in the mountains, a dirty apostrophe surrounded by snowy peaks on Nepal’s northern border with Tibet. ‘We used to play on the glacier as children, and it came right down to the monastery,’ says Ringin Laama, a local yak herder. ‘But now it’s about two kilometres further back.’ The mountainside beneath the glacier is heavily scarred, clearly marking its original extent on the rocks. Every year, the glacier retreats much further, according to Laama. ‘I think it will be completely gone in ten years’ time,’ he says. ‘Strange to think.’
Curved walls made of large boulders have been constructed along the mountain face above each small cluster of houses. The ground here used to be permanently iced all year, and the melting has exposed fissures in the rocks. The Himalayan mountain range – the ‘Abode of Snows’ in Sanskrit – is one of the youngest on Earth and it’s still highly energetic with active seismic and tectonic processes. Landslides, already common here, are becoming more frequent in the warming climate, with deadly consequences. Laama traces a large scratch in the mountain opposite with his finger. It extends down through the rubble of former houses and terminates in a huge boulder.
Elsewhere, landslides are damming up rivers, resulting in a build-up of water. The risk then is of a catastrophic release: a flash flood that occurs rapidly, with little warning and transports vast amounts of water and debris at high velocity. Every year, hundreds of people die – in 2002, flash floods and landslides killed 427 people in Nepal and caused $2.7 million-worth of damage.
Glacier-fed rivers are set to swell over the next decade as melting accelerates. But it will be a short-lived sufficiency – once the glaciers have gone, there will be no more meltwater. It means that the turbines that power Ani’s kitchen will lie still. Perhaps anticipating this, some of the villagers have invested in a rival cooking source, supported by another NGO. I visit the home of Alok Shrestha, a man so self-sufficient he makes methane cooking gas from his household’s sewage, animal manure and other waste, which are shovelled into a biodigester under his house. The biodigester is a large feeding box for bacteria, which metabolise the nutritious waste and produce useful methane in the process. Shrestha taps this for his cooking stove and has plenty left over to power lighting and a small generator that recharges batteries.
I have visited several homes around the world where people are making their own biogas from a range of wastes, including one in Peru that was powered by guinea-pig poo, and all fuel efficient cooking stoves with smokeless flames. Firing up a stove for brief, if regular, intervals is one thing; powering equipment that requires a continual source of electricity is another. For example, the hydroturbine on which the hopes and dreams of Mahabir’s Pun tribe rest is powered by a stream fed by snowmelt higher up. No snow means no meltwater and no power, and levels have been diminishing in the once-deep stream. When the water fails, the development of that entire region, which outstrips its neighbours on every measurable scale from literacy to health, will be at the mercy of the government for grid provision.
The government has just a few years to build enough reservoirs to trap the melting waters and power the country towards twenty-first-century development, before lights go out. It is hard to see how that will happen. Drought conditions are already causing blackouts as the nation’s hydropower struggles with lack of water and poor energy infrastructure. As throughout the developing world, most of the blackouts are planned load-shedding intervals, where the government tries to manage the poor supply by rationing electricity among different regions in turn. The load-shedding is seriously impacting Nepal’s fledgling electric car industry, its 700 Safa Tempos (three-wheeled electric passenger vans), which cleanly ply Kathmandu’s streets, charging at thirty-two stations and transporting around 100,000 people a day. More than $8 million is invested in the industry, and its five manufacturing companies employ thousands. But power outages have pushed the industry to the verge of collapse – people (90% of whom are self-employed single women) who purchased a Safa on loan schemes backed by NGOs can’t afford to pay the instalments because they can’t use their cars and have to take taxis instead. If the industry does go under, it means more filthy cars on the streets – which means more carbon in the atmosphere and more brown haze. Which means more warming.
The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is quite unlike any atmosphere the planet has known, and the effects of humanity’s impacts on our aerial ocean will leave their mark on the world for millennia to come. The chemicals we are introducing into the air will find their way into the oceans, rocks and living parts of our world. Corals and trees are ingesting a different ratio of isotopes (forms) of carbon from the one they took in during the Holocene, because they are now absorbing carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. But despite this, our changes to the atmosphere itself are as transient or permanent as we make them. If, tomorrow, we stopped releasing gases into the atmosphere, switched off our millions of signalling devices, ceased all aerial transport, within a matter of years most of our atmosphere would return to Holocene-like conditions. Within a few centuries, even the carbon dioxide levels would drop down to pre-industrial norms.
We are of course not going to stop releasing chemicals tomorrow, though. The amount of almost every pollutant humans emit is increasing, and will continue to change the climate. Despite being told repeatedly that our climate is changing, by numerous scientists, agencies and media, it is nevertheless hard to fully appreciate how significant this is – we may intellectually believe the change, but to emotionally understand and realise what it means is a different matter.
Our climate is one of humankind’s most powerful reference points. It fundamentally describes where and how we live, our culture, environment and even our place in time. Climate is what defines the Holocene geological epoch. The climate is what determines biodiversity regionally and globally, it decides the ecology, the hydrology (how much water there is) and weather. It determines, for example, whether malaria is more likely and whether wheat can grow.
Living in a changed climate is like living in a different world – or rather, our world in a different geological time. Instead of the climatically stable Holocene, we are entering the uncharted territory of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. We will feel its effects even as we try to insulate ourselves from the changes and adapt to them. Climate change will increasingly affect our food production, the integrity of our cities, energy production, global politics, and the way we interact with other people and other species.
Human behaviour and the way nations develop will decide the atmospheric conditions as the Anthropocene unfurls. And the atmosphere of the Anthropocene will also play a deciding role in how humans develop. Poverty-stricken, backward Nepal is teetering on the edge of a bright new future: it has the promise of a functioning democracy, and the benefits of a decade of NGO experimentation in projects from micro-hydro to clean-cook stoves, even while it battles the legacy of atmospheric warming from industrialisation elsewhere. Whichever way it teeters, the children of Nangi have in many ways escaped the destiny of most of their contemporaries. Because they are already a part of the great human conversation, theirs will be a more assured Anthropocene, with opportunities to overcome the limitations imposed by geography.
The effects of our transformation of the atmosphere will crop up frequently in this book – I’ll show how they are intertwined with other changes we’re making to our planet. Many of humanity’s solutions rest on our innovative technological invasion of the skies, innovations just like Mahabir Pun’s in Nangi. As Google’s Larry Brilliant said about world-changing: ‘It starts with ordinary people. Ordinary people do extraordinary things, and then we lionise them. We make heroes out of them. And that’s a problem, because it makes other ordinary people look at these heroes and think that they can’t achieve the same things. But that path is open to everybody. Anybody at any time.’
When early Earth’s shifting sludge of molten rock hardened into a crust, some 4.3
