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“Change is coming, whether you like it or not.” Wise words from a 16-year-old lost among the clam­or of panicking adults who can’t see beyond their beliefs and bank accounts. Greta Thunberg has blown the conch shell, meta­phorically. In Hindu mythology, the conch shell was blown at the beginning of a battle of good vs evil. In the Mahabharata, a long and destructive battle almost destroyed both sides, but the les­son remains—no matter what the cost, the battle had to be fought to the bitter end for ethical and moral reasons. Once you have entered the fray, there was no turning back.

The war of the Mahabhara­ta was only 18 days long. But what intense eighteen days! The epic is rich with extraordinary characters, plots and events. The Mahabharata is the longest epic poem known to humani­ty. According to Wikipedia: “At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.”

And in much the same way, we can see the unfolding furies and passions of people separat­ing into two battle lines as Thun­berg blows the conch shell over what may be the biggest battle of humanity—the fight over the sur­vival of the planet itself. Tied to this battle is humanity’s survival, and also the survival of all living forms on earth.

For those who believe that their “way of life” is at risk, and who continue to believe the leftists are using children to make up alarm­ist stories to attack their lifestyles, the path forward is clear—more fossil fuel extraction, more auto­mobiles on the roads, endless deforestation for palm oil, soy and beef, clearcutting of all of South America to feed the geometrically multiplying human population. In this scenario, poverty can only be ended when every single human eats a hamburger a day, discards 4.6 pounds of disposable plastic each day, and drinks only bot­tled water or soda out of plastic bottles.

Agriculture will be increasingly “human free,” and will be done on a war footing with computers, drones and planes spraying thou­sands of hectares of land with lethal pesticides that kill every pest (and every weed, wildflower, bird, bee, earthworm, and beetle in the vicinity.) This is the vision of progress and affluence pushed by America, which coinciden­tally also happens to have the biggest fossil fuel companies, car companies and fertilizer and pes­ticide companies listed on their stock exchanges, enriching their stockholders with this apocalyptic vision of progress.

When Thunberg took a sailboat from Sweden to New York, she was entering the lion’s den—the city where all the commodities erasing the planet’s lifeforms are traded. Billions of dollars change hands in Wall Street and around New York everyday, as big finance companies trade in palm oil, soy, beef, and timber. The lifestyles of those trading the future secu­rity of the coming generation for their own securities—private jets, brownstones in Manhattan, giant mansions in Connecticut, dinners at Nobu, holiday homes at Mar­tha’s Vineyard, private tuition at Ivy Leagues—all depend on coolly calculative decisions which prior­itize profit over planet everyday.

For these ruling elites, Thun­berg and children like her who speak the truth are a threat. She must be brought down by the force of public opinion, so the right-wing cavalry marched into action. Dinesh D’Souza, right-wing extraordinaire, posted a pic­ture of Nazi propaganda featuring a blue-eyed girl with braids and juxtaposed that with a photograph of Thunberg. “Children—notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks—were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goeb­bels technique! Looks like today’s progressive Left is still learning its game from an earlier Left in the 1930s,” he wrote. Fox host Laura Ingraham compared Thunberg to a Stephen King story.

Sandipan Deb, former edi­tor of India’s Financial Express and founder-editor of Open and Swarajya magazines, said “radi­cal-left handlers” are using Thun­berg to create a pre-industrial society akin to Pol Pot’s. On the eve of massive unseasonal floods which left many people dead in Bihar, Deb wrote: “Even if global temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, noth­ing cataclysmic will happen.”

Deb goes on to claim “crazed leftists” want to keep the poor in a helpless state, while magnani­mous people like him see the way forward—better research in green energy which will be cheaper and more attractive than fossil fuel. By a sudden switcheroo, climate activists clamoring for an end of fossil fuel and for green energy are suddenly crazed and only out to drive people into poverty, while wise people like Deb have been calling for green energy all along. Besides the sleight of hand of this argument, Deb expects nobody will notice the internal contradiction of dismissing the 1.5 degree threshold while seizing the green energy platform.

Who will win this massive battle for the survival of all life? There is no doubt in my mind. It is not the middle-aged people furiously railing against Thunberg while trying to deviously confuse us with their bizarre arguments, hoping nobody will notice that their prime concern is for their stocks and shares. The only win­ners in this epic battle are the next generation, which will shape the world according to its own vision of prosperity.

