benefits of the program were mostly captured by wealthier, more politically powerful families. Today, 87 percent of Indian household electricity is subsidized, but less than a fifth of the subsidies go to the rural poor for whom they were intended, and the utilities have little incentive to spend what it would take to connect them. Even if India floods the sky with coal smoke, the 300 million Indians without power still might not get connected—the worst of all possible worlds.
Enter Harish Hande. Born in 1967 and raised in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, he won a scholarship and obtained an engineering PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His dissertation focused on rural electrification. When Hande returned to India, he went to the southern city of Bangalore, where he bought a solar home-lighting system with the last $300 from his scholarship. He sold it, installing the system himself. The transaction earned Hande enough to purchase a second system, which he sold, and then a third. He found a U.S. partner who helped him obtain additional funding. In 1995 the two men incorporated a for-profit business, the Solar Electric Light Company—SELCO. As Hande slowly built up his customer base, he kept asking villagers why they didn’t already have electricity. For decades they had been waiting futilely for government agencies to fulfill promises to provide power. Why couldn’t they go out and just get it themselves by installing solar panels?
According to SELCO technical manager Jonathan Bassett, the single biggest problem was financial: classically risk-averse loan officers at local banks found ways to avoid lending money for solar projects. Hande and his team came to believe that the route to India’s energy future ran through the offices of low-level bank functionaries. Persuading and cajoling, experimenting and testing, they gradually installed 300,000 solar-power systems in remote villages in southern India and Gujarat, along with 45 branch offices to provide service and maintenance. As a rule of thumb, Bassett tells me, “We won’t install systems without a branch that’s less than two hours away.”
Increasingly, SELCO is expanding beyond individual installations—the kiosk in Luckman is one—to village-wide projects. The key, Bassett says, is the “local guy who runs the kiosk.” SELCO installs solar panels adjacent to the store. The electricity feeds a charging station inside the kiosk. Clipped into the station are small batteries, each the size of a cigar. At dusk, participating families send someone to fetch their battery. It connects to a SELCO 6-watt LED light via a standard VGA port (the unusual plug both helps deter theft and makes it harder to damage the devices by amateur fiddling). In the morning, the families return their battery for charging. They pay 25 rupees a month (about 40 cents) for the service. The next step, now being tested, is village solar networks—with greater capacity and independent “minigrids” that allow participants to run fans, sewing machines, and computers.
SELCO is far from alone; dozens of other solar ventures exist in the Indian countryside, though few have been as successful. Because solar energy is intermittent, many Indians see it as second class; a Greenpeace minigrid experiment in the northeastern state of Bihar last year was met by villagers chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!” But SELCO-style projects have a signal advantage: they can expand rapidly. SELCO’s installations are increasing at a 20 percent annual clip. More important, the company is training 100 entrepreneurs a year to replicate its business model across the country. Instead of building huge solar parks or giant coal plants and trying to distribute electricity to remote villages, it is attempting to make the villages themselves the source of power. Hande envisions a bottom-up movement, with entrepreneurs training entrepreneurs. With luck and favorable government policies, it could represent a third path to the future—one quite different from anything as yet envisioned by Modi.
Whatever decisions India makes on the road to providing power for its hundreds of millions of unwired people, its choices will resonate around the world. Its popular prime minister has alternated between promoting renewable energy, as he did in Gujarat, and increasing the focus on coal. Neither is an easy path. Grid-style solar power requires building both massive new Charanka-style solar plants and massive energy-storage facilities, all on a scale that has never been seen in the world. It is a daunting prospect. Coal is cheaper, and there is little mystery about how to use it. But obtaining enough for India to prosper will require Coal India and other companies to sort through enormous logistical and humanitarian difficulties. And even if Modi managed to surmount them, he would be burdening India with a hug
e pollution problem—and the rest of the world with catastrophic carbon dioxide emissions. The nation cannot follow both paths equally. Modi, in his shifting allegiance, seems to be signaling a preference for coal.
