A month of War and Peace
21/03/10 08:48
I’m always a mess on the flight home, but I thought this was a unique, solitary experience until today (or whatever 20 hours ago is in the context of a three-continent plane ride). The lesson came in a taxi on the way to the sprawling Delhi international terminal, my mobile rang — my hydrological colleague who was in Guatemala was calling. He was in a cab as well, also headed to an airport on the way home. If I have a brother in water, it must be B.
We chatted about our experiences. His trip was relatively short — just a week, up to a central American montane cloud forest. These are bathed in rain and mist continuously. You need a good raincoat for a cloud forest. Typically, they’re at the top of the spine of mountains running through central America, capturing the moist air coming from the Pacific. When it’s not actually raining, being in a cloud forest is usually like walking through the shower room in a gym, very humid, usually full of mist. They form an island of special communities throughout the region. A completely different group of birds, mammals, insects, and plants live across this mountain archipelago that contrasts greatly with the areas just a little lower in elevation, which aren’t bathed in 100 percent humidity all the time.
B said, this forest was dry and burning. I was shocked — cloud forests might be one of the few types of forest globally where fire is a extremely rare event. “It’s a very bad El Nino year,” he said. “Everything was dry and clear. The worst the local people have ever seen. And the forest was burning.” Fire transforms forests. Especially forests that have not seen fire for a really long time.
On some level, neither of us was surprised. The first species believed to go extinct largely because of climate change was an amphibian from a central American cloud forest. The clouds that had soaked the mountains where golden toads lived literally rose up over the mountains. “Normal” as supersaturated became normal that was still wet, just a lot less wet. Within a decade, Alan Pounds watched golden toad populations catastrophically disappear during the 1980s in an area where they had been abundant and healthy in the 1970s. The smoking gun was a cloud hovering over (but not around) the mountaintop.
B was pretty bummed. “What did you see?” In the grim currency of climate change stories, I told him about Nepal.
“I visited a bunch of small hydropower generating plants.” These were pretty tiny by North American or European standards, just a few megawatts. And all of them were a special type of hydro station called “run of the river.” Most people are familiar with the big Three Gorges or Hoover dam type of hydro plant, with a massive storage wall and a gargantuan lake. These dams can generate hundreds or thousands of megawatts. Run of the river stations — RoRs — are quite different. They’re often in small, narrow valleys. A low dam or barrage pushes some of the water from the river into a tunnel bored into the side of the valley. A very small RoR facility might have just one tunnel, about the diameter of a tall person. It might run parallel to the river for three or four kilometers, depending on the steepness of the valley. The water picks up a lot of velocity and power (“head”) in the tunnel, then hits a power-generating station downstream. At that point, all of the water is returned back to the river.
Ideally, RoR dams don’t take that much water from their river; they divert a portion of the water, leaving at least 20 or 30 percent of the water for the stretch of river that runs parallel to the tunnel. “But all of the ones I saw looked like storage dams.” The whole river was going into the tunnel. You could see bone-dry fish ladders extending down to a dry riverbed below the diversion dam.
“The dam operators said they were diverting everything because the dry season water flows are so low. They were getting political pressure because they were only operating at 30 or 40 percent of their capacity, and they said if they let any of the water go through the intermediate part of the river they’d hardly make any electricity. They said the dams were never meant to operate at such low flows.” In Nepal, that’s a hard choice. Even in the capital, Kathmandu, my hotel had backup generators because the city had roving blackouts for 11 or 12 hours a day. At night, I’d wake up when I heard the city power pop on or off, changing the background noises of the city. And restaurants looked really charming with their candles on each table until you realized that this was in preparation for a blackout. During a workshop, two presentations stopped completely until we got the office generators back up and running. But 2010 was pretty good. Last year at this time, there were blackouts for 18 hours a day. “People in the villages we visited said precipitation patterns have really changed. They’ve gone from four crops a year to two in less than a decade. Nepal was already one of the poorest countries in the world, so having that much less food to eat or sell meant that rural communities were much more likely to chuck it all and head for the grinding poverty of one of Nepal’s cities. Even worse, those three- or four-kilometer stretches of river that are dry below each RoR dam are basically dead zones for the freshwater species in the area. For them, every year has become a drought year.
Fire and bleached fish ladders. It was an intense call.
There was a long pause as we took in each other’s stories. “You know, I always get so emotional on the flight home,” B said. “Yeah — me too.” I’m a mess. I end up crying during most of the movies, even the comedies. “It must be the emotional exhaustion.” I nodded into the dark haze of Delhi, a beggar child knocking on my window, palm outstretched, keening to the rich white guy in the taxi. “I understand.”
Safe journeys, man. You too. Talk to you on the other side.
I usually pick a good book for each trip, and this trip I had decided to reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I’m a big fan of the dead Russians generally, and I had heard good comments about a new (translation. But my previous readings had always been while I was in North America. Reading about the upper class of Russia in the early nineteenth century while I was curled up in some in some truck driver’s hotel in rural Nepal or while camping on an island in the middle of the Ganges in northern India (worrying about jackals in the night) completely changed the novel. I kept thinking about the serfs who worked the main characters’ estates. About famines and wars. About nineteenth-century medicine in the twenty-first century. About exposure to the elements and shifting vulnerabilities. Those serfs were not that far from many of these rural areas around me, except that these people had mobile phones and diesel water groundwater pumps and Chicago Bulls t-shirts. Where are those serfs’ descendants now? And where are these people going?