When I was an undergrad­uate at Brown University, I took a class on Colonial Latin America. An exceptionally brilliant professor, R. Douglas Cope, taught the class. Method­ically through the semester, we read texts describing the arrival of the Spanish from Europe, and their gradual takeover of Latin and South America. We went through the conquistadores and the encomienda system. Post-colonial theory remains trendy in anthropology and English departments—in each of which I have a Masters degrees. I am not a subscriber to the theory that all structural problems of the present are the fault of the colonial systems of the past. The Indians (of India), for one, blame the British a lot for their social problems while under-examining their own roles in the poor state of affairs of their nation.

At the same time, it is hard to deny that many of the social problems of our day and age does stem from European colonial­ism, and the way the colonialists used savage methods to suppress and decimate the people and the lands they colonized. Indigenous people were brutally murdered in mass so the lands they had lived on for centuries could be turned to farmland and grazing land for the settlers. I wonder how much of North America’s landscape is “natural,” and how much of it has been changed by the hands of the white man. I also wonder how many of the current hurricanes and torna­does that the US experiences are man-made.

Vast farmland, aerated by tox­ic pesticides and nurtured only by chemical fertilizers, cover the middle of the US. I travelled through Iowa during a cross-coun­try trip in the early 90s. Long lines of corn that had been planted in precise lines, zipping by our eyes for days. Fallow land looked like the surface of the moon—nothing grew on them, not a single speck of weed, no moss, no fern, no fungi. No bees buzzed, no but­terflies flew. There were no soy­beans and pumpkins climbing the corn plants, as in the Three Sisters method of planting practiced by indigenous tribes.

Nothing else interrupted the landscape, except an occasion­al mammoth tractor or truck in the horizon. The landscape was anything but natural. Did these vast plains in the middle of the continent contain massive for­ests before? Did CO2 and oxygen circulate differently, leading to more stable weather patterns? It is hard to know how much the hand of the European settlers have changed the landscape and the weather in North America.

We thought the devastation of indigenous people and their lands was over, that we now lived in civilized, democratic countries with human rights. Then along came Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new­est President. And in his actions we can see all of European colo­nial and imperial history as if it’s happening in front of our eyes. The Amazon has been set on fire. South America will burn to ashes, and be replaced with beef farms and soybean plantations to feed cattle in Europe, China, and emerging economies.

People all over the world, acute­ly aware of the climate crisis, are horrified and devastated by these actions. And yet Western democ­racy says we must let this ecocide megalomaniac play out his course of action. Nothing can stop him, because the holy strictures of European democracy is so sacred he must be allowed to burn and slaughter through the last remain­ing old-growth forests of the plan­et for a terra nulla future in Brazil.

Protesting beef is tagged as a BJP activity in the subcontinent. But one can no longer ignore that the Hindus had a point when they resisted the eating of beef as an unethical and immoral activity. If life itself is going to be snuffed out in this planet due to people’s appetite for beef, how can we view this eating as ethical and moral?

I visited Brazil in 2005 to attend a conference on migration, and later visited the World Social Forum at Porte Allegre. Lula was the much loved President of Bra­zil. When he showed up at the forum, people surrounded him and showered him with love. There was a feeling of peace and love in the air, if such things can be felt.

Later I ended up in a Vipassana center in the hills around Rio. I was relegated to the dish-wash­ing with an indigenous Peruvi­an man, while the white people cooked. I didn’t like the division of labor or the way race played out in what should have been a race-neutral space of Buddhist practice. Back in Rio, I saw black people living in immense poverty side by side huge wealth. I didn’t like that either.

On another memorable occa­sion, I thought I’d take the bus to Copacabana beach. I was about to step off the bus saying: ‘Copaca­bana?’ with a bright smile when a tired looking indigenous woman wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug and screamed: ‘No!’ She wouldn’t let me go till the bus had arrived at a safe neighbor­hood and I was out of the favelas. Brazil was riven with violence, race inequality and class injus­tice—the feeling was palpable.

How the world responds to the apocalyptic devastation of Brazil now will be a test not just of our commitment to climate change, but also to our ideas of fairness and equality. This is the moment to seriously redress environmen­tal and racial injustice.

