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 me about his quest to transform his tribe’s villages through the unlikely medium of Wi-Fi connectivity. His plan leapfrogs the traditional model of connectivity – improved roads followed by landline connection – and exploits the atmosphere instead.
Nangi village, home to around 800 people of the Pun tribe, has no telephone line or cellphone reception and consists mainly of subsistence vegetable farmers, yak herders and those who leave to seek their fortune as Gurkha soldiers. Mahabir was taught in the valley by retired soldiers who had never been to school themselves. They used wooden boards blackened with charcoal, writing with soft limestone from the local cliff. He first used a pen and paper in seventh grade (age 13) and a textbook in eighth grade, but even these rudimentary lessons were expensive for his father, a retired Gurkha from the British army, who had to sell all his land to pay for them. So Mahabir left school at 14 and worked for twelve years as a teacher, supporting his family and helping his brothers through school.
It took two years of writing daily application letters to universities and institutes in America before Mahabir was finally accepted with full scholarship on a degree course at the University of Nebraska in Kearney. ‘I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I wanted to bring an income in and better education and medical facilities,’ he says. Twenty-odd years after arriving in America he returned to Nangi with his dream and an equally important folder of contacts.
It is dusk and we have climbed 2,500 metres higher by the time we are greeted with an excited rush of village children who present us with garlands of sweet-scented marigolds and escort us the last few yards to Nangi. Mahabir shows me to my home for the night: a small round wattle-and-daub hut with a stone roof. I make my introductions by candlelight and share a tasty curry of home-grown vegetables cooked on a smoky dung-fuelled stove by the school’s science teacher, before falling into exhausted sleep.
In the morning Mahabir leads me through the small village, past women grinding masala spices and kneading dough for chapatis on wood and stone, past a circle of community leaders and elders sitting cross-legged and deep in discussion on the cold ground, to the school. Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles and greetings – everyone is glad to see Mahabir. He points out a rather grand, newly finished hut. ‘Girls’ composting toilet,’ he says, taking me inside. He smiles and pats the internal wall approvingly, as I stand awkwardly either side of the hole, trying not to notice the smell of, um, toilets. ‘The compost works very well for growing vegetables,’ he says.
As nations develop, societies work in increasingly technical, mechanised and complex ways, and entirely new jobs emerge to support these industries, most of which demand literacy and numeracy. Globalisation favours those who speak international languages, and the people who will shape our lives in the Anthropocene will be those whose understanding and experience goes far beyond small village life, and those who are able to negotiate the accumulated learning, wisdom and knowledge generated by millions of global citizens via the hive mind of the worldwide web. It starts with school – with reading and writing and the self-confidence and awareness that sprout from those uniquely human skills. Done effectively, education is the bridge out of poverty, and educating girls is now recognised as a transformative development goal. Educated women marry on average four years later, have at least two fewer children and provide better health care for their families, for example. And not only is the income generated by an educated person higher, the average income of the community is also raised. ‘When you educate a girl, you are educating a nation,’ a 6-year-old girl once solemnly recited to me in Uganda. So what stops girls being educated? I’ve heard everything from worries she’ll be too clever for marriage, to worries that she’ll no longer be ‘pure’ or that she’ll get pregnant. But the biggest factor is poverty – girls are first to be pulled out of class to work when money is tight. And as they get older, it’s a question of toilets. Schools that lack clean private toilets – and many have no facilities at all – lose girls once they reach puberty and begin menstruating, and they also struggle to keep female teachers. Development comes down to the importance of toilets, like the one Mahabir showed me.
Nearby, there is a fenced-off vegetable patch with plastic sheeting over half of it. ‘We started experimenting with growing vegetables later in the year, so that we would have some fresh greens all year round,’ he explains. ‘At first we needed the plastic sheeting as a kind of greenhouse, but the past three years, the warmer weather means the plants have grown perfectly well without it.’
At the far side of a rectangular patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general assembly area for the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts. We walk over to them and Mahabir pulls back the door.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array of computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a startling sight. Girls and boys, many barefooted, sit studiously working away, the only sound the clatter of keypads. ‘You want to check your email?’ Mahabir asks me, grinning at my surprise. The computer and Internet facilities here would be unusual in a school in London – here, they are astonishing.
In the Anthropocene, the world no longer needs to end at the village perimeter. Just as social development goals now include a right to electricity, it is no longer acceptable for people to be denied access to Tim Berners-Lee’s brilliant toy. Through it, we are no longer a few individuals collaborating with a few more. We are a bigger more beautiful creature: the organism of humanity, ‘Homo omnis’. We can communicate not just with remotely located people, but with everybody simultaneously – we’re even attempting to speak to aliens located elsewhere in the universe.
The atmosphere of Earth has been lit up in the Anthropocene by the billions of invisible beams of our communicating devices. And it has happened in a remarkably short time. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent in 1858 by Queen Victoria to the US president James Buchanan, and by 1902, cables encircled the world across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans,