B said, “My taxi just passed an india — a rural indigenous woman — on the side of the road.” I could hear the strength of the emotion in his voice. He was thinking of her and her children’s future. My mind switched to the image of a boy sitting near the Nepal-China border with a baby goat in his lap, both of whom stared at the weird white guy in the wildly pitching car passing by and wondered where they heck he was going.
B said, this forest was dry and burning. I was shocked — cloud forests might be one of the few types of forest globally where fire is a extremely rare event. “It’s a very bad El Nino year,” he said. “Everything was dry and clear. The worst the local people have ever seen. And the forest was burning.” Fire transforms forests. Especially forests that have not seen fire for a really long time.
On some level, neither of us was surprised. The first species believed to go extinct largely because of climate change was an amphibian from a central American cloud forest. The clouds that had soaked the mountains where golden toads lived literally rose up over the mountains. “Normal” as supersaturated became normal that was still wet, just a lot less wet. Within a decade, Alan Pounds watched golden toad populations catastrophically disappear during the 1980s in an area where they had been abundant and healthy in the 1970s. The smoking gun was a cloud hovering over (but not around) the mountaintop.
B was pretty bummed. “What did you see?” In the grim currency of climate change stories, I told him about Nepal.
“I visited a bunch of small hydropower generating plants.” These were pretty tiny by North American or European standards, just a few megawatts. And all of them were a special type of hydro station called “run of the river.” Most people are familiar with the big Three Gorges or Hoover dam type of hydro plant, with a massive storage wall and a gargantuan lake. These dams can generate hundreds or thousands of megawatts. Run of the river stations — RoRs — are quite different. They’re often in small, narrow valleys. A low dam or barrage pushes some of the water from the river into a tunnel bored into the side of the valley. A very small RoR facility might have just one tunnel, about the diameter of a tall person. It might run parallel to the river for three or four kilometers, depending on the steepness of the valley. The water picks up a lot of velocity and power (“head”) in the tunnel, then hits a power-generating station downstream. At that point, all of the water is returned back to the river.
Ideally, RoR dams don’t take that much water from their river; they divert a portion of the water, leaving at least 20 or 30 percent of the water for the stretch of river that runs parallel to the tunnel. “But all of the ones I saw looked like storage dams.” The whole river was going into the tunnel. You could see bone-dry fish ladders extending down to a dry riverbed below the diversion dam.
“The dam operators said they were diverting everything because the dry season water flows are so low. They were getting political pressure because they were only operating at 30 or 40 percent of their capacity, and they said if they let any of the water go through the intermediate part of the river they’d hardly make any electricity. They said the dams were never meant to operate at such low flows.” In Nepal, that’s a hard choice. Even in the capital, Kathmandu, my hotel had backup generators because the city had roving blackouts for 11 or 12 hours a day. At night, I’d wake up when I heard the city power pop on or off, changing the background noises of the city. And restaurants looked really charming with their candles on each table until you realized that this was in preparation for a blackout. During a workshop, two presentations stopped completely until we got the office generators back up and running. But 2010 was pretty good. Last year at this time, there were blackouts for 18 hours a day. “People in the villages we visited said precipitation patterns have really changed. They’ve gone from four crops a year to two in less than a decade. Nepal was already one of the poorest countries in the world, so having that much less food to eat or sell meant that rural communities were much more likely to chuck it all and head for the grinding poverty of one of Nepal’s cities. Even worse, those three- or four-kilometer stretches of river that are dry below each RoR dam are basically dead zones for the freshwater species in the area. For them, every year has become a drought year.
Fire and bleached fish ladders. It was an intense call.
There was a long pause as we took in each other’s stories. “You know, I always get so emotional on the flight home,” B said. “Yeah — me too.” I’m a mess. I end up crying during most of the movies, even the comedies. “It must be the emotional exhaustion.” I nodded into the dark haze of Delhi, a beggar child knocking on my window, palm outstretched, keening to the rich white guy in the taxi. “I understand.”
Safe journeys, man. You too. Talk to you on the other side.
I usually pick a good book for each trip, and this trip I had decided to reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I’m a big fan of the dead Russians generally, and I had heard good comments about a new (translation. But my previous readings had always been while I was in North America. Reading about the upper class of Russia in the early nineteenth century while I was curled up in some in some truck driver’s hotel in rural Nepal or while camping on an island in the middle of the Ganges in northern India (worrying about jackals in the night) completely changed the novel. I kept thinking about the serfs who worked the main characters’ estates. About famines and wars. About nineteenth-century medicine in the twenty-first century. About exposure to the elements and shifting vulnerabilities. Those serfs were not that far from many of these rural areas around me, except that these people had mobile phones and diesel water groundwater pumps and Chicago Bulls t-shirts. Where are those serfs’ descendants now? And where are these people going?
B said, “My taxi just passed an india — a rural indigenous woman — on the side of the road.” I could hear the strength of the emotion in his voice. He was thinking of her and her children’s future. My mind switched to the image of a boy sitting near the Nepal-China border with a baby goat in his lap, both of whom stared at the weird white guy in the wildly pitching car passing by and wondered where they heck he was going.
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