Preface
A Himalayan Journey
High in the Zanskar Valley, in the Indian Himalayas, a fairy spirit called the Zbalu, who wandered the ancient valley, presented a difficult choice to the villagers of Kumik. He offered either to build a protective wall around the village, or to provide endless amounts of water to nourish the community and its crops until the end of time. The villagers of Kumik, who struggled with wolves attacking their livestock – while knowing the value of water – reluctantly chose the wall. At the time, there was no need for water. Kumik had an ample supply streaming from the glacier that carved down the mountainside of 6,100-metre-high Sultan Largo, the mountain that towers behind the village. The Zbalu, stone by stone, got to work on the wall. He worked constantly throughout the night and had the whole structure completed by the next day. But, as the legend goes, none of the villagers offered him food or water. It was a fateful mistake. Bitter from mistreatment, the Zbalu put a curse on Kumik declaring the village would one day run out of water. He then marched off into the mountains. Today, the wall that was supposedly built by the Zbalu surrounds the village guarding against wolves, and the curse that water would disappear echoes throughout Kumik.
Despite the Zbalu’s curse, for centuries the village of Kumik had few concerns about water. The heavy snows during the winter replenished the underground springs, along with meltwater coming from the glacier on Sultan Largo. The supply of water seemed completely secure. Over the past few decades however, things have begun to change. Snowfalls are decreasing and the glacier has slowly, but steadily, retreated to the top of the mountain and no longer provides water to Kumik. The village has now entered a state of perpetual drought. The curse has been fulfilled.
I first stumbled upon Kumik’s plight by reading Jon Mingle’s book, Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World, which brought to my attention the issue of black carbon, better known as soot, and its connection to the disappearance of Kumik’s glacier. I was hooked. My curiosity guided me deeper into the issue of black carbon, and took me to Kumik and beyond.
From cooking to power plants, from cars to factories, the particulate matter released from the burning of raw materials has widely affected communities across Asia and particularly those in India. The interconnected impacts black carbon has on health, ice, water, and the climate itself are alarmingly vast. Combined with climate change, the effects of black carbon on the Himalayas are immense. Yet, despite the scale of the problems there has been little action, or even rhetoric, devoted to the issue.
According to countless studies, soot, when inhaled, is a major contributor to respiratory illnesses affecting women, children and elderly people who spend countless hours in smoky kitchens. Globally, the number of recorded deaths due to air pollution, both indoor and outdoor, is nightmarishly high. These statistics were made all the more real after seeing the effects in person. In Kumik, and elsewhere in the Himalayas, it was common to hear of someone dying from a lung condition. I watched people grieve and saw the conditions their loved ones had faced. If the problem of black carbon is not addressed the people I met, and millions of others, will continue to suffer in silence.
The fires across Asia continue to burn, and a vast proportion of them are on the plains of India. The black carbon particulates from these fires blow across the plains to the Himalayas and nestle on the mountains’ peaks and glaciers, wreaking havoc on some of the most remote parts of the planet. Studies on black carbon show it is a leading contributor to the retreat of glaciers and decreasing snowfall, due to the higher temperatures it creates across the mountain chain. As many of Asia’s major rivers originate from Himalayan glaciers, the ongoing effects have worrying implications for a water supply that is used by almost 1.4 billion people across the Indian subcontinent, China and much of Southeast Asia. How this scenario will pan out in 10, 20, or 50 years is anyone’s guess, but for now, it remains a problem that needs to be urgently addressed.
The disappearance of its glacier and its spring water has created a perpetual drought for Kumik, but it is also the harbinger for what might happen in the future, not just in remote Himalayan valleys, but also downstream. For the cities that lie on the banks of rivers that originate in the Himalayas, where tens of millions of people live, the water that begins its journey in the mountains is a critical resource.
The story of Kumik, the predictions of what could happen downstream and what actions must happen inspired my journey across the Indian subcontinent: a journey that spanned the better part of four years.
On June 22, 2016, after connecting with the author Jon Mingle, I was given the contact details for Tashi Stobdan from Kumik and Urgain Dorjay from Zanskar’s provincial centre, Padum. Tashi and Urgain were two central characters in Jon’s book, so it felt surreal that I was to meet them both – hopefully. I sent both Tashi and Urgain emails, but received no response. This wasn’t surprising as the internet connection in the Himalayas is notoriously unreliable, or simply unavailable. I waited two weeks for a reply, but decided that just turning up in the Zanskar Valley might yield better results. It was a leap of faith in some respects, but past experience had taught me that everyone knows everyone in the mountains. Finding someone just requires patience and a lot of asking.
Shortly after, I arrived in Kolkata, India, and was greeted by the smell of betel nut floating through the humid air on a sweltering July morning. I was a world away from the tiny village of Kumik, on the other side of India. From Kolkata I travelled eight days, including a stopover in Srinagar, Kashmir, where violent anti-government protests were flaring up once again. Every day was an endless succession of trains, buses and cars. I slept overnight in grotty guesthouses and shovelled down dubious curries along the way. “What would be waiting on the other side of this journey?” I wondered.
After a punishing pilgrimage I finally arrived in Zanskar’s dusty provincial centre of Padum, which lies on a flat plain on the banks of the Zanskar River where two valleys converge. I had nothing except my backpack and two names.
Lacking a decent night's rest and after crossing multiple mountain passes more than 4,000 metres above sea level, I crashed down with a bout of altitude sickness. Garlic soup, the local remedy for weary untrained foreigners, didn't seem to work. Debilitating headaches and fatigue overtook my life for two days before I felt somewhat normal. I wandered Padum’s streets stopping by local chai shops, restaurants and travel agencies asking if anyone knew Urgain Dorjay or Tashi Stobdan. In the Himalayas, many people have similar names and without any other information, tracking the right person down can be tough. Luckily I knew Tashi was a schoolteacher from Kumik and Urgain ran the Zanskar Ski School, a non-profit organisation that taught children how to ski.
As if fate had decided to intervene, I happened to run into Urgain’s cousin. “Yes, he is my cousin. I can take you. Let’s go now.” We passed through Padum and walked along the only main road until we reached the local mosque where bearded Muslim men were wandering out after prayer late in the afternoon. We finally reached Urgain’s house, which was nestled on the mountainside overlooking Padum and the Zanskar Valley. The view was a sight to remember. Yellow fields of barley and wheat ready to be harvested surrounded the little box-shaped, white homes that were sprinkled across the heavenly Himalayan landscape. Urgain answered the door. A warm smile brimming from his face made the wrinkles around his eyes even more prominent. Without a hint of surprise or curiosity, he welcomed me into his home.
We talked and drank a constant flow of Himalayan salt butter tea. “Stay here tonight,” said Urgain. “I’ll ask my wife to cook something special and we’ll go find Tashi tomorrow. I’ll try and help you get to Kumik.” Things were coming together. I felt I could finally rest my weary body, despite the nighttime chorus of barking dogs, the town’s strays fighting for territory.