 There’s a strange dichotomy that has developed in the climate debate in the United States. One group, known as the “denialists”, insist humans and fossil fuel have nothing to do with climate change. They may be asso­ciated with the oil lobby, or the Republicans, or the feminist-hat­ing men, or the Antifa opponents, or the right-wing extremists. In any case, they’ve decided to put their eggs in the “Denial” boat, just because in the US you have to take a strong position in any pub­lic debate, and this sounds like the right position to take. Their way of life is under attack and they’re going to hunker down and deny they have a hand in the world’s chaos. The other side embraces science, and refute the denialists. This discourse has taken on com­plex moral undertones, especially among the science stalwarts who are outraged that the denialists are ignoring the real science, and focusing only on beliefs.

This narrative, which is repeat­ed over and over in the American press (although thankfully not in the presses of other democra­tized countries), has also led to a fervent push for “science.” When Greta Thunberg got onto her little sailboat to sail to New York to talk about climate change, a banner in the background clearly states: “Unite Behind the Science.” When the National Geographic chooses women scientists to go and mea­sure the levels of plastic in the Ganges, they make a special point that only science can resolve this— and nothing else. Only science. Anyone else who dares to breathe a different opinion is automatical­ly labeled a denialist (in the US) and a Hindu fundamentalist, or BJP, or a saffron loving extremist (in the Indian subcontinent.)

I find that problematic, if only because modern science, which is touted as the solution to the plastic crisis and the fossil fuel debacle, is in fact the cause of our current environmental prob­lems. The most obvious example: there would be no plastic with­out science. Bakelite, also known as polyoxybenzylmethylengly­colanhydride, was developed by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland in Yonkers, New York, in 1907. Bakelite was desig­nated a National Historic Chem­ical Landmark by the American Chemical Society on 9 Novem­ber, 1993, in recognition of its significance as the world’s first synthetic plastic. We know the importance of bakelite, but we don’t know whether the chemist asked the right questions when creating it. Did he, for instance, think about the consequences of his invention when making it? Or was the invention itself the only important end-goal, and all social, moral and ethical consequences of his actions were elided in this eureka moment?

Modern science has been fueled by this pure pursuit of power and recognition, with no mor­al or ethical check-and-balance to keep it on track, unlike the scientific pursuits of an earlier age. The inventors and chemists of the Reinaissance where kept in check by the religious clergy and the philosophers. But since the 19th century, capitalism has been the moderating principle behind science.

Modern science operates in a narrow, blinkered manner, look­ing at one small problem at a time, unconcerned about its impact on the macro scale. Because scientif­ic work is incremental, nobody is responsible for the final product. No international forum or law court holds a scientist account­able for mass extinctions if they create a toxic pesticide that col­lapses the colonies of all bee spe­cies, or if they create a plastic which clogs up every waterway on earth. No scientist, engineer or technologist is responsible for fossil fuel inventions and their impact on air, water and human health. Scientists are only accountable to their patrons in the industries or in the military, and to the stockholders of the companies who they work for.

Whoever creates the most pat­ents wins the most money, lead­ing to a mad rush for funding, with military and government the first entities turned to for sup­port. How can science fueled for military purposes or for indus­trial capitalism be anything but destructive? But these questions are never raised in academia.

Somehow we are made to believe this very science which will again cure the looming exis­tential threats. A group of women scientists picking up the thread of a plastic bottle to the Ganges will suddenly cure the scourge of plastic, as if through the divine intervention of their female pres­ence and their STEM skills. We are asked to give up our supersti­tious non-scientific beliefs, and yet the alternative offered is again belief—belief in the all-curative powers of modern science.

If “snake-oil” refers to a decep­tive concoction with no real medicinal value which is sold as a panacea for all ills, then modern science is as much a snake-oil discipline as those thought up by any wily salesman of the past. While I admire good science (yes, there are some people still doing that), I don’t think this deified, adored and much adulated dis­cipline offers the world-changing paradigm we need to shift away from our current destructive ten­dencies towards a more simple and sustainable way of life. That will come from moral arguments and ethical frameworks, both of which has been missing from Western epistemologies for the past two centuries of rape and pillage of the earth. This will come from legal action and polit­ical will, international solidari­ty and global awareness, all of which is rising above the dom­inance of science to define this existential crisis .

 A friend of mine who used to work for ICIMOD said to me: “You should write an op-ed about how we always respond to disasters when they occur, but we never plan for them proactively. An earthquake cannot be pre­dicted, but floods happen year­ly. Why don’t we have policies and implementation to stop this? The government is ready with relief materials and helicopter rescues. But they have no policies or implementation to prevent disasters.” Why, indeed? Is it that the polit­ical elites know that disasters are profitable moments to bring in generous amounts of state fund­ing and international aid? Com­mentators have talked about the “Bihar Flood Mafia,” who thrive on this mismanagement of the rivers and who look forward to the yearly flood of funds that fol­lows the inundation and breakage of barricades. Writer P. Sainath explored this disaster capitalism more in his book ‘Everyone Loves a Good Drought’.

