Representative image. Photo: Yen Le/Unsplash
- A steep ascent in tech infrastructure can only be achieved by greater material largesse, which dumping irreversible terminal waste on the planet.
- Conservation is a troubled ideal unless it comes with tangible benefits. So the challenge is to find solutions that preserve nature and provide great returns.
- The ‘conserve and use’ solution needs invention with natural wisdom, which moves technology from reductionist to holistic.
A mad race is on, hurdling us towards unlimited invention and greater development. More superhighways to make it easier for people to travel. But more people on the road means more cars. This in turn means more exhaust fumes and sadly, increased greenhouse emissions. We are battling climate change but more highways, more cars and more travel will do the opposite. So we go one step forward and many steps back. The government is busy increasing the number of airports. An increasing number of aircraft ferrying more people will again generate more greenhouse emissions.
It is the same with the communication revolution. We are witnessing the increasing use of cell phones with more features which in turn require more towers, more transmitters, more satellites and more computers. And now, we are going big on artificial intelligence. The race goes on.
Something is going very wrong as we announce that we are going to net zero.
A steep ascent in tech infrastructure can only be achieved by greater material largesse and invention. Nor can we forget that all this artificial infrastructure has a short lifetime – in the larger scheme of things – and is then discarded as unrecycled waste on the planet. So we have two kinds of waste: 1) retired or obsolete infrastructure that is creating techno cemeteries and 2) greenhouse emissions from the production of all these unending gadgets. Sadly, we are making and dumping irreversible terminal waste on the planet. This has only one consequence: to convert our living planet into a net zero life planet.
We are at a point where the quality of everything that is part of nature – species, lakes, rivers, seas, soil, food and even air – has significantly depreciated. These factors define the quality of life. But so wedded are we to our ingenuities that we do not see the degradation caused in this technology-ridden Anthropocene era.
How are we handling the loss of all this living natural infrastructure? We resort to inventing more technology – air purifiers to give us good air, water purifiers to give us uncontaminated water and so on and on.
Of course, we talk about electric cars – forgetting these are being built by using a host of new incremental greenhouse materials, which in turn means the setting up of a huge body of additional infrastructure. They also need new batteries and charging stations. Musn’t forget that the batteries will have to be charged by electric power, which still comes mainly from coal, oil and gas. It may, to some extent, go green and come from solar power and wind power. But while these green energy solutions are from renewable sources, their apparatus is not renewable. Besides, electric car batteries are far from recyclable.
Till now, all technology has been invasive to the planet – it makes waste of the planet by mining vast tracts of it and dumps unrecycled waste on the planet.
Yet, we have not learnt from nature, the greatest production system on the planet which has no unrecycled waste.
Also Read: Thousands More Species at Risk of Extinction Than Currently Recorded: New Study
Conserve and use
Today, our focus must be to conserve areas of high natural value because they are crucial to sustaining life. These living natural resources include rivers, forests, aquifers and our biodiversity. These are evolutionary resources that took millions of years to make. They share a history of co-evolution with us. Our metabolism is based on them, be it natural mineral water or organic food. Thus it is imperative we conserve this natural infrastructure.
But conservation is a troubled ideal unless it comes with tangible benefits. So here’s the challenge – to find solutions that preserve nature and provide great returns. We decided to find solutions that ‘conserve and use’ living natural resources. This needs more than just invention – it needs invention with natural wisdom, which moves technology from reductionist to holistic. Here are a few tested examples.
Indian rivers are monsoon rivers, which, after millions of years of flooding have created deep and wide sandy floodplains around their banks. These rivers have deep (50-100 metres) and wide (several kilometres) sandy aquifers that run for thousands of kilometres and serve as enormous natural storage for water. Floodplains of rivers can provide a new source of water which is naturally stored and naturally recharged by rain in aquifers under the sand. Sand is porous – wonderful aquifer material – and the floodplains hold a lot of water, 35-40% of their volume. They get recharged by good quality water from the monsoon rain and late-season floods when the river is not so polluted. They feed groundwater aquifers in their environs.