Still, one can envision another course, in which bottom-up efforts like those from SELCO could buy some time, giving rural Indians some of the most important benefits of electrification while allowing the nation to build up its renewables infrastructure. No serious study has yet laid out the conditions under which this could occur. But it is hard to believe this could happen without significant financial assistance from developed nations. (There is also the moral argument; as Narain said, the West did fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide first.) India will fight hard for this in Paris. But ultimately the decision about assistance will be made by Europe and the United States.
India will make a choice, but it will not be India’s alone.
EMMA MARRIS
Return of the Wild
FROM Boom: A Journal of California
IT IS A frosty spring morning, and I’m tracking celebrity wolves in Southern Oregon. The patriarch of this pack is a big deal. Scientists call him OR7, the seventh wolf in Oregon to be captured and fitted with a tracking collar. Environmentalists call him Journey, a name that pays homage to his epic thousand-mile trek from his birth pack in northeastern Oregon to the California border. A few days after Christmas in 2011, OR7 crossed that border, becoming the first known wild wolf in the state since 1924.1 When OR7 found a mate—a dark black female without a collar, or a known history—they settled in Oregon, much to the disappointment of lobo fans in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and other hotspots of California wolf fandom.
Now I think I might be looking at his poop. The sun is raising steam off the graveled timber roads. We’re driving along, slowly, with a VHF receiver balanced on the front console of the truck. So far, all we’ve heard from the receiver is static—none of the pings that would indicate that OR7’s collar is in range. But John Stephenson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist I’m accompanying, has a lead. Yesterday he followed the VHF signal to OR7 and caught a glimpse of the gray wolf and one of his offspring, but the wolves saw Stephenson first and were gone in a flash. “It is so hard to get a visual in this country,” Stephenson says. “Too many damn trees.”
We drive to the site of this very brief interspecies encounter and find a few monstrous piles of poop, bristling with elk hair. Stephenson bags them. We also find at least three sets of tracks headed straight down the road. Wolf prints are larger than almost all dog prints, and they typically run in these very straight lines. “It’s a good way to tell a wolf from a large dog,” Stephenson says. “Dogs tend to wander around.”
We follow the tracks for some time, until we lose the trail on hard, dry ground. We spend the rest of the day crisscrossing the forest, seeing only the odd logging truck—no other cars or trucks, and no wolves. It’s not surprising OR7 finds this nearly humanless place a good home. Wolves generally do their very best to avoid people.
With an average population density of almost 250 people per square mile, California might seem an unlikely choice for wolves in search of a home. But as far we know, wolves don’t read road atlases or care about statistical averages, and there is some very wild and remote country in northeastern California—from the arid Modoc Plateau to the pine and fir forests of Mount Lassen. Stephenson wonders whether there are enough deer and elk to sustain a robust wolf population in the state; but as he prepares to document the second round of pups for this family that lives within one or two long days’ walk of the California border, he says some of OR7’s children could “easily” settle down in the Golden State.
Indeed, on August 20 the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that camera traps had caught snaps of fuzzy wolf pups playing in Northern California. They probably aren’t OR7’s grandchildren—Stephenson thinks they are the pups of “previously undetected dispersers from Idaho or northeast Oregon.” But even if this family doesn’t make a permanent home in California, the expansion of wolves into California seems inevitable. The first wolves entered neighboring Oregon in the late 1990s, the children of reintroductions undertaken by the federal government in the early 1990s in Idaho. They’ve found southern Oregon to be a good home, and as their numbers increase, they will almost certainly carve out additional territories in California.
The state has been preparing for their return. On June 4, 2014, the California Fish and Game Commission voted to preemptively list gray wolves as endangered under the state Endangered Species Act. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife had been completing a plan for managing the incoming wolves, though now it may need revising. Ranchers, hunters, and environmentalists have all been invited to be part of the process, and wolf advocates are feeling good about the prospects for a more cooperative, less contentious coexistence between wolves and livestock in Northern California than in the Rocky Mountains (where the “wolf wars” have turned the animal into a political football). The emphasis is on teaching the wolves not to go after livestock, by frightening them away with flagging tape, loud noises, and livestock-guarding dogs. “We are hoping to do what we can before wolves get here so it can be different,” says Karin Vardaman, director of California wolf recovery at the California Wolf Center. “Because, really, if you keep politics out of it, in areas where ranchers have learned to use these nonlethal tools correctly, the controversy just went away.”
