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Book Review: ‘Endlessly Green’ Gives Our Rancid, Grey World New Hope

Book Review: ‘Endlessly Green’ Gives Our Rancid, Grey World New Hope

Savita at work. Photo: Savita Hiremath

Having returned from a climate summit that made annoyingly slow progress, I found myself quite grumpy on my return to Delhi. And then I chanced upon Endlessly Green, a book written by Savita Hiremath, a journalist turned solid waste management practitioner, that left me with the right sense of hope and action on which to end the year.

Endlessly Green looks at “the history, the science and the art of composting and sustainable waste management through a kaleidoscope of philosophical, moral and ethical intricacies”.

While I have come across a couple of books tackling solid waste management, they have been too technical. Books on the environment can leave us feeling overwhelmed – but here is one that empowers you to take charge of at least one problem around us: our own waste.

The strength of this book is its author, who doesn’t just intellectualise the problem, but draws on her own experiences of finding solutions in her community in Bengaluru. She is open about the roadblocks she encounters on her journey and how she finds solutions. This book is for the individual who is environmentally aware, wants to do more and is handed a tool to guide her through that journey.

Hiremath painstakingly elucidates a 360º view of the solid-waste problem, starting with her own personal engagement with the issue. There’s a story here: she doesn’t start with just throwing cold facts at you; she experiments with processes, material and people. As she states in chapter 4: “if not for my willing encounters with composting experiments, I would have missed out on a wonderful chance to perceive the otherwise-ordinary things in radically new ways”.

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Until then, her engagement with composting had been mostly academic, but now she finds it becoming more “conscious” and “experiential”. What we consider to be inconsequential or just simply soil or mud becomes for Hiremath something that is “throbbing with life”.  At this point, I must confess, I am hooked.

Chapter 8, on the history of composting, is a fascinating one. Hiremath pores over archives and reveals that the earliest record of composting could be from the Mesopotamian era, when humans began to settle, grow their own food and domesticate animals.

The nugget on Cleopatra and her love for earthworms is an endearing one: as early as 50 BC, when none of the urban scourge of the world and its modern day problems had even dawned, Cleopatra had declared earthworms ‘sacred’, making their removal from Egypt a “crime punishable by death”. This reveals the foresight of ancient rulers. Travel down many centuries and we have yet to recognise the worth of the lowly earthworm and its role as a natural decomposer.

The big cities of the world generate the largest amount of waste and then spend even more money trying to get rid of it. New York, according to some estimates, generates 14 million tonnes of trash a year and then sends it thousands of miles away, to India or China, for processing, dumping, etc.

By 2050, experts have said that two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities. Urban India will face many challenges, including from climate change and disease. At the heart of these problems lies our ability to tackle the waste we generate. That’s why solid-waste management practice needs to become a household movement. We can hold lofty environmental conferences and espouse big causes such as reducing emissions, but if we can’t dispose off our own household waste in a responsible way, saving the planet will remain a distant dream.

The third part of the book focuses on “doing” a step-by-step guide to solid-waste management, and this is really the strength of this book. One realises that managing solid waste is more than just putting the garbage in the right bin; it’s about recognising the layers of people involved in managing our garbage in an urban ecosystem, and getting each one of them trained in the process.

Also read: How to Talk About Climate Change, by Katherine Hayhoe

A couple of chapters in the book’s fourth part become a bit technical for me, sections for instance that deal with the “pH puzzle” or “electrical conductivity”. While it reveals the hold of the author on the subject, I am not sure if an average reader would be interested.

But this is a minor quibble and doesn’t take away from the overall appeal of the book. When you make New Year’s resolutions in less than a month, put composting right up on your list. Endlessly Green will empower you to do the right thing for our planet.

Bahar Dutt is an award winning environment journalist and author of two books Green Wars and Rewilding in India.

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