Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
live in rural areas, many depending for survival on subsistence plots too small to support them, with little or no access to electricity, clean water, sanitation, education or health care, and national shortages of everything from rice to kerosene. More than a decade of Maoist insurgency and civil unrest has wrecked the economy and crippled infrastructure. Nepal has been incapable of even basic governance over the past few decades, and relies on an army of aid charities to avoid mass starvation – the number of NGOs in the country soared from 220 in 1990 to more than 15,000, now contributing around 60% of GDP.
Desperate times? A century ago, most people in Switzerland lived in similar conditions to this, and were even less likely to reach their fiftieth birthday.
Around the world, 40% of people (2.8 billion) have no access even to a communal toilet, which is a major factor in the 2.4 million deaths every year from diarrhoea. About 80% of illnesses are caused by faecal matter (people living without sanitation can ingest as much as ten grams of faecal matter a day). If Nepal is to make the leap in development that Switzerland made, it will need to grow its economy to make similar social investments in health, education and infrastructure. Nepali women will be able to do laundry at the push of a button, freeing up time for education and income-generating activities. Nobody will be using the public lake as a toilet. By 2048, it’s predicted that the average income earned by a person in Asia will be dollar for dollar equivalent to that earned by someone in the United States. The question is how they are going to get there in the changing conditions of the Anthropocene, and without exacerbating the environmental challenges humanity faces. I’ve sought out Mahabir to discover how humanity’s recent exploitation of the atmosphere is being used to smooth that path.
It is a five-hour tortuous drive to the tiny town of Beni (‘the place where two rivers meet’), in a Toyota that dates from 1973, as the driver tells me proudly, giving the chassis a fond slap that causes the side panel to reverberate and almost detach from the rest of the car. The threadbare re-treads skid and swerve in and out of potholes along a narrow road that disappears alarmingly into gorges on either edge. We’re chasing sunset, but it wins, plunging us into darkness for the final, hair-raising hour of the trip.
We overnight in a spartan hotel – made of timber, like all of Beni’s buildings – and set off again at first light. There is no road to Nangi. Reaching Mahabir’s remote mountain village involves a full day’s hike up near-vertical paths, and it’s not long before my pack is straining at my shoulders and my legs complaining at the unaccustomed exercise. In an age where I’m more used to judging distances by the time it takes to travel them by car, plane or other oil-fuelled transport, it’s quite an adjustment to talk in journey times of hours or days by foot.
My laced-up hiking shoes are stifling in the sun. Mahabir had warned me that we would be trekking at altitude where there was likely to be thick snow at this time of year. ‘Tonight freezing, tomorrow night more freezing,’ he tells me cheerfully, as I eye his open flip-flops. Until recently, everyone in his village went barefoot, he says. Even in the snow? ‘Yes, of course. But now even the poorest person has sandals.’
The ascent is immediately steep and continues so for nine hours. Every time the path diverges and I hopefully query it, the answer comes emphatically from below: ‘Up, up.’ It is with a certain satisfaction that I notice Mahabir starting to look a little damp and taking rather longer than before to plod up this interminable stairway.
It is beautiful, though. Vultures spiral up from below us on thermals that take them high into the eye-watering blue. The mountains seem to grow vaster as we climb and I start to experience ‘peak mirage’ – each time we approach a peak, the path unfurls higher and the peak recedes further up. Children often draw sky as a stripe of blue high above the grounded green of domesticity. It feels as though every step is taking us closer to piercing that blue, penetrating that mysterious space where men have placed angels and gods.
The atmosphere is vast and unknowable, but as familiar to us as it was to our distant ancestors. Who has not lain under a tree and taken pleasure at how the phantasmal wind shivers its leaves, or delighted in the puffs of clouds cruising by, or peered at night through the breathable air to the stars beyond. Until recently, only winged creatures could transcend our planetary home and explore the three-dimensional Great Aerial Ocean of the atmosphere. The closest we earthbound humans got was through arduous climbs like this, ascending slowly and painfully through the clouds to taste the chilled, thin air beyond. It wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century that hot-air balloons carried men high above the sod, giving them a bird’s-eye view of our home and enabling direct travel between destinations ‘as the crow flies’. Now that we can dance through the atmosphere with our toys and technologies, we can achieve a truly global perspective on our natural and artificial worlds, and perhaps even reconcile the two. Satellites orbiting the planet can allow us to track tagged marine and land mammals, measure forest loss, and compare Arctic ice coverage over decades. We can measure the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene in real time as the planet changes.
Handily placed stone rest-stops are built into our steep path at twenty-minute intervals and we make use of them all – stopping to sit a while, offloading our backpacks and admiring the view. There’s something noble about conquering a peak: this 3,500-metre hill is my Everest and I take the same pride in my pathetic achievement as Hillary.
We see no other foreigners, just local people commuting up and down between villages that are unlinked by roads, and traders carrying impossibly large baskets of firewood and oranges from the higher slopes to the markets below. ‘Oranges are growing very well in the past few years as it’s become warmer,’ Mahabir tells me. ‘Many villages higher up are growing oranges now.’ We have an orange-pip-spitting competition and Mahabir giggles in delight when he doubles my distance.
‘Normally this whole area is covered in snow from October,’ Mahabir says, looking at the muddy earth. ‘Recently we have been getting less and less snow. We used to get two metres in the winter, and it would stay for weeks. Last winter we only had two centimetres, and it comes later. It means the winter crops have no water and are dying. The price of wheat and barley will be high this spring,’ he predicts.
As we warm the atmosphere, the vast, churning blanket of greenhouse gases that protect life on Earth from the freezing cold of space is changing, affecting the snow here in Nepal and the price of food around the world. As we release more and more stored carbon into the air by burning fossil fuels, we are heading for a 4°C post-Holocene warming this century alone. That’s 2°C higher than the ‘safe’ level determined by scientists. The impacts of this atmospheric carbon are affecting every part of the planet.
No single person or community came up with the idea to put the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oil-based market-driven economy is a characteristic of civilisation that arose out of the human love of energy and its promise of power and wealth. One gallon of oil contains an amount of energy that would take a man eight days of labour to produce. What is wealth if not the key to freedom, a way of throwing off the shackles of labour and the circumscribed life – the liberty to have, be and do as you choose; the dream of no man having dominion over you? It’s intoxicating stuff.
Around the world, scientists and governments now understand the relationship between oil and global warming, and are discussing how to steer us towards healthier ways of achieving this hit. But replacing the efficient package of energy found in fossil fuels with alternatives is far from easy. Poor countries like Nepal, where people still get much of their energy from pre-industrial renewable sources, are feeling the effects of global climate change even while they yearn for the benefits of reliable power that fossil fuels provide. It’s a problem I will encounter throughout my travels.
A road is planned for Nangi, Mahabir tells me, but until then, the only way for people to communicate or trade beyond the distance a voice carries is to physically meet each other or send an emissary. For millennia, people have made journeys like this out of necessity, and yet, in my home life, making the journey to meet someone in person now is often so unnecessary that it carries its own message, that of deference or love, for example.
As we climb, we chat in panting bursts. Mahabir, who despite his grubby outfit and self-effacing manner is something of a celebrity in these parts, tells