We know the Tarai is a flood-plain which floods annually. Himalayan rivers, swollen from the Asar-Shravan rains, burst their bounds and spread over the land, bringing with them disaster as well as the rich alluvial bounty of the monsoon. Before the Sixties, the rush of this water was held back by the Char-Kosay Jhadi, the jungles which lay on the border between India and Nepal. Like Shiva’s locks which held back the mighty Ganga as she burst forth her bounds, the tangled roots of the jungle held back the water, absorbed it, and controlled the volume.

With DDT came the end of mos­quitoes and malaria. People start­ed to move down to the Tarai in droves, decimating the jungles. With the forests went the tigers. As the big cats disappeared, so did a cascade of species that lived inside dense jungles.

Recently it was World Tiger Day. Someone who goes by the moni­ker “Amulya Sir” tweeted a pho­tograph of King Tribhuwan by a dead tiger, and asked the question (I am paraphrasing his words): “Do you know why the tigers were more protected then, despite the hunting?” Then he answered his own question: “Because the habitat of the tiger was not frag­mented as it is now.” The Tarai was a long impenetrable corridor teeming with trees and wildlife where tigers thrived, alongside an ecological treasure-house of other species. Jungles absorbed the river’s overflow, acting as a natural checkdam and barrage for the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. With the end of the jun­gles came the end of the tigers, but it was also the beginning of the misery of humans who saw their settlements washed away each year, with no Shiva locks to hold back raging torrents.

Is the answer then the slow revival of jungles as they once existed in this vast East-West cor­ridor of the Nepal Tarai? If people find life untenable in these areas due to annual “habitat loss,” per­haps the way forward could be to re-stitch together the land into one long wildlife corridor. Osten­sibly we would be saving the tiger, but it would also provide a natural barricade for human settlements downstream. The government would have to provide compensa­tion and resettle those who have to move into safe areas.

Loktantra has brought with it disasters we had not foreseen— bulldozers breaking down peepal trees and resting places (chautari), guthi temples and lands being absorbed by profiteers, even the land underneath the Prime Min­ister’s office itself being stolen and sold. If everything is for sale, what will remain in thirty years’ time for those who come after us? If the land on which rice grows is decimated by concrete apartment buildings, what will we eat when there is another food shortage or an Indian blockade? While we have the political freedom to speak out now, is the environ­mental destruction so great that life itself may become untenable in a few decades?

Saving the tiger seems like a poor cause to champion when Nepal is rift apart by human traf­ficking and slavery of migrant laborers in the Gulf. And yet as I look at the map and saw a pro­posed railway would lead straight from the Chinese border to Sur­khet, close to our last remaining wildlife reserves, I cannot help but wonder if the tiger’s destiny is tied with our own. If we allow this railway, opening the flood of wildlife traffickers and poachers that are sure to follow, what will be left?

If the last remaining tiger is killed for his penis or his bones (supposed to have aphrodisiac properties and coveted by patri­archal Chinese men who most likely never experienced the intense bonding between a male and a female that comes with love and respect between partners), then what kind of Nepal will we be left with?

Loktantra has viewed every­thing—agricultural land, guthi temples, migrant workers, Lok Sewa appointments, road con­tracts, drinking water, public transport, airports and airlines— as commodities to be exploited for capitalist gain. Nothing is seen as national resources to be stew­arded and preserved for future generations. There is little social­ism and even less democratic thinking in our leaders as they sit at throne-like coffee tables and receive supplicants like mafia Godfathers, while dispensing lar­gesse. Needless to say, such a system cannot in the long run be in charge of stewarding a nation-state, which requires self-sacrifice and long-term vision.

South Asia goes through periodic droughts and floods in the same year. Why hasn’t it occurred to us that this is a paradox? How can a continent reeling from water shortage suddenly be inundated with an overabundance of rain, which leads to annual floods? Often, this phenomena is happening in contiguous areas only a few kilometers apart.