Urgain and I walked into town early the next morning to ask if anyone had seen Tashi. “He’s here! Today! In Padum,” said Urgain after asking a handful of locals outside a chai shop. “Wait here. I will go find him and bring him here.” We met Tashi outside the Jammu & Kashmir Bank, a stone’s throw away from the chai shop. It was home to Padum’s one and only ATM, which at the time had run out of cash. Tashi had a round face and soft features. He approached with a smile and an extended hand. “Jon tried to put me in contact with you. Did you get our emails?” I asked. Tashi shrugged. “The internet never works here,” he said, “but don’t worry, you are here now. Come to Kumik today. Stay at my house,” he said as if he had already anticipated my wish to visit the village.
It was a summer’s afternoon when I arrived in Kumik. The sun draped the mountains with an orange hue as it dipped lower in the sky. Tashi and I hitched a ride with a man who was going to Stongde, the village after Kumik. The driver dropped us off at the bottom of the hill in front of the village gate. “You can walk up the hill?” asked Tashi. I suspect he thought I was tired after all the travelling and was worried if I’d make it up. To be honest, I was exhausted, but out of my mouth came the words, “Of course. It’s no problem!” Luckily enough, just as I uttered those words I saw another car heading to Kumik, kicking up dust on the dirt road behind us. It picked us up and we sped up the hill, zigzagging all the way up to the village.
Kumik clings to a mountainside overlooking the wide Zanskar Valley below. At 3,400 metres above sea level, the view from the village was divine. White mudbrick houses dotted the landscape and the town of Karsha, home to the famous Karsha Gompa, perched on the other side of the valley. Soon after that I saw, for the first time, where the glacier had once come down Sultan Largo, the mountain behind Kumik. I was shocked to see the ice had retreated to the top of the mountain. The realities of a warming Himalayas and a warming world were clear.
As my eyes were glued to Sultan Largo, Tashi stood beside me. “See there is no more ice left. Just this little bit of water coming from the spring,” said Tashi, while pointing at the canal that ran through the village.
Since the glacier had gone, the water Kumik relied on during summer came from a handful of small springs on the mountainside. These springs are recharged by winter snowfall, but in recent years snow too has been on a steady decrease due to warming temperatures. The water was channelled towards the fields where barley and wheat crops were growing. There were also dams, but in recent times there had not been enough water to fill them.
“We’ve tried everything to get more water – dams, trying to find other springs, more canals,” Tashi explained. “But not much success. That’s why we want to move.” He then showed me some draft blueprints for a proposed new village to be named “Lower Kumik”. Lower Kumik was to be built on land secured from the government on the banks of the Zanskar River near Kumik’s entrance gate at the bottom of the zigzag road. The move down the mountain would potentially allow the villagers direct access to water from the Zanskar River. Yet, according to Tashi, some villagers seemed hesitant. “Many people don’t want to move, so we have a big problem,” he said.
In stark contrast with Kumik where the poplar trees swayed in the wind and crops were green, Lower Kumik resembled a desert. It was brown and lifeless with a few half-built homes dotting the valley floor. “Is anybody living down there right now?” I asked. “Yes, some people, not many,” said Tashi. In the hope of being close to a more secure water supply, a few people had used their life savings to establish homes in the new settlement. Their immediate hopes were dashed when flash-flooding severely damaged a newly-built canal. “We made a canal that brought water to the new village from the river, but it was washed away by a big glacier lake exploding,” said Tashi. The villagers who have moved don’t have enough money to rebuild another canal and are stranded with nowhere else to go.
Time moved easily that summer. Although I was a foreign stranger, I photographed Kumik without being met by any suspicion. Instead, I was met with smiles, open doors and generosity. My presence was welcomed. I felt at home. Night after night I became better acquainted with the village’s free-flowing arak, a local barley wine that hits like a shot of whisky. After working on the fields all day, the villagers deserved it. Tsewang Zangmo, Tashi’s wife, was ever-present and poured drinks for everyone. “Don, don,” she would repeatedly say, meaning “drink, please”. She had a unique smile that looked as if she was biting her tongue. Her smile and motherly love warmed the room. One night, I asked Tashi to ask Zangmo what she thought of the water situation. Pondering for a moment after Tashi translated my words, Zangmo shook her head. “We had to sell many animals,” she said. Unable to grow enough fodder, the cost of buying feed was too great. “It was very hard because the animals were worth a lot more than we got for them,” Zangmo continued as she poured more arak. “It’s very hard without good water.”
After bearing witness to Kumik’s plight, I wanted to follow the story and see where it would take me. The journey that followed was one that I would be glad I took. I left Kumik sometime in mid-September and began the long journey back to New Delhi. Some friends put me in contact with Ravi Mishra, a journalist and fixer in India. I remember meeting him for the first time and shaking hands. He was wearing Ray-Bans and gold earrings, and sported a thick beard. His genuineness was immediately apparent and a close friendship began, a friendship built upon countless hours of travelling and working on stories together.
In 2017 I began talking to Ravi about expanding my project and widening the scope of my black carbon story. In early 2018, we travelled to Jharia in Jharkhand, India. Jharia is a rural town that is home to some of the largest coal mines and coal deposits on the subcontinent. Much of the coal mined in this region powers cities and factories across India, but it is also used for domestic purposes. This in turn results in the coal being stolen or sold on the black market for people to use in their homes for cooking.
“Hey bro, make sure you put on your mask. The fire is burning everywhere,” said Ravi. “See those flames coming from the ground?” he pointed. Fires licked up from the earth lighting up pockets of the dark landscape.
It was 5 a.m. and we had arrived at a mine site. I walked to the edge of the mine and looked down upon hundreds of large and small fires burning across the land. Plumes of smoke rose up from fires originating within the earth. It smelt of death. “These people breathe in this shit every day. It’s a catastrophe. Sometimes I wonder how we’re ever going to repair what we’ve done,” said Ravi while we slid our way down the cliff face into the mine.
The entire region of Jharia is on fire. The flames began around a hundred years ago. No one knows exactly how. Some say it was started by someone unwittingly throwing burning trash into a mine shaft. Since then, the fire has continued to burn the virtually unlimited supply of coal that fuels it, and has been known to swallow whole villages. The flames burn without showing any signs of an underground inferno – until it’s too late – and the land gives away and collapses. “Let me go first man, I know this area and what is stable and what’s not,” said Ravi as we walked across a collapsed part of the landscape that was once a village. “These areas of the ground are so unstable and unsafe. When people go down they almost always die,” said Ravi. Many parts of the region looked as though someone had sliced the ground with a knife, exposing hellfire underneath.
After covering our initial story in Jharia, between 2018 and 2020, we travelled overland across India on a number of trips chasing fires and smoke. From rural Madhya Pradesh in central India to the streets of the capital, New Delhi. At times we even backtracked to areas we spotted from trains. Our eyes, and indeed our minds, were fixed on the story. I remember one morning, as we woke ourselves up drinking fresh chai, Ravi looked up at the sky. It was covered in a thick smoky haze, which represented so much of what we had been working on. “Just photograph anything man. It’s all covered in smoke anyway. Call it art!” said Ravi with a cheeky laugh. So much fire. So much smoke. It was as if the inferno had no limit or end.
