Prithvi Mata
Do you remember from Covid’s peak panic what the alphanumeric “N95” represents? It means that this type of face mask filters 95% of airborne particles.
Here’s easier math: what percentage of smog’s nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone are harmful to our respiratory systems? 100%!
Why is one such a lonely number? Add one oxygen molecule to carbon monoxide (CO) and you get carbon dioxide (CO2). Emitted from internal combustion engines, CO poses an immediate threat to human health. As long as emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 remain high, global average temperatures will continue to rise and jeopardize the earth’s health.
Just a bit more arithmetic. Why is one such a lovely number? Because we have only one Mother Earth, one Prithvi Mata.
Alphabet Soup Smog
On my wife (Mangla) and my recent trip to India, we wore masks when we were in crowded interiors and whenever we were outdoors. To be sure, we were overly cautious about Covid’s risk; but I’m certain that our lungs thanked us for filtering the thick, hazy, sulfur-smelling, alphabet-soup-spelling smog of NOx, SOx, CO, VOCs, PM, and O3.
But in India, we were practically alone in our mask-prophylaxis. Over 34 days, I kept count of the number of people I saw wearing masks. Including Mangla, but excluding all the women on scooters who used scarves to cover their entire head except their eyes, the number of mask-wearers was nine. One more than the eight Ashtavinayaka temples we visited on our pilgrimage to honor Ganesha, the Lord of Beginnings, Remover of Obstacles.
Resolutions for 2024
In this auspicious numeric spirit, may I suggest the following eight New Year’s Resolutions for your consideration?
- Avoid flying to India (9.5 t)
- Live car-free (2.4 t)
- Buy green energy (1.5 t)
- Switch car to hybrid or EV (0.5 – 1.1 t)
- Eat a plant-based diet (0.8 t)
- Wash clothes in cold water (0.3 t)
- Line-dry clothes (0.2 t)
- Recycle (0.2 t)
I don’t intend to be a prescriptive scold, but just imagine the change in the world if in 2024 every reader removes just one of these eight obstacles to mitigating climate change (derived from Environmental Research Letters).
Reducing My Carbon Footprint
Like most Indians residing in India, I can check off the bottom four Maslowian ways to manage my carbon footprint, despite my liking the cozy, soft feeling of warm cottons, fresh out of the clothes dryer. But like elites living in India and the West, I have the ability and obligation to do much more at the top of the Climate Change Pareto chart.
While my wife is loyal to her Prius hybrid, I can’t see my way to trading our trusty old luxury car for an electric vehicle; my frugality suggests that I do more for the environment by minimizing car travel rather than driving an EV that is not a free ride. Also, neither Mangla nor I can fathom never visiting India again; we’ll keep returning to our motherland as long as our muscles and bones can tolerate the long flight across the Pacific.
Changing Times
I’m old enough to remember a time in India when plastic bags and bottles were more scarce than a solar eclipse when travelers would rest their weary bodies under a banyan tree and drink cool, fresh water poured into their hands by an old man servicing a piau. I sentimentally recall when a car was a rare sight in my ancestral villages, thus requiring that we take horse or ox carts from the railway station to our homes. My romantic nostalgia takes me back to when Indian Railways provided a leisurely, cost-effective, and ecologically sound way to negotiate travel across the country by sleeper cars that enabled me to stretch out further than any business-class flight could.
That said, I have changed with the times, mirroring what I see around me. I, too, am guilty of waste and overconsumption. In big ways and small, I “pass” the first part of Gandhiji’s test about change:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body.”
But I’ve failed the second, more important, part of the quote:
“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
Our Ashtavinayaka Yatra
On this trip, Mangla and I flew between major cosmopolitan areas and hired a car and driver to take us between villages and cities, as well as on our Ashtavinayaka Yatra around Pune. On all those trips—plus during one night’s journey by train—I used bottled water. Given that I once had typhoid and have struggled with dysentery, I suppose it is understandable that when I didn’t have access to boiled water, I requested bottled water. Still, by my count, I used several dozen plastic bottles of Bisleri and Aquafina during our trip. That translates to a carbon footprint of somewhere between 3,600 – 5,000 grams. While shareholders of Bisleri and Aquafina might rejoice, I shudder to calculate the impact of 1.4 billion Indians following my mineral-water-drinking ways.
Even a mother and child langur cradling a plastic bottle and rhesus monkeys near an ancient temple carved into a hillside cave seemed to mock my wastefulness by drinking from a tourist’s water bottle. What if our fellow primates knew that my round-trip flight between San Francisco and Hyderabad resulted in 9.5 tons of CO2? They might instruct me to trust a favored environment agency and internalize this truth: to stop climate change, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be generated by a single person in a year needs to be reduced to 0.6 – 2.0 tons.
A Roadmap to Stop Climate Change
Although I have a doctorate in organizational change, I’m not clever enough to design a roadmap to that goal. Large-scale change of this magnitude requires the earth’s 7.9 billion people to be fully aligned. It demands a long-term, commonsense vision that begins with planting a seed for a leafy tree under which a child in the distant future will seek shade.
Almost everywhere I look, that kind of forward-looking leadership is missing. Gentle reader, perhaps you feel disappointed when you look to the Left and the Right and you find politicians of all stripes and spots spouting climate change gamesmanship rather than servant leadership; perhaps you feel overwhelmed when you look to the Global North and South and see cool cats in governments playing carbon footsie.
I, too, feel disappointed and overwhelmed until I think about Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “Ekla Cholo Re” (“Then Walk Alone”). It is a fine clarion call for the climate change movement.
If the dark night brings thunder and storm at the door
Then let the lightning ignite the light in you
Alone to shine on the path
If no one heeds your call—then walk alone.