I was consulting for the World Bank between 2008-2010, and I remember the then director of World Bank in Nepal, Susan Goldmark, saying that South Asia would never get out of this drought and flood cycle till it managed its monsoon—storing high volumes of rainwater in the high season, withdrawing during the low season. This bit of common sense came to me as a shock when I first heard it. I think about that moment and wonder if we’ve always taken these “natural calamities” for granted, as acts of god and nature which we cannot change. But as Goldmark pointed out, it may just be an issue of policy and management which will end this cycle.

Our ancestors were brilliant and much more technically savvy than us in harvesting rainwater. The dhungay-dhara technology, a Newari invention, stores water in underground channels and withdraws it year around. It is a marvel whose workings were hidden by those who made it so that enemies could not locate its source and disable the water system when attacking a city. Perhaps it is because of this that the system fell into disuse, because only a few were privy to its workings. There’s a channel to recharge underground reservoirs, and a system to filter the water as it goes down.

Anybody who’s dealt with today’s pumps, electric motors and ozone filters, which frequently go bust and need constant repair and electricity, can’t but admire this technology that operates seamlessly. In the last year, I have invested Rs 80,000 ($800) in an underground pump, Rs 30,000 ($300) in a filter, and Rs 24,000 ($240) in an ozone filter for my kitchen. They all work sporadically and need constant repair. The ozone filter requires a Rs 3,500 filter change every six months. I changed it two months ago and the last few days I haven’t had any water coming out. I have reverted to my older filter with a ceramic candle in order to get a few liters of clean water.

No wonder it’s much easier to go out and buy a plastic canister, which will last for a while and comes with a guarantee of purity and freshness. The gentleman in charge of bringing water to the Kathmandu Valley, Surya Raj Kandel, is now engaged in the bottled water business. Kandel is the Executive Director of Melamchi Water Supply Project, and a majority shareholder at Crystal Aqua Service Private Limited. In any country, this is a flagrant violation of ethics and conflict of interest. In Nepal, nobody blinks, probably because the gentleman in question is part of the ruling party, and his wife is the registered owner.

All throughout the monsoon, as the rain fell incessantly, I could hear the roar of diesel jeeps parking outside my house, full of plastic water tanks. This fossil fueled absurdity makes no sense, especially when clean water fell without pause from the sky.

To imagine a city of 1.3 million (with some estimating that the Lalitpur and Bhaktapur districts have an additional four million residents) will get their water through diesel tankers is not just stupid, but also criminal in the age of climate change. I don’t know if UNFCCC has anything to say about that, but they should put out an advisory to Third World countries like Nepal which have fallen off the sustainability rails regarding the use of fossil fuels to ferry water into cities.

Besides heating the atmosphere and making it unbearable for urban residents, these thousands of tankers spew daily air pollution, affecting our health. We pay a high price for a public utility like water through the added tax of petrol and diesel, all of which ends up in the exchequer of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, the countries which are enslaving our people in the first place.

How did a country with an overabundance of water become dependent on a complex web of fossil fuel, sold by undemocratic authoritative regimes, to get its drinking water? We have to look at neighbor India as a culprit as well—it has aggressively extended its motorcycles, trucks, tankers, and petrol pipelines into Nepal, bringing Modinomics (including a far too jovial relationship with petrol tyrants of Central Asia) into our country. If we are to separate ourselves from this tangled web, let us start with what we’ve always known—our own indigenous technology.

What we need is government policy which mandates rainwater harvesting, and reliable companies that can provide professional service. Unfortunately Nepal government is too busy collecting taxes and fees from migrant workers to think about training them in this essential work. So we continue to limp onwards, a city (and increasingly, a country) flooded by Himalayan rivers and the monsoon which is also captive to the fossil fuel and bottled water lobby.

Nepal government and aid agencies need to scale up technical trainings and regulatory mechanisms for traditional water harvesting and groundwater recharge, which is the only way dense cities like Kathmandu will have water in the future.

June 11 is the date for the arrival of the monsoon in Nepal. This year, there was no sign of rain on the 11th. The days ticked by as we looked at the skies, increasingly anxious about the oppressive feeling in the air. A cyclone predicted to hit the coast of Gujarat moved away to the ocean, and was blamed for sucking rain away from the mainland. No one—meteorologists, climate change specialists, Indian scientifc community, NASA—seemed to know why the monsoon was delayed. As the drought worsened, maps started to appear on Twitter, showing how far the monsoon should have moved across the subcontinent by late June. Most Indian states which should have received rain had seen weak rainfall or none at all.