After my first visit to Kumik in 2016, I often wondered how the village was doing. In 2019, I decided to head back to the village during the bone-chilling Himalayan winter. Because of the cold and snow no roads were open and the only way in was a flight from New Delhi to Leh, the provincial capital of Ladakh, and then a walk along the Zanskar River on what the locals call the Chadar, which translates to “frozen river”. Historically, the Chadar was a route used to transport butter from Zanskar to the people of Leh. These days, the Chadar is more a tourist attraction catering mostly to Indian tourists who travel a portion of the way to Tibb Cave, where they camp for one night.
Flying into Leh on December 23, only two days before Christmas, I began the journey with my good friend Tanzin Rigzin. After acclimatising to the altitude of 3,500 metres for four days, we began the walk to Kumik that would – given perfect conditions – take another four to five days. We followed caravans of local Zanskari people making the journey back home from Leh and slept alongside them in ancient caves on the river banks as well as seeking refuge among crumbling animal shelters used by seasonal shepherds. Each day as the sun set we would mentally prepare ourselves for a night where our bodies would curl up like balls to conserve heat. Some night temperatures dipped below minus 30 degrees Celsius. Tanzin and I made a game out of finding prospective shelter each afternoon. “Look at this amazing yak house,” said Tanzin. “Great man. We don’t have to sleep outside. It’s 5-star, brother!” A roof over our heads was an improvement to the previous night where we woke covered in a thin layer of snow that had blown inside the cave where we slept.
It was especially cold. Locals along the way said they had never before seen parts of the river frozen to the same extent. In particular, the notorious section known as Wama, which roughly translates to “only a fox can cross”, was frozen solid. In years past, Zanskaris told us stories that, if Wama was broken, they would either wait for it to refreeze or take the long way over two 4,000 metre plus passes. If Wama’s ice did start breaking while you were part of the way across, your only refuge was an open cliff face. We hurried over Wama, covering it in 45 minutes, pushing against a cutting wind that I could feel right down to the marrow of my bones.
Conditions held up and four days later Tanzin and I arrived at the roadhead in the village of Zangla, in the Zanskar Valley, a day’s walk from Kumik. After hitching a ride from Zangla, we were dropped off at the bottom of the hill below Kumik. The zigzag road from my summer memory was covered in snow. We had no choice but to wade through it. On our way up to the village, we were initially met with some confusion, but upon closer inspection, people remembered me from 2016. “Jullay,” they greeted me with a wave.
“Kumik, Zanskar brother. We’re here,” said Tanzin. It was surreal in a way. The village was a familiar place, but blanketed in snow, it was totally new at the same time. Everything around me was shimmering from the sun hitting the unspoilt white powder.
Tashi and Zangmo’s house, I remembered, sat right next to one of the village’s Buddhist stupas. We followed the road up the hill and knocked on the door. We were met by a young girl, Tenzin Yangdoll, who I had never met. She called out to Zangmo. “Aunty! There are two people here. One foreigner and a man from Spiti. They asked for you,” she said. I heard Zangmo’s voice in the distance. “A foreigner and a man from Spiti?” Zangmo yelled in confusion, “Who would be here at this time of year!? Tell them to go into the kitchen and give them tea!”
Yangdoll guided us into the winter kitchen that was under the main portion of the house. I hadn’t been in this part of Tashi’s house before. It was cosy and warm, and it was a relief to remove my snow-filled shoes and to thaw my fingers and toes by the dried dung-fuelled fire. Zangmo walked in. “Ashley, how are you here? It’s too cold to be here!” she said with a hint of astonishment in her voice. We caught up on news, and I filled her in on what had happened to me since my last visit. I told her I missed Kumik and I had to come back. She gave me that Zangmo smile – the one that looked as if she was biting her tongue – while she poured me another butter tea. “Tashi has gone to Leh for a government teacher training program. He’s not here right now, but please stay,” she said.
Much of what occurs in Kumik during the summer is based on preparing for winter. The activities are dependent on water and make themselves clearly evident during winter. Drying and collecting cow dung for fire fuel, the growing and harvesting fodder for livestock, and growing and storing enough food to see out the winter all become critical. Fodder and food are dependent on water, but during this cold season, water was in short supply. The situation was even worse than in summer. Only one underground spring remained unfrozen and all the villagers and their livestock had to share it. “Ena chu dhua?” which translates into “How is the water today?” was a regular question asked between villagers. The daily process of accessing, transporting, and storing water was an everyday struggle.
“I remember the ice came down the mountain and I could only see small rocks,” said Rigzin Yangdol, a 72-year-old woman who had spent her whole life in the village, as she sat in her winter kitchen thumping flatbread dough on the fiery stove. “Now it’s gone, and you can see all the big rocks that were under the ice.” I sat and listened to her story. I asked if the village had ever gone through water shortages in the past and she just shook her head. Her older brother, Rigzin Phunsok, the village folk doctor, sat beside her. “Do you think that’s a lot of snow outside?” he asked. “It’s nothing compared to what used to come down when we were kids. That’s why we have no water.” Phunsok then thought out loud, “I don’t know how much longer the young people will last here.”
Many villagers, especially those with children, were torn between moving to Lower Kumik or staying put. Some feared moving would anger the village’s house gods. “There’s a water problem. I would like my children to move, but I don’t want to anger the gods,” said Tenzin Thinlay, whose family had lived in Kumik for generations. The 57-year-old man resides in one of Kumik’s oldest homes with his family. “It’s not only the water, but the seasons are different now too. Our summers are longer and the winters are shorter.” Thinlay cracked a smile, which masked his feelings about the village’s predicament. “The crops grow well because it’s warmer, but we’ve got no water for them,” he said. Everyone I met found the cost of relocating too expensive. It was difficult to imagine Tashi’s vision of the entire village moving down to Lower Kumik coming to fruition.
Each night Zangmo, Yangdoll, Tanzin and I kept warm by the fire where a kettle was constantly boiling water for tea. Each time the kettle was removed, embers and sparks rose up from the metal stove’s hole. They flickered for a moment just before the kettle was placed back and rested atop the fire. I pondered the black carbon rising from the flames that kept me warm – the very same substance that created Kumik’s plight. The thought that Kumik’s villagers face the loss of their livelihoods, their homes, and centuries of memories, history, and culture lingered in my mind the whole time I was there.
As I was on the verge of leaving Kumik, snow had fallen nonstop for three days, but counter-intuitively, this had raised the temperature of the entire region. “Be safe and come back in summer when it's warmer,” said Zangmo, as Tanzin and I said our goodbyes outside her home. To our dismay, we had heard that the Chadar had broken because of the warm temperatures, and we didn’t know how long it would take to reform. We travelled to Padum where Urgain had already heard that I was back in Kumik. He was expecting me and had sent a message – via one of the villagers – to come and stay at his house. Tanzin and I pushed through the new blanket of snow, heading to the bottom of the valley towards Lower Kumik to begin the long journey to Padum. Luckily, we were picked up by a truck driver who drove a government water tanker that provided water to villages facing water shortages across the Zanskar Valley – Kumik included. He gestured for us to get on the back and drove us to town.