The Department of Fish and Wildlife is struggling to come up with maps of where wolves could live in the state or estimates of how large a population the state potentially could host. Historical records aren’t helpful—but not, as you might think, because of how much California has changed. The problem is that virtually no historical records exist. California eradicated the wolf from its landscapes so quickly and thoroughly that the animals barely appear in the historical record. It’s a testament to the power of colonization and modernization that a species that was no doubt once an apex predator, one of the kings of California along with the grizzly, was reduced to a rumor, a word, a skull, a walk-on role in legend.
Indeed, until recently, it was often repeated (notably in Barry Lopez’s book Of Wolves and Men) that there never were any wolves in California. Scientific maps showing the precontact range of wolves in North America compiled in 1944, 1953, 1981, and 2002 omit all or most of the state.2
Only two natural history museum specimens are verified to be California wolves from the 20th century. There are none from the 19th. “I was shocked when I started looking. How could there only be two?” says Sarah Hendricks, a geneticist who hoped to learn about the state’s population dynamics by analyzing DNA from old skulls and pelts. Hendricks was working in a UCLA lab run by canine geneticist Robert Wayne when the state requested a thorough report on what was known about the vanished wolf packs’ population structure just before eradication. Hendricks had only two skulls to work with, both from animals collected in the 1920s and housed in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California–Berkeley. The museum sent her the tiniest sample possible—minute shavings from the inside of the precious skulls’ nostrils. “I opened up the envelopes and I said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work, because there is hardly anything here,’” Hendricks says. But she managed to pull enough DNA from the material to establish that a wolf killed in San Bernardino County in 1922 was probably a Mexican wolf, a distinct subspecies currently being reintroduced into the wild in the Southwest. The other skull came from California’s last recorded wild wolf, an emaciated, maimed critter killed in Lassen County in 1924. It had DNA markers linking it to the large population of gray wolves of the Rocky Mountains and Canada.3 Because OR7 descends from wolves reintroduced to Idaho from inland British Columbia, Hendricks’s analysis suggests that more or less the “right” kind of wolf—according to ecologists—is recolonizing Oregon and California. But with just two specimens, it is pointless to even try to guess at population densities or dynamics of these
wolves.
“Other states have a frame of reference for what their populations were historically before they were eradicated,” says Karen Kovacs, wildlife program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We scoured every source we could find.” Kovacs and her team looked for trapping records. Nothing. They looked at historical accounts of the first Europeans, but she felt many of these were unreliable because of a widespread loosey-goosey habit of referring to coyotes as a kind of wolf.
Back in 1991 ecologist Robert Schmidt, then at Berkeley, combed through more than 50 European historical accounts, looking for those writers who separately mentioned and clearly distinguished between coyotes, foxes, and wolves. He also gave writers who were trained naturalists the benefit of the doubt that they knew their canids, and he found several sightings that qualified under those rules.4 Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue, for example, saw two species of “wolves” in the San Francisco Bay Area—most likely wolves and coyotes. In Schmidt’s estimation, wolves likely lived in the Central Valley, Coast Ranges, and Sierra Nevada until about 1800. Trapping, shooting, and poisoning of these suspected livestock thieves likely occurred so quickly and so thoroughly that they were nearly lost to Euro-American history.
Of course, that’s not the only history in California. Two analyses of native languages and literature have found traces of the wolf across nearly the whole state. In 2001 Alexandra Geddes-Osborne and Malcolm Margolin found separate words for “wolf” and “coyote” in many indigenous languages, and a role for wolves in story and ceremonies, in tribes as disparate as the Karuk in the far north, to the Pomo in the center of the state, and the Luiseno in the south.5 More recently, a report by scholars from the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University found 15 indigenous languages across the state with different words for wolf, coyote, and dog, and five tribes with traditions in which the wolf features.6