The briefest shower I have ever seen in Kathmandu washed away the dust on the leaves of my curry tree plant on June 17. The rain lasted fve minutes. On Asar 15 ( June 30), we saw photographs of people planting rice in what looked like well-irrigated terraces. Mud-happy people stuck rice seedlings into the ground. For a Twitter moment, all seemed well.

For most urban dwellers running around on motorcycles, rain is an inconvenience that floods them in badly planned cities. Urban floods are an annual occurrence in cities like Mumbai. But “floods” and “droughts” are two sides of the same coin. For a continent that should recharge during rainy season and withdraw water during dry season, we tend to waste our precious water during monsoon in dirty, uncontrollable floods, and cry foul during dry season when another state or area which has better managed its resources refuses to give us its precious hoard.

South Asia has also adopted the electric underground pump with a vengeance—most of us get our drinking water from rained groundwater reservoirs. But South Asians in general are not known for frugal use of water. We extract massive amounts from our finite reservoirs with no thought for the future. We leave the tap turned on because there are no consequences from government or community.

Chennai, a city of estimated 12 million people, has run dry. The alarming news that this major city in India had run out of water first became evident through satellite photographs posted by NASA, which showed before and after photographs of Puzhal Lake from 2018 and 2019. The four rained reservoirs in Chennai were operating at a 0.2 capacity. Thecity, the NASA article notes, “has been devoid of rain for almost 200 days.”

An article by Nidhi Jamwal in ‘The Wire’ on June 27, titled “Not Just Chennai, India’s Drought Situation Is Far Worse Than We Realize” quotes the South Asian Drought Monitor: “more than 44% area of the country is facing drought-like conditions, of which over 17% is facing ‘severe dry’ conditions.”

On June 23, I read an article titled ‘Amid growing crisis, Madhya Pradesh may become first state to introduce Right to Water Act’ on the India Water Portal. The language of rights has always interested me, not the least in ways South Asians demand rights without also realizing it comes with responsibilities.

So I posted this on Twitter: In India too, the talk is all about “rights” but nothing about “responsibilities.” Not even basic water conservation steps like turning off taps, not overusing tubewells (I’ve seen these left gushing in India), just plain old abuse of water is not addressed.

India wastes massive amount of water, not the least for irrigation where farmers turn on an electric motor and leave the water gushing for hours on end. This waste is fueled by cheap electricity subsidies. As the July 1 op-ed “To handle water crisis, overhaul irrigation” by Joydeep Gupta in India Climate Dialogue pointed out, this must be replaced by the more efficient drip-irrigation system which pinpoints and directs water directly to the roots of the plant instead of flooding the entire field. He also advocates a move away from water intensive crops like rice towards barley and millets that are water efficient.

The language describing this crisis as “drought” and “climate change” removes human agency and turns the manmade environmental disaster into an abstract natural catastrophe. Yet we are very much to blame. By we, I mean government policies that have prioritized pumps over indigenous methods of recharge, and forest clearcutting for mining companies instead of reforestation. By we, I mean cities which have paved every single inch with asphalt and turned urban spaces into barren deserts. By we, I mean users who over-pump underground reservoirs with no thought of the future.

It is clear that the Prime Minister’s Offce in India is now taking the water conservation issue seriously. On June 30, PM Modi urged people to conserve every drop of water and create a database of people involved in the indigenous water conservation.

This is the first step in acknowledging wasteful use of water is a cause of India’s water emergency. India needs to move towards a national and regional policy which prioritizes reforestation, river conservation, groundwater stewardship, rainwater harvesting, and wells and ponds revival. Is South Asia, as a region, prepared for such a massive crisis? India and Pakistan continue to battle onwards with manufactured military crisis in Kashmir that eat away at their treasuries. So successful has this strategy been for political domination in each country that nobody—not least the political elites—seem willing to put it aside for the real issues, including water, besetting the subcontinent. India needs to sink a few million recharge wells into its cities and villages, but most of the money is siphoned off to buy clunky, decommissioned military hardware from Russia and France instead.

South Asia cannot afford a drought. We are a continent of a billion and a half people dependent on rain-fed agriculture. The crops may fail this year, and we need to plan. The alternative— South Asian governments’ apathy—is too terrifying to imagine. Without rain to recharge these underground water dhukuti, we are looking not just at an abstract “monsoon defcit” but a humanitarian crisis. India must stop its BIMSTEC nonsense and immediately come onboard SAARC again. The very first issues the South Asian region must discuss is how to resolve the water and upcoming food shortage crisis.