We met Urgain outside the only open chai shop on the main street, where everyone seemed to congregate. Ice crystals formed on the walls inside the store from steam meeting the cold. We walked back to Urgain’s house and conversed over a cup of butter tea. Later, I helped shovel the huge fall of snow from his roof as a way of thanking him for his hospitality. Seeing Urgain again reminded me of my first time in Zanskar, wandering around, and looking for a stranger. Now I was lucky enough to call the stranger my friend.
With heavy snow on the passes and the Chadar broken, the Zanskar Valley was cut off from the rest of the world. “You’re stuck now,” said Urgain with a laugh, “but this is your home, so stay for the whole of winter. It doesn’t matter.” There was a local, but incredibly unreliable, winter helicopter service operated by the Indian army from the Padum army base. Both Tanzin and I tried to get on board, but as both of us were considered foreigners, we had to file extensive paperwork first. This involved going back and forth to the army base – a 14 kilometre round trip – every day for six days. “At least we’re keeping warm by walking back to Urgain’s every day,” I said as I tried to keep up our spirits. The paperwork never reached the people it was meant for, so it was a fruitless exercise. The only real solution was for the skies to clear and the temperature to drop far enough to refreeze the Chadar. “I pray every day to the Goddess for colder weather bro,” said Tanzin as we made our way back to Urgain’s under a cloudy sky.
On our seventh morning in Urgain’s house in Padum, as Tanzin and I killed time by playing chess in the kitchen, we were surprised by an unexpected guest. Tashi Stobdan, who we thought was in Leh, had returned to Zanskar. “Why are you here?” asked Tashi as he walked into Urgain’s kitchen. “Come back to Kumik,” he said as he laughed. “I heard you were in Kumik so I came back from Leh early, but we got stuck on the Chadar. Ice was broken.” He went on to tell us that he had been stranded for five days and had to walk through waist-deep water on an underlayer of ice to get through. I was humbled that my old friend had taken such risks in order to see me before I left. “The Chadar is okay now. Wama is fixed. So no problems,” said Tashi. “But come back to Zanskar soon. I will wait.”
After drinking our cups of butter tea the next morning, Tanzin and I left for Leh, uncertain whether the Chadar would still be open. Urgain helped us prepare and gave us some emergency rations for the journey. On the way out of Padum, we passed a local protest. Hundreds of Zanskaris, including people from Kumik, marched to the regional government office chanting, “We need a road! We need phone connections! No more isolation!” Some of the villagers from Kumik stopped, shook our hands and thanked us for coming. They implored me to tell the world about their struggle. We found the last shared jeep and headed to Zangla, at the end of the road, and spent the night.
The Chadar was open, but it had changed a great deal since we had walked in. What had been a four-day journey took us seven dangerous days to complete on the way back. At some points we had to wade through thick snow and walk through knee-deep water on the underlayer of the ice. We scrambled over mounds of snow formed by avalanches that had landed on the frozen river, sometimes breaking parts of the ice. At night, we slept in caves as the temperatures dropped again. One night in particular, my temperature gauge reached its limit at minus 30, but my bones told me it was colder. Even the water bottle that rested under my sleeping bag and was warmed by my body froze in the coldest hours of the morning. We woke up with ice attached to our sleeping bags from where our warm breath went through the bag and met the cold.
That night I turned to Tanzin and asked, “Are you awake bro?” He laughed, “Yes, bro I am awake. Very cold. Maybe we should start walking now?” he said. I had never wanted to start walking so much in my life. The very thought of getting the blood moving in my body was a source of inspiration. It was 4:30 a.m. and pitch black outside with no sound except a howling mountain wind under a starlit sky. We got up and started walking. Hours later, the sun finally rose. We stopped and laid against our backpacks on the ice, bathing in the sun's warmth – almost worshipping it. The feeling in my feet started to come back.
Just as Tashi had said, Wama was fixed, but the ice on the cliff face had shifted downwards by a couple of metres compared to where it was when we initially walked in. There were even moments when we heard deep cracks below us as we walked along. The further we got in, the more nervous we were that the ice would give way. We decided to run. With the air temperature so low, a fall into the icy water below the ice would be a death sentence. To make things even more precarious, the ice that had melted during the uptick in temperature had erased everyone’s footprints, taking away our signposts to the best and safest routes. At times, it was a guessing game.
After making it safely across the Chadar and suffering a one-day bout of diarrhoea from food poisoning, we finally reached the road from where we could hitch a ride back to Leh. “Look, there’s the spot!” I yelled to Tanzin pointing at the place where we began our journey over a month earlier. I had been thinking about this spot for seven days. “Yes, brother! We made it and you have stopped blasting. Stomach is ok now – right at the end,” replied Tanzin with a laugh.
“We made it.” Words never meant so much.
This is the journey of Our Dark Materials. Everything that happened, from beginning to end and everything in between, is within the pages of this book. Black carbon and its impacts on the Himalayas, water security and health remain one of the most important – and most under-reported – environmental and social issues of our time. The future of Kumik and its connection to the fires that burn on the plains below the Himalayas is still unknown, but what is known is that the impact of black carbon is immense and the impacts can be seen now. Kumik’s story is the beginning of a narrative that will continue on a far grander scale if we do not open our eyes and act.
Chapter One
The Waterless Village
Kumik, Zanskar Valley, India
Chapter Two
Our Warming World
Black Carbon, Climate Change and the Himalayas
It was the winter of 2013. I sat, leaning against a rock, marvelling at the starlit night sky beaming light upon a glacier that carved down Annapurna Dakshin, a steep 7,219 metre Himalayan peak in Nepal. My attention on the stars was constantly interrupted by the sounds of ice fracturing and moving beside me. At that moment the Himalayas seemed to place everything else in the world in shadow. The sound of splintering ice once again interrupted my train of thought. Right next to me, an underappreciated phenomenon was under way. The cracking, moving glacier that snaked through the Himalayan valley beside me would eventually contribute to some of the earth’s mightiest rivers. The rivers would, in turn, carve their way across the Asian continent providing billions of people with access to water. Trying to fully comprehend this entire system might be impossible, but understanding the threat it faces is one of the most important issues of our time.
Towering high above Asia and crossing multiple geopolitical borders, the Himalayan mountain range is a formidable sight. It includes the highest point on earth, Mt. Everest, and is home to all but four of the world’s 8,000 metre plus peaks. The Himalayas have captured the human imagination since time immemorial. The remoteness, beauty, and ice-covered wilderness of the mountains is unlike any other landscape on earth. Standing tall through millennia of change, the mountains are now surrounded by the globe’s largest populations in India and China. When one is deep within the mountains, the roughly 2.6 billion people surrounding them seem all but a background murmur. Yet, what goes on the plains below the mountains has an almost instant effect on this fragile alpine system, and is remaining harder and harder to ignore.
