With a general election round the corner, the price of onions seems to hold everyone's attention longer than something like a publicly stated commitment from our politicians to revive our rivers and keep them clean and flowing
A few years ago, I met a French couple that had walked across Africa, and asked the two what was the most difficult part of the three-year long journey. They recounted the time when they were in an uninhabited area and had to walk for a couple of days without a village or a person in sight, and without water. When they were severely dehydrated and close to giving up, like a mirage a single woman with a pot of water appeared and poured till they drank the entire contents. Never had they ever imagined what the value of a single sip of water could mean and how immensely life-enforcing a single mouthful of it can be.
We are all quite aware of the state that rivers all over the world are in. Many have been reduced to little more than either large tanks for breeding fish, reined in to generate power or more often than not a sewage and garbage disposal system. We throw something into the water stream, and the river just carries it away, out of sight, out of mind and out of our backyard. It’s not possible for a lot of us to even fathom the extent and depth to which we’ve filled and choked our rivers till they turn into a slow moving slurry of plastic, sewage and chemicals.
While in the greater Himalayas, I was camping at one of the villages and trying to locate a water source when I found my way to a little stream that came out from within a rock-face. Right next to the spout was a little sign (in Hindi) which said: “This is drinking water — do not throw garbage, spit or dirty it”. The most basic principle of water and life was being acknowledged and respected.
Across the mountains, I could see there was another source of water which had made its way down the tree-less slopes — like an outline of the ravine drawn in green, plants and trees clung to the edges of the snowmelt as it trickled and flowed. Animals and birds knew and remembered this water source as well, and mapped their movements around the one thing that holds life on earth.
In a flash I found myself in what could have been Delhi or Kanpur or Ahmedabad; the river could have been the Cauvery or the Damodar or the Yamuna — they all looked the same and shared the same fate. Once civilisations settled on their banks and as villages, towns and cities grew and growth became the only thing we could see, the rivers began dying.
A river of fish, turtles, plants and tiny shrimp grew darker with each new pipe that was added, spewing all the waste, toxins and chemicals from the belly of industries that had lain themselves down like some enormous beast that had over-eaten and couldn’t break the cycle of consumption and expulsion. Rivers, being the travellers that they are, wind their way through thousands of kilometers heading to the ocean where they finally spill themselves in their entirety with the longest and widest carrying the most waste.
Each year, whales are being washed ashore, either dead or dying, with our trash lodged in their bellies. In 2010, a pair of sweat-pants, a golf ball, surgical gloves, small towels, bits of plastic and 20 plastic bags had all found their way into the ocean and then inside a whale. Scientist John Calambokidis said in 20 years of examining more than 200 whale carcasses he had never seen so much trash in a whale’s stomach.
That was almost four years ago. This July, a young adult Sperm whale washed ashore with 59 different plastic items inside it, totalling over 37 pounds! Most of this plastic consisted of transparent sheeting used to build greenhouses for the purpose of growing tomatoes for the European market. The rest was plastic bags, meters of rope, two stretches of hosepipe, two small flower pots and a plastic spray canister — all familiar household items that we use.
Today with the general election around the corner, opinions and stands about all kinds of issues are being thrown up. Unfortunately the price of a kilo of onions seems to hold everyone’s attention longer than something like an offer to commit to reviving our rivers and keeping them that way.
The good part is that things can be turned around and rivers have been revived the world over. At one point, many German rivers had turned into toxic wastelands, home to diseased fish with ulcers all over, gasping for air, in water filled with plastic and effluents and porpoises dying out. Not unlike the Yamuna, the Elbe River and its tributaries were considered doomed, until the reunification of Germany in 1990.
Today, the rivers are thriving. With the closure of many East German factories, the continuous treatment of waste water, and the implementation of stricter environmental regulations, gradually, the rivers came back to life. Now, the Elbe flows transformed and has people angling and swimming in it’s waters, even the porpoises are returning after decades.
In the UK, the Environment Council is working towards restoring 15,288km of river. In los Angeles, the eponymous river revitalisation project has kicked into high gear and is aiming at a complete transformation by 2020. This should have been a priority all along and needs to be a priority today and now or we’d be fools looking for hope where there is none. Is it complacency or are we just that thick-skinned that we can stand with our backs to everything that is crumbling around usIJ
From a tree being lopped, to bursting firecrackers that cover entire cities in a toxic cloud, to an empty bag of chips being thrown out of a car — Until we are all involved and refuse to accept the current state of things and transform our collective attitude, promises of change will stay printed only on sheets of paper. What is your impact as an individualIJ
How far will that bag of chips or plastic bottle you threw away, goIJ Until we answer questions like this and more for ourselves, and turn them into little acts of change, we will not be able to transform the future of this pale blue dot that we live on.
(The author is a wildlife film-maker)