 Thousands of Nepali students go to study abroad each year, in countries like the UK, Australia, the US, and others. These countries are known not just for their high living standards but also their perceived superiority in the sciences. Families sell their ancestral lands and homes in order to fund their children’s education because they believe what their children will learn abroad will be far superior to what they can learn in Nepal.

But is that necessarily true? In the past decade or two, the planet has warmed to unsustain­able levels due to the residues of Western scientific inventions, including fossil fuels and tox­ic emissions from incineration of plastics. Chemical fertilizers and insecticides have devastated large swathes of fertile agricul­tural land, leaving wastelands of monoculture that can be wiped out with a single insect attack. Antibiotics, a seemingly benign pharmacological invention, now runs off into rivers and water-bod­ies at such high levels that they are decimating aquatic life. They also kill the good bacteria in human guts, altering the microbiome and bringing about a host of unspec­ified diseases to the weakened human body.

All of these Western scientific marvels are working in concert to bring about a genocidal end to all life on the planet. A recent report by IPBES has stated that one million species of insects, animals and birds are at risk of going extinct.

In the North and South poles, which store thousands of cubits of water in the form of Arctic and Antarctic ice, temperatures are soaring to such extremes (32 degree centigrade was recorded in 2017) that the poles are hotter than some European countries in peak summer. As the perma­frost melts, the rising waters are bringing about coastal flooding, hurricanes and cyclones on a scale not recorded before. Envi­ronmentalists warn that thou­sands of coastal cities are in dan­ger of being inundated and made uninhabitable.

Despite all these warnings, we continue with our daily life, as if nothing is at stake. In Kathmandu, we get in our cars and motor­bikes, fire up the ignition and expel some more toxic pollutants from petrol and diesel in the air. Despite hazardous levels of PM2 particles in the air, we assume this is a minor inconvenience, or an unavoidable hazard we have to endure in our drive for Western-style modernity. To walk would be embarrassing and show poverty, although Nepalis have always walked everywhere since they settled on this mountainous land.

When I asked the young women who help me with my housework to carry cotton bags when going shopping, they unanimously refuse. It’s embarrassing to carry a reusable bag, they say. Single-use plastic is smart and fashionable. They don’t want to look dumpy carrying a cotton bag to market. Even when I explain how plastic is entering every nook and cran­ny of our waterways, and how it never degrades but only gets smaller and smaller into particles known as microplastics which enter our bloodstream, they still refuse. To them, I am a quaint and impractical woman living a strange life, who mops her floors with soapnuts and orange peel instead of using the smart new gadgets which exude a stream of high quality cleaning chemi­cals, like in the homes of the peo­ple who they’ve worked for in the past.

In the vegetable market, I get into daily battles with vendors who want to be kind and hand me my dirty vegetables in clean plastic, and I have to insist that potatoes or tomatoes will do just fine in my cotton bag, and I don’t need the plastic, thank you.

Herein lies the crux of the mat­ter: everything Western Civiliza­tion told us was “dirty” is in fact ecologically clean, whereas every­thing they’ve told us is clean is in fact highly toxic. Take cowdung, used for millennia to clean floors. It provides a sparkling clean floor (for those who haven’t seen a cowdung and red earth paint­ed floor, I’d highly recommend checking out how beautiful it can be). Yet Western science insists it is dirty. Take cleaning chemicals invented in the laboratories of Western science, which are mar­keted as purveyors of cleanliness. New research now says this hys­terical push toward a sterile envi­ronment has caused an epidemic of allergies in Western societies, with people dying if they even so much as come into contact with something as ordinary as peanut or milk.If something as simple as what is clean and what is dirty has been inverted, does it mean that other things have been too? What about right and wrong? What about good and bad?

We can’t ask these questions, though, because the unstat­ed assumption is that Western civilization can never be ques­tioned. To use a recent analo­gy—like the jailing of comedian Pranesh Gautam for his critique of a bad film, anybody daring to critique the “bad film” of West­ern Civilization will end up in the punitive jail of ostracization, with jobs, contracts, grants, net­works being closed off with a clang. Since Western societies control all the sources of financial currency, without which human life cannot sustain, the critique of this system will never come out. It’s a water-tight system of self-regulating approval and self-evident truth.