The creation of these unimaginably high peaks began some 50 million years ago with the Indian and Eurasian geologic plates colliding and pushing up the earth’s crust. To this day, the mountains are shifting, growing, and changing. Battered by snow and unimaginably cold temperatures the Himalayas created a frozen expanse where some of the world’s largest and longest glaciers formed. Indeed, the Himalayas account for the largest mass of ice outside the polar regions, with some commentators labelling the region as “The Third Pole”.
In summer, the temperature rises just high enough to disrupt the freezing cycle and melt parts of the built-up ice found in the glaciers. Happening largely out of sight, this melting provides a steady stream of water, feeding hundreds of streams and rivers that ultimately make up some of the most important river systems in Asia, including the Ganges, Indus, Yangtze, and Mekong. These rivers sustain livelihoods and industries – from agriculture to fishing and electricity – in dozens of Asian countries from India to Cambodia. In India alone 60 percent of water used for the irrigation of food crops, for both domestic consumption and exports, originates in the Himalayas.1
On average, and over time, the cycle of snow falling, then freezing into the ice that has built the Himalayas’ vast glaciers, then melting, has been relatively balanced. The melt that occurred during summer was replaced by the snow turned into ice during winter. However, over recent decades, temperatures have dramatically shifted and are continuing to rise on average, due to human activities below and far, far away. The delicate balance has tipped, with the majority of Himalayan glaciers now entering a process of shrinking and dying. They leave nothing behind, except the scars on the landscape where ice once carved its way through the mountains. The snowfall during winter is simply unable to make up for the melt during today’s longer, warmer summer months.
As fossil fuel-based industrialisation and other human activities have swept across Asia, the Himalayas and the ice contained in the mountains is under threat. Much of the rapid rise in temperatures can be linked to the burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting increase in carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the global atmosphere. However, there has been another, not so obvious, culprit also playing a part in the great thaw occurring across the mountain range. The impact of black carbon, or what is commonly known as soot, has gone relatively unnoticed. Black carbon is a microscopic, solid particle, the waste matter resulting from the incomplete combustion of organic materials and fossil fuels. It is packed into the smoke from the things we burn.
Unlike carbon dioxide and climate change, black carbon has not been discussed on a scale that does the issue justice. This is somewhat perplexing given the serious nature of the issue and its impact. Scientists studying black carbon have argued that it is the second most important particle affecting the climate of the Himalayas – second only to carbon dioxide. Making this worse is the fact that black carbon is compounding the effect of carbon dioxide, essentially doubling the warming.3 Other experts go further and say that black carbon is actually a greater short-term threat to the Himalayas than carbon dioxide and climate change as a whole.2
The sources of black carbon vary. Most are the result of fuel combustion for cooking, transport, and electricity generation. Coal, diesel, wood, and dried dung cakes used as fuel, all release copious amounts of black carbon into the surrounding locality and regional atmosphere. Globally, the largest emitters of black carbon are the two largest nations divided by the Himalayas – India and China.3 The smoke from the hundreds of millions of people who are still reliant on basic, inefficient fuels for cooking and heating, along with the emissions from transport, industry and others, can no longer be looked at with indifference.
Black carbon has been found in multiple areas of the Himalayas, across multiple nations. It has been found on Mt. Saraswati at 4,540 metres in India; on the southern slopes of Mt. Everest at 5,097 metres in Nepal; and as high as 6,350 metres on Muztagh Ata and 6,500 metres on the East Rongbuk Glacier in China.2 The true extent of black carbon’s spread may never be known due to the difficulty of accessing so much of the remote Himalayas.
Ice-core data taken from glaciers in the region also indicates that most of the black carbon has been deposited over the past 50 to 100 years, coinciding with the growth of population and development, which would not have been possible without fire.2
A major concern about black carbon relates to its colour and to what scientists know as the albedo effect, which measures the reflectivity of a surface and how much of the sun’s heat is reflected or absorbed. In simple terms dark colours absorb heat and light colours reflect it.
The vast majority of the Himalayas are covered in white ice and much of it naturally reflects sunlight and heat back into space. Normally, as much as 50 to 90 percent of sunlight is reflected by the ice, reducing melting. The presence of black carbon on the icy surfaces has caused vast reductions in the ice’s albedo.34 Rather than reflecting the sun’s heat, black carbon’s dark particles are actually absorbing it.
This leads to what scientists call a positive feedback loop, which exacerbates the effects of a small change or disturbance. In other words, the reduction in the ice’s albedo resulting from black carbon leads to melting. In turn, the reduction of ice reduces its albedo effect on the surrounding region, making the temperature rise and ultimately leading to more ice melting. This principle has been harnessed throughout the ages, when people scattered ashes from their home fires onto fresh snow in order to make it melt quicker.
Black carbon’s colour and heat absorption ability also cause atmospheric warming, as it not only settles on the ice, but also lingers in the air itself. Studies show that between 1961 and 2006 there was an estimated surface warming of 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius up to altitudes of 5000 metres in the Himalayas. Indeed, one study from the Tibetan Plateau suggested that black carbon alone accounted for 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming.5 This is one of the highest warming trends recorded on earth. By comparison, during the same period, warming in the Arctic was associated with a loss of sea ice after an increase of only 1.2 degrees Celsius.5 With the Himalayas warming at almost double the rate of the Arctic, there is clear cause for concern. A possible explanation for the dramatic warming trend is the impact of black carbon, which results in greater absorption of the sun’s heat at higher altitudes, and baking landscapes that are no longer protected by reflective ice.
The rapid warming across the Himalayas is leading to glaciers retreating at rates of between 10 to 60 metres per year, with many smaller glaciers already gone.6 At this rate, studies suggest that a third of all Himalayan glaciers will disappear in the next 70 years.78 The effects of a warming world are making themselves clear – no matter how remote the mountains are.9 Every single glacier I’ve seen, in India, Nepal and China, is creeping towards death. Once they have disappeared, there is little to no chance these ancient rivers of ice will reform.
The threat to Himalayan glaciers places immense pressure on the future of Asia’s water security.1011 This is especially relevant to the energy and agriculture industries. Without water, hydroelectric dams, which have received heavy investment in countries such as India, will be unable to provide enough energy for development. Agriculture, where the vast majority of Asia’s population is employed, will be heavily impacted, to say the least. For Kumik, water shortages are already real and have resulted in crop failures and the growing inability to feed and water livestock, culminating in a drop in incomes. Glaciers and the water they provide quite literally enable life in much of Asia to continue. Villages like Kumik are on the front line facing the challenges presented by a warming world caused by both black carbon and climate change.
Seeing the ice on top of the towering Himalayan peaks and the long glaciers carving through mountain valleys can give a false sense of security, that everything is fine, that surely there is plenty of ice left and we have nothing to worry about. However, ignorance in this case is not bliss and the vast thaw taking place across the Himalayas is happening on a human time scale, over decades. Could life as we know it go on without water from these glaciers? If Kumik’s lived experience and story is a harbinger of things to come, many other small communities will not survive. And what of the huge Asian cities dependent on water from the Himalayas’ glaciers? Without proper action now, the great thaw will continue.
