a hydropower generator in the stream at the bottom of the village,’ he says. He wants to install another, bigger turbine when they can afford it, so that the entire village has power – at the moment, the precious electricity is reserved for the computers and server.
As we embark on another full day’s climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component there, we come across another of Mahabir’s networked villages. Here, towering incongruously among the simple stone-roofed huts is a huge white satellite dish. ‘We tried for years to get some sort of phone system here,’ Mahabir explains. ‘Then a few months ago, we got sent this dish by an NGO for a satellite phone and television. By then of course we had the wireless network Internet phone so we didn’t need it. Anyway, it would be far too expensive to make calls on that.’ Still, the villagers have erected it on the roof of the school where it sits like a totem to the useless. Nobody in this village has a television set, let alone the electricity to power one.
Mahabir was quick to realise that the connectivity had numerous other important applications. In the past year, the village has built a telemedicine and dentistry clinic, in which village midwives and nurses can talk using the webcam directly to doctors in a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses have been trained in reproductive medicine, childcare, wound and accident management, and basic dentistry.
The Wi-Fi has also improved livelihoods here, allowing yak farmers to talk to their families and dealers several days’ walk away, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to home-made paper, jams and honey. Finding a sustainable income stream is key to keeping the other social development projects going, and Mahabir is betting on tourism. Many of the villages are located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes in the Annapurna mountain range, and they have started advertising campsite facilities and trekking guide services for tourists. The local teenagers and adults know the routes well, and Mahabir is organising training for them, including some rudimentary English. And with the help of Western volunteers, the villages have come together to build their first tourist hostel just below Relay No. 1, on a remote stretch of the mountains. ‘We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the Internet so that more tourists will come, which will help finance the education and health projects,’ he says.
Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to transform the village, including a yak cross-breeding farm. The warming rate here in the Himalayas is five times higher than the global average and it’s forcing yak farmers into ever more remote and dangerous locations, because the thickly coated animals can’t live below 3,000 metres. Mahabir is trying to cross the yaks with cows to produce a useful pack animal that is hardy, can live at lower elevations and also produces good milk. ‘The first sixteen cows we took up there for breeding got taken by snow leopards, so we’ve had to guard them more carefully,’ he says.
Cattle are vital for the villagers because they produce the dung that is used to fertilise the poor mountain soils, enabling their crops to grow. But the cattle need to eat and, ideally, something other than the villagers’ crops. In another of his inspired projects, while all the villages around have been destroying their sparse forests for firewood, timber and agriculture, Mahabir has fostered a substantial nursery from which he plants about 15,000 trees a year in Nangi, and more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It provides the villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder. While many people in Nepal’s hill villages suffer food shortages, the people of Nangi look well nourished – some of the teachers are even a little plump, which is hard to believe considering the slope they have to conquer just to get from their homes to the school each day.
As Mahabir calls up instructions to a guy at the top of a swaying tree who is grappling with tools to fix the relay equipment, I realise that development in these remote villages need not be hostage to a failed government. For much of the Holocene, people like the residents of Nangi would have been limited socially and economically by the geography of their village. A true visionary with determination like Mahabir can effect change village by village, incrementally constructing a web through the atmosphere. But how much faster and effective Nepal’s development would be if it were backed by national coordinated programmes, good governance and regulated private industry with access to markets, as is occurring elsewhere.
The democratisation of online information, education, communication and markets, means that the Anthropocene has the potential to lead to a more equal global society – a ‘flatter Earth’, in which the dominance of Europe, the United States and a few other rich nations is challenged by eastern and southern rivals, such as China, Brazil and India. At the beginning of the Anthropocene, there are already signs that humanity’s well-being is improving – there are now fewer ‘failed states’, more countries practising a degree of democracy, and a global reduction in poverty compared to just a few decades ago. In 2008, for the first time, the number and proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell in every continent, and the trend has continued since.6 Our exploitation of the atmosphere with mobile and Internet communication – and the entrepreneurship that follows – has played a significant role in this trend.
We humans may have brilliantly exploited the atmosphere to communicate as an interconnected super-species, but at the same time we have been horribly indiscriminate about what else we’ve put up there.
The ugly face of humanity’s atmospheric interference – the many gases we have emitted – now threatens to overwhelm our civilised and natural world. In as much as they have put off the next ice age, perhaps indefinitely, carbon gases have been to our advantage, but the greenhouse effect of those emissions is impacting every part of our planet from farmlands to deserts to oceans. We are dumping so many different pollutants into our aerial ocean that we are not only changing our climate and weather systems, we are also poisoning ourselves.
Air pollution is not new – ancient Rome was notorious for its smoky streets from wood and coal fires, and in 1306, King Edward I of England actually banned coal burning on penalty of death. Needless to say, it was ineffectual. It wasn’t until a London smog of 1952 killed an estimated 4,000 people in just four days (and a further 8,000 in the weeks and months after) that a Clean Air Act forced Londoners to burn smokeless coke rather than coal. Similar acts in the 1950s and 60 s transformed the atmospheres of New York and other cities in the then-developing world – Westerners still breathe a cocktail of pollutants, but they are mainly invisible carcinogens, like ozone and oxides of nitrogen, rather than soot and sulphurous emissions. However, the citizens of the current developing world are now experiencing similar conditions to those mid-century pea-soupers, but on a much greater scale.
The ‘dark satanic mills’ of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the coal stations that powered them, blackened the skies and caused countless deaths – air pollution from European coal power stations continues to kill more than 22,000 people every year, scientists calculate.7 Greenhouse gas emissions from smokestacks and exhaust pipes continue to pump out. But the visibly filthy skies of the past few centuries have cleared because of more stringent pollution controls that have forced factories and power plants to install scrubbing technologies and other practices. And, because the dirtiest manufacturing has moved out of western Europe.
China, where the vast bulk of dirty industry is now based, has an atmosphere so filthy that only 1% of the nation’s urban population is breathing air considered clean by European Union standards, a 2007 World Bank study found, although much of the report was redacted by the Chinese, who feared social unrest.8 Visiting Beijing in springtime, I was struck by the eerie absence of the sun. The pollution, which stung my eyes and throat, shielded the sun so thoroughly that although the cloudless days were light, the source of this light was impossible to see. And that was the city after its ‘clean-up’. China has followed Europe’s example and outsourced its dirty industry from the wealthy cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, inland to rural and less developed central and western areas, as well as to poorer countries, such as Indonesia. In doing so, China’s air quality will improve, just as Europe’s has, while the atmosphere of developing countries will worsen. Ultimately,