A part of this natural recharge can be used ecologically. Since most rivers are severely polluted in the non-monsoon months, we need great caution here – the water level in the floodplain must remain above that of the river so the gravitational flow of water is from the floodplain to the river. Or, the floodplain will get terminally polluted. This is a sacred condition.
Given the increasing scarcity of quality water, the rivers and their floodplains are likely to be one of the few perennial good water resources of the future. There are numerous river towns in the country which can be completely watered by floodplain water; except the megacities which are way beyond any sensible carrying capacity.
The Palla river floodplain project in Delhi is a realisation of this idea on the ground. However, it is being overexploited and no longer being used in an ecological way and could well face terminal contamination by the polluted river, as has already happened to the NOIDA floodplain aquifer after providing water to that city for over 30 years.
Such a scheme will work for water-short China, which has great floodplain rivers. It will also work for the Tigris and the Euphrates in the Middle East and many other geographies.
We can make a rough and conservative assessment of the sustainable water potential of the floodplains for the country. An estimate of the river length of all the rivers of India yields a figure of over 25,000 kilometres. They will recharge well over 50 billion cubic metres of water every year. If we use just half of this to provide water to towns and cities, we can provide quality water for three-quarters of a billion people at 100 litres per person per day.
But this can do much more. As I argued in a previous article in The Wire Science, leasing floodplain farmland can bolster farmer income (over Rs 30,000 an acre every year) by providing quality floodplain water at normal domestic rates to towns along the river.
Farmers can, in addition, organically grow a food forest or fruit orchards – but not water-intensive crops – on this land and get great returns. It would guarantee not only a good farming income but also great earnings from the water for the farmers without taking the ownership of the land away from them. The scheme would use only half the recharged water in the floodplain and return the rest to the river, bringing back its health and still leaving substantial revenue for the city administration. Such a scheme will connect the rural to the urban.
Protecting floodplains as water sanctuaries is a perennial solution that conserves and uses the floodplains in a non-invasive way for future generations.
Another solution is a perennial scheme to supply local natural mineral water to towns. As of now, natural mineral water is very expensive and comes in plastic bottles. This water is purely for drinking and so we need just 2-3 litres in a day for a person. Such a modest requirement can easily be sourced from a subterranean aquifer underlying a local forest. These aquifers are also naturally recharged by rain and carry all the minerals and nutrients we need. This can provide great health and economic benefits. There are many towns which lie nearby forest ridges which will fit the bill and those which do not have forests can start growing one in these days of climate change.
Also Read: Pandemic Pushes Sustainable Development Goals Further Out of Reach for Asia and Pacific
The proposal of a ‘Natural City‘ is of the same genre. It is a pioneering new blueprint for a city – a departure from the historical structure of cities. It is a design for a self-sustaining metabolic city which uses the principle of homeostasis, which governs all life on the planet. The smallest living organism maintains its life parameters like body temperature and pressure and so does the whole planet. A city falls in between these two scales.
A natural city can be a living entity that will be self-sufficient on water, fruit, vegetables and milk, regulate its temperature and minimise energy use and pollution providing an excellent quality of life. Obviously, natural cities have carrying capacities set by their natural infrastructure. Not surprisingly, megacities violate the natural city norm in the extreme – we were witness to how temperatures in Delhi soared to 49° C in May.
We have just skimmed through a few solutions which integrate the natural infrastructure into our living scheme. There are many such non-invasive ‘Conserve and Use’ solutions for the planet that can provide the essentials for a holistic quality of life. Is this a possibility? I think, yes.
We need to conserve and use the natural infrastructure of the planet for future generations – building more artificial infrastructure, no matter how captivating, will only destroy the natural infrastructure of the planet and accelerate our way to an Anthropocene extinction.