Chapter Three
A Burning Land
The Indian Subcontinent
Chapter Four
The Air We Breathe
Black Carbon, Air Pollution and Our Health
I woke to the gentle rocking of the train en route to Lanzhou, China, where I would have to transfer on my way to Urumqi in China’s far western province of Xinjiang. It was just past dawn and I peered out the window expecting to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. I was confronted with nothing but a brown haze. A couple of hours passed and I wearily stepped off the morning train. It was early, but outside the main long-distance train station the city was already bursting with energy. I was greeted by high rises that towered in front of me blanketed in a smog so thick you could see, smell, taste, and practically touch. The whole scene resembled a post-apocalyptic movie where the idea of blue skies existed only in my memory. The air was obviously not the kind people should breathe, yet just like everyone else who lived there, I had no choice but to inhale what was clearly a poisonous gas.
Almost eight years have passed since that morning in China and due to the rising global awareness about air pollution and its related issues, air quality is improving – albeit slowly. However in India, a place where I have spent much of my time over the past four years, air quality across the subcontinent has seemingly remained steady. Throughout this time air pollution levels measured on the Air Quality Index (AQI) scale have maxed out at 500 on multiple occasions, particularly in India’s capital New Delhi where one event was labelled as “The Great Smog of Delhi”. At an AQI of 500, exposure over a 24-hour period is the equivalent to smoking about 27 cigarettes.12 Tragically events like this have become a normal part of life in many Indian cities.
The term air pollution covers different particulates, gases, heavy metals and chemicals that are mixed into the air we breathe. They come from different sources and depending on the country, region or area, you may find more of one substance and less of another. In Asia however, the vast majority of air pollution can be traced back to a handful of substances that are burnt: wood, dried dung, coal, diesel fuel, garbage, and agricultural waste.
The pollutants released depend on the material that is burnt, and frequently, the most harmful are microscopic solid particles and gases that are invisible to the naked eye. Some of these include black carbon and carbon monoxide, as well as toxic organic and polyaromatic compounds like benzene, formaldehyde, and benzopyrene. The solid particles are measured in microns and defined as PM10 and PM2.5 depending on their size. These descriptions have become common in many countries across the globe. For example, black carbon, which is present in so much of the material that is burnt as fuel, and is invisible to the naked eye, measures less than 2.5 microns. To put this into perspective, the average human hair measures between 50 to 70 microns.
Despite most particles and gases being unseeable at the individual level, there can be so much floating around in the air that you are bound to see it. The spread of air pollution is apparent when you fly, and particularly for me, has been obvious when I travel from the Himalayan town of Leh, in Ladakh, India, to the capital city of New Delhi. I’ve flown this route a dozen times and each journey is the same. You can see the smog clogging even the remotest mountain valleys and, as you pass over the vast plains of India, the smog becomes so thick you are unable to see the landscape below. I find myself imagining what the view might be like if it was not obscured by air pollution, but when I land and start breathing the noxious air along with everybody else, reality really hits.
The impact of air pollution on health is severe and is linked to a range of chronic long-term, and acute short-term, medical conditions. Whether the pollution consists of gases or solid particulates, and whether it is indoor or outdoor, it directly contributes to conditions such as cancers of the trachea, bronchus, and the lungs. The list expands to other chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections, chronic bronchitis and an increased risk of developing active tuberculosis. The effects of these long-term conditions are made worse by the onset of coughing, sore eyes, and inflamed throats. This is a harsh reality faced by hundreds of millions of people every day.
For a long time, significant attention has been given to outdoor air pollution in megacities across the world, especially in Asia, with the Great Smog of Delhi being a prime example.
We are accustomed to the pictures and videos of buildings shrouded by a thick haze caused by coal-fired power plants, millions of cars, the burning of trash, factories churning out fumes, and farmers burning their fields. The attention paid to outdoor air pollution is justified and it remains a worrisome public health issue. In 2019 alone, air pollution was responsible for 4.2 million deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization.3
When I think of outdoor air pollution, however, I think of the coal mining region of Jharia, in the Indian state of Jharkhand. The entire time I spent there I could smell nothing but smoke and sulphur from burning underground coal seams. The fumes seep out of the cracks in the toasted ground. The haze was so thick that I felt like I was in a cloud. The Jharia coal seam fires have been burning since 1917 and show no signs of being controlled. With 30 percent of India’s coal production located in Jharia, the fire has virtually unlimited amounts of fuel and there is no end in sight.4
While different from the air pollution that plagues large cities, the underground fires in Jharia are filling the atmosphere with the usual suspects, along with heavy metals like lead and arsenic.5 To make matters worse, much of the coal that is mined or scavenged in the area is used in daily domestic activities like cooking, which further adds to the already deadly mix of air pollution plaguing the region. Little formal research has been directly focused on the health impacts on the people that live in Jharia, but documenting the region has made it clear to me the situation must be dire for the region’s people.
Nothing made the outdoor air pollution in Jharia more obvious than my clothes, which shimmered with a layer of black, dust-like particles. My industrial-grade particulate mask didn’t fare much better. It was essentially useless after one day, shaded black and leaving the taste of metal in my mouth when I breathed through it. However, what I was exposed to over weeks was but a fraction of what the people of the area have lived through over their entire lives. They did not have the luxury of packing up and leaving as I did.
This only paints half the picture however. As a guest in many homes across the Asian continent, and particularly in India, you realise how indoor air pollution is often a larger problem than its outdoor counterpart. A large number of the homes in Asia that I have visited over the years are still reliant on solid fuels for cooking and heating. Studies across Asia have confirmed this observation to be a fact.7 More often than not, solid fuels are all that is available and affordable.
While the fires inside homes are belching smoke, women and children have to deal with it as best they can. This often means trying to push the smoke away using a flap of cardboard. They have no choice but to breathe the smoke, cough, and wipe away the tears from their stinging eyes as they provide food for their family. In India alone, estimates show that between 756 to 815 million people are still reliant on biomass fuel alone – fuels such as wood and dried dung.710 This is almost double the population of the European Union. For India, this presents a major public health challenge and it underlines the need for cleaner fuels to not only be more accessible, but also more affordable.
The human cost of the reliance on solid fuels and the impacts of indoor air pollution can be difficult to comprehend. The World Health Organization suggests that individuals should be exposed to no more than 50 milligrams per cubic centimetre of PM10 and 25 milligrams per cubic centimetre of PM2.5 over 24 hours. Yet, studies show that indoor concentrations of PM10 inside many rural Indian homes over a 24-hour period have gone beyond 2,000 milligrams per cubic centimetre, with some readings reaching as high as 3,300 milligrams per cubic centimetre, with PM2.5 levels averaging around 173 milligrams per cubic centimetre.89
Tragically, according to the latest Indian estimates, exposure to indoor air pollution culminates in over 480,000 deaths and a further 670,000 deaths result from outdoor air pollution.10 Due to their exposure in kitchens, women and children are disproportionately represented and make up 400,000 of these casualties.7 Kitchen fires are dangerous in other ways too. In India alone, 500,000 women every year suffer debilitating burns from open cooking fires.7 All these numbers stand in stark and unfair contrast with a country like the United States where approximately only 30,000 deaths occur due to air-pollution-related causes.11
These statistics were made all the more real in Kumik during the winter of 2020, when a middle-aged woman died from what locals said was a “problem with her breathing and chest.” It was almost certainly a lung condition, never diagnosed or treated properly due to a lack of medical facilities, that developed over a lifetime of smoke exposure. How many deaths like hers go unreported? How many people’s lives are affected by illness, disease or disability? These are questions that will never be answered adequately, but it is clear the numbers are huge.