Why doesn’t Western science ask this question before it starts creating a new invention: Will this new invention cause harm to any form of life? If so, should we cease and desist? If it had started from this ethical basis, the even more toxic pharmacological products and toxic chemicals which threaten to crash all of life would never have come into existence. But science nowadays is fueled by the need to make profit, and these questions are merely silly rhetorical questions asked only by philosophers of the Eastern kind. But perhaps the time has come for people from the periphery to start asking these questions. Is the self-per­ceived truth of Western science and its superiority over all other epistemological systems simply a sham?

 The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides to society, last week released a report stating that one million species are at risk of extinction. They estimate there are 5.5 million species of insects, of which 10 percent (500,000 species) are threatened. In addition, there are 2.5 million species of animals and plants (but not insects), of which 25 percent (500,000 species) are threatened. (This 25 percent figure is estimated from IUCN Red List assessments.)

Whatever the numbers, which will surely be hotly debated among conservationists, biolo­gists and industrialists for years to come, it is clear that the volume of animal and plant life all over the planet is declining in alarming numbers.

Humans are the main culprits. Their industrial agricultural prac­tices which tolerate only mono­culture and aerial applications of toxic herbicides and pesticides, huge cities of concrete, massive toxic emissions from fossil fuels, millions of tons of toxic plastic objects which break down into a soup of microplastic in the water­ways, pharmacological waste, and a dizzying array of chemicals used in daily life are contaminating every millimeter of earth, water, sky and air.

And then there is the hubris of a human-centric worldview where the planet is viewed as terra nulla for humans to colonize. Every other species must make way, or die if need be, for our smallest needs.

Nepal may feel separate from these discussions. And yet we cannot afford not to be part of this global dialogue. Our shops are full of pesticides. Our water­ways are full of plastic bottles. Our supermarkets are full of beauty products and cosmetics contain­ing innocent sounding ingredients which cause endocrine disrup­tion, leading to a “thyroid” health crisis. Our chickens are full of last resort antibiotics.

When I visited Jumla in 1993, I was 20. With just a junior techni­cal assistant from the NGO that had hired me to write a report about its work in Jumla as a guide, I made my way across the dis­trict for six weeks. Chicken were kept in close proximity to sleep­ing areas, and people were often so disturbed by the pests on the birds they sprinkled DDT onto their beds before going to sleep. I was offered some DDT to sprin­kle on my bed, which I politely declined. Lecturing people on the harm created by this practice was useless—they felt there was no alternative if they wanted a good night’s sleep.

I often think about this dis­turbing memory and wonder how many of the cancers occur­ring in Nepalis are triggered by agro-chemicals. There was a young woman I met at the Nepal­gunj airport on that trip who was ravaged by breast cancer. More recently, I was in Dhulikhel when an elderly lady on a bus told me she was undergoing treatment for cancer. She was obviously sick, and I wondered how much of the beautiful landscape outside was scarred with invisible poison.

We have been made to believe Western science and its inven­tions are the height of intelligence and infallible wisdom. Yet how can a worldview that encourages people to keep making danger­ous chemicals and compounds with not a single thought about its end result be ethical, rational or wise? In Eastern philosophi­cal traditions (different strands of Jainism, Hinduism and Bud­dhism) the ethical consequences of harming another life is front and center in every action we take. How could we have been made to believe that this “sci­ence” which keeps inventing one toxic killer substance after anoth­er is not just a way of thinking we must all adopt on a global level, but indeed the only way? What made us so deluded we have no effective way to push back at this genocidal regime and say: “No, we refuse to adopt a way of life which is murdering a million spe­cies on earth”?

Homo sapiens—Latin for “the wise man”—was the name given to humans to indicate their ability to think. Scientists often boast intelligence marks humans out from other beings who cannot think with the same cognitive complexity. Our cognitive abili­ties are far superior to any other species on earth, the scientists assure us. They’ve done the stud­ies, so they should know.

And yet how could we be an intelligent species if we’re destroying the very basis of what makes us alive—the web of life which sustains us on earth—all destroyed with no end in sight? We may have the military, indus­trial and chemical arsenal that no other animal has. But then no other animal attacks its own basis of life the way Homo sapiens has so successfully done, with the help of science and technology.

Does this mean we are not as intelligent as we think we are? Does it mean we are missing a chip—the ecological quotient chip that all other animals come so beautifully equipped with? Will we manage to decimate the whales who survived for 2.5 mil­lion years? Will we kill even the cockroaches, the ultimate survi­vor? Are we bringing the web of life crashing down, all the while clapping at our own brilliance? Perhaps it is time to change our name to Homo insapiens—the foolish human species.