Scientists are now making a connection between air pollution and a negative impact on children’s brain and cognitive development. This has wide-ranging implications, including on the ability to learn at school. A study conducted in the United States tentatively concluded that there is a consistent relationship between black carbon and reduced cognitive functions in school-aged children exposed to particulate matter.1213 If this is accurate, education, which is one of the most important factors in the development of a society, is being tragically hindered due to the effects of air pollution and its impact on children.
The road ahead combating air pollution remains long. Despite the many years that have passed since the morning in Lanzhou when I looked up at China’s hazy, polluted sky, air pollution continues to engulf people’s lives. Most often those affected have little to no choice in the matter and most of the time it comes back to fuels, and what kind of fuels people are able to access and afford. Both indoor and outdoor air pollution create suffering on a scale that is unimaginable – a staggering loss of human potential. Yet this tragically remains an everyday reality for hundreds of millions of people, especially women and children. Without a significant shift in the kind of fuels used, air pollution will be the main source of dozens of public health and developmental problems for years to come. The situation will affect developing nations the most. And the most affected of all will be the families who are unable to afford and access cleaner alternative fuels.
Chapter Five
The Himalayan Thaw
The Retreating Glaciers and the Rivers Giving Life to Asia
Chapter Six
The Water Well
Kumik, Zanskar Valley, India
Chapter Seven
The Path Ahead
Black Carbon and Asia
The cold bit at my face and mist rose from my breath as it hit the icy Himalayan air. It was the winter of 2020 and I was on Urgain Dorjay’s roof shovelling snow with Tanzin Rigzin after a blizzard had passed. I paused for a moment and gazed at the Zanskar Valley that folded out in front of me, and I reflected on the years that had passed since I began documenting black carbon in India and the Himalayas. The journey had come full circle.
What started as a trip to document one remote village’s water shortages had led me on a journey exploring black carbon that was longer than I had ever imagined. So many places. So many people. So many kilometres travelled. Bringing together what I had seen and what I had read I came to a conclusion: solving the problem of black carbon is an enormous, but doable task. Climate change, on the other hand, requires a massive global shift in how we live our lives, a long-term overhaul of essentially everything everyone does.
Resolving Asia’s black carbon issues does not require the same degree of change. However, the potential benefits from reducing black carbon emissions are great and, better still, they can be achieved in the short term. Already, across Asia and in particular India, there are real-world examples of successful efforts to remove black carbon. Eliminating all black carbon is an unrealistic goal, but a substantial reduction could lead to short-term environmental, economic, and health benefits for a huge number of people.
There is real hope and progress. Just perhaps, black carbon can become a background issue and not the threat it is today. The world’s largest population of people still reliant on solid fuels for domestic use live in India.1 And it is in India where I came across a number of initiatives that illustrate how relatively small changes might have enormous results.
In 2016, when I first began working on the issue of black carbon in India, I asked friends if they knew of any initiatives that were in any way working to resolve the problem. I was pointed to an Australian and an Indian, Russel Collins and Tanzin Rigzin, who were working on a “rocket stove”. This was the beginning of a friendship with Tanzin that ultimately led to him joining me on my journey to Kumik in the winter of 2020.
I met Russel and Tanzin in early October in Leh, Ladakh, to see what they were working on. The stove they had developed, which had no name at the time, was ingenious. The materials required to make it included water, clay, sand, puffed rice, straw, and gravel, all of which were locally available, cheap or free. The materials were moulded into multiple doughnut shapes that stacked on top of one another creating a funnel. Wood was fed into a tunnel that jutted out from the base of the funnel. When complete, the stove resembled an “L” shape or a modified chula – a traditional Indian stove.
This design creates a powerful vacuum. The wind rushing into the vacuum creates a fire with such high temperatures that smoke actually burns too. The new stove not only burns with a clean, smokeless flame, but is also hotter and more efficient compared to traditional chulas.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Russel and Tanzin held small workshops across rural India and the Himalayas attempting to spread knowledge of the stoves and their benefits by teaching people how to make and use them. In one such workshop, held in the Khandwa region of Madhya Pradesh, they worked with the local Korku tribe, most of whom were small-scale farmers who supplemented their livelihoods with labouring work.
A follow-up study by Russel and Tanzin’s Himalayan Rocket Stove Foundation showed encouraging results. According to the Korku people who were surveyed, cooking time decreased by 33 percent and firewood consumption by 47 percent. This meant they were saving about 97 kilograms of wood per month. All this was achieved with the added benefit of eliminating smoke emissions. In terms of health benefits, 84 percent said coughing was reduced, and 67 percent stated there was an overall reduction in breathing problems, along with watery eyes. The most encouraging statistic was that 84 percent of households said they no longer used their traditional stoves.2
The widespread rollout of highly efficient stoves could bring multiple benefits to millions across South Asia, eliminating black carbon and other indoor and outdoor pollutants and reducing, if not eliminating, the health problems associated with cooking stoves’ deadly smoke.
Established fuels like Liquified Petroleum Gas, better known as LPG, also have a big role to play in reducing black carbon and improving cooking conditions. Despite being regularly touted as the way forward, LPG is expensive and requires a significant upfront investment. The cost of buying the stoves, purchasing gas cylinders and setting up distribution networks can take its toll on governments as well as the people who are using the gas. The cost of the gas, which is subject to global price fluctuations, can be a barrier to adoption especially if prices are not kept stable. For many people who absorb the brunt of black carbon’s impact, these costs can be too much to bear.
In 2016 in India, the Pradhan Mantru Uijwala Yohana, or PMUY scheme, provided free LPG connections to 50 million people and was poised to remove the dangers of open cooking fires for families across the subcontinent. By 2019, according to the Indian government, the expansion of the PMUY scheme saw LPG distribution potentially reach 90 percent of homes.6 This has resulted in an actual increase in LPG usage from 15 percent to 48 percent of homes, according to the Indian National Statistical Organization.6
While initially encouraging, PMUY’s wide distribution coverage has not been reflected in the rates of adoption and use. According to one study, 83 percent of households continue to use open fires and free fuels like wood, and dried cow dung some of the time.3 The cost of refilling the LPG gas bottles remains the single biggest hurdle.56 Those who would seem to benefit most from schemes such as PMUY, are generally cash poor and despite the government refunds available for gas refills, people are still required to make up-front payments.
LPG should not be cast aside, despite the possible accessibility and adoption issues, as the resource is one of the main reasons black carbon isn’t a widespread issue in other parts of the world. There have been encouraging results in the lower regions of the Himalayas resulting from the introduction of LPG to households that were once reliant on chopping down alpine forests for fuel. Apart from the health benefits, the forests in the study area have begun to recover from vast deforestation. The same study showed that between 1990 and 2005, wood consumption dropped from 475 kilograms per capita to just 46 kilograms after the introduction of LPG.4
Is there a middle ground between the use of something like the Himalayan Rocket Stove and LPG? In a diverse place like Asia, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every problem – reducing black carbon emissions included. Rather, solutions are dependent on the regional location, peoples’ incomes, available resources, the level of education, and the willingness of policymakers to make the right decisions.
Cooking stoves make up the bulk of Asia’s black carbon emissions, but factories, cars, buses, and trucks are also serious contributors. In many places however, public transport policies are taking great leaps forward. In New Delhi, India, for example, older buses running on black-carbon-emitting diesel were ordered to be retrofitted to natural gas, and all new buses are to be built with natural gas engines.78 Privately owned cars, unfortunately, haven’t followed suit and diesel-burning trucks still remain on the roads and across the Himalayas belching out black smoke.
Agriculture is also a significant contributor to the problem of black carbon. At the end of each year in northern India, over 23 million tonnes of organic waste is burnt to prepare fields for their next crop. The amount of agricultural waste that is burnt, if stacked into 38-centimetre high, 20-kilogram bales, would build a structure high enough to reach the moon.9 These black carbon emissions could be eliminated if farms adopted no-till farming technologies such as the Happy Seeder, which chops leftover waste then plants new seeds in the same place, using the chopped waste as compost. However issues related to implementation are similar to those facing LPG. The cost remains a major hurdle, along with the difficulty of educating farmers about these alternative farming techniques and technologies.10
While good things are happening elsewhere, unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to solve the issues surrounding the underground fires in the coal mines of Jharia in Jharkhand, India. Despite the apocalyptic scenes and dire living conditions that plague the people that live and work around the mines, coal mining is unlikely to stop. And the constant digging for more coal stirs the earth and helps keep the fire burning.11 Across India, coal mining is likely to increase as the country strives to get the energy it needs for more development. This will bring environmental damage and come at the cost of human health and lives.
Health impacts, like those faced by the people that live near, and work inside, Jharia’s coal mines, result in a huge loss in human potential and create enormous costs for health care systems and the overall economy. A study by the United Nations Environment Programme suggested that around $US5 trillion is lost due to the impact of air pollution on people’s health.7 Removing this cost would be one of the greatest public health achievements in history and also, more specifically, would be a huge boon for India and its development into one of Asia’s leading nations.
Solving Asia’s black carbon problem would also bring enormous environmental benefits to the Himalayan region. It would dramatically reduce short-term warming effects, which would in turn stem glacier retreat rates – for a while.1 This would buy us precious time to deal with the longer-term threat of climate change in the Himalayas.12 If the impacts of climate change were compared to a car speeding off the edge of a cliff, black carbon’s removal would be like putting on the brakes. Not bringing us to a total halt, but slowing us down enough to work out what else we need to do to stop us from falling off the edge.
Although it is easy to get carried away with technical fixes and infrastructure programs that address black carbon emissions, there is another missing link that is crucial to resolving the issue. The single most effective way to eliminate black carbon is to lift people out of poverty. A study in 2015 estimated that 875,000 deaths were attributable to indoor air pollution from cooking stoves in India.13 The latest estimates place that number at 480,000, a drop of almost half.14 Of course, access to technology and cleaner fuels has had a part to play in this incredible decrease, but it is important to consider that the movement of people out of poverty is likely to have played the most significant role.
As people move out of poverty, their incomes increase, and as incomes increase, so too does their access to cleaner alternative fuels. But these movements take time. Fortunately, as the world grows wealthier and better educated, poverty is continuing on a downward trend.15 In the past 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost halved.16 If the world continues on this path, black carbon emissions will follow this downward spiral.
The process of lifting people out of poverty can be accelerated with the right approaches and policies directed towards the people who need help the most. A long-term vision of the widespread adoption of clean fuels is critical and removing the barriers to making cleaner fuels more accessible and affordable would be a good start. This would be a vastly different response to what history has shown us does not work: simply handing technology over and saying, “Job done”.
The initiatives that are helping to clean up cooking stoves across India, along with vast reductions in poverty, are sources of hope for the future. If black carbon emissions are to be solved, it will require a holistic approach that uses not just one technology, but a range of methods that include appropriate government policies, financial support, long-term planning, and education. My hope is that as we look to the future, we begin to consider what kind of society we want to build and what kind of planet we want to live on. This is necessary to ensure that Kumik’s story, and the stories of all those families suffering from air-pollution-related conditions, do not go unheard.
What is the way forward? Can we see a future where Asia has the luxury of relegating black carbon to a background issue like it is in richer parts of the world? This will not be an easy task, but I am hopeful that it’s a doable task within our power to achieve. Success would improve the lives of millions and increase the water security for billions of people.
Kumik – the place where beauty, friendship, and uncertainty all meet – is the place that showed me first-hand the true urgency of the black carbon problem. It is a story that is still unfolding and one that has many alternative paths ahead. The path that we choose now, as global citizens, will decide what is written in the not too distant future. Kumik’s struggle, and the struggle of many people in the region, is the result of complacency, and an attitude of “business as usual” that allows people to turn a blind eye to the plight of so many. Will these cautionary tales go unheard? Perhaps, perhaps not.
It is certain that the problem of black carbon cannot be solved by individuals alone. This issue requires a united effort on a societal scale. When I began shovelling snow off Urgain’s roof with Tanzin Rigzin, my companion on my winter journey into the Zanskar Valley, the pile was enormous and the task seemed impossible. Frustrated, I looked over at Tanzin and asked, “How are we going to get through all of this!?” Tanzin stopped, took a puff from his beedi cigarette and smiled.
“Together,” he said.
Bit by bit the snow began to disappear until it was entirely gone. What at first appeared to be an overwhelming task was solved by both of us agreeing to work together. This point rings true for the path that lies ahead with black carbon. Considering the circumstances and gravity of the problems across Asia, resolving black carbon and its issues does seem like an impossible task at first. It is a complex, multi-faceted situation that requires everyone from governments to industry and people across the world to do their part. Yet, just like the seemingly endless piles of snow that amassed on Urgain’s roof, the problem is solvable – together.
Once finished, Tanzin and I placed our shovels against the mudbrick walls of Urgain’s house and dusted the snow off ourselves. The sun’s rays were now blindingly bright as they burst through the clouds and reflected off the fresh snow that blanketed the region. We broke through the snow on the ground and headed to the warmth of the kitchen where smoke from the fire blew out the chimney and drifted off into the Himalayan air. We finally sat down, warming our hands against the fire. Urgain looked at us and laughed.
“What took you so long?”
