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Blame it on Climate Change
The crippling Chennai floods in December 2015 were blamed on climate change. it was, instead, the fault of short-sighted engineering interventions and land-use change, specifically the conversion of fragile wetlands into real estate, that had caused the floods.
Four years later, Chennai once again made headlines. This time, it had “run out of water.” Once again, international media looked for climate angles to frame this crisis.
While climate change is sure to play an increasingly significant role in worsening the problem in coming years, it has little to do with the city’s current predicament. Chennai’s vulnerability to both floods and droughts is historical folly rooted in destructive land-use changes and its drive to pave over its wetlands in the name of growth. Between 1980 and 2010, the built area of the city increased from 47 to 402 square kilometers, while wetlands decreased from 186 to 71 square kilometers.
In successive waves of urbanization and industrialization, wetlands, grazing commons, and even waterways were repurposed as residential layouts, industrial estates, and urban infrastructure.
Before the British East India Company set foot on this part of the coast, the region was a vast patchwork of agrarian settlements bound on the east by a long stretch of sandy beaches. The monotony of the beaches was broken by mangrove-studded estuaries formed by seasonal streams and rivers that drained these lands. The flat terrain was not amenable to retaining water except in the sprawling Pallikaranai marshlands in what is now the southern part of the city, and the much larger tidal wetlands of the Ennore-Pulicat region to the north. To make water stay and enable agriculture, medieval engineers carved out gravity fed irrigation tanks called eri, and drinking water bodies called ooranis and kulams. Settlements were built upgradient of the eris and agriculture and grazing grounds were located downgradient. Eris not only had their own catchments, they also received water through specially designed inlet canals from upstream tanks. They then discharged their surplus through canals that filled other eris downstream as they cascaded down to the rivers and the sea.
The urbanization that began with the arrival of the British in 1639 valued buildable land that could serve the purposes of colonial extraction and urban expansion over everything else. Water, the one element for which earlier agrarian cultures transformed the landscape, began to be viewed as a nuisance and a health hazard inside the city. This was used as a justification to pave them over and develop them as real estate. What the British colonial government began, the state-level administration in independent India continued with added vigor. The result is an urban sprawl that converts natural events like heavy rainfall and seasonal droughts into national disasters. This will only get worse with climate change. But what ails the city, and indeed the planet, is not merely excess carbon in the air, but what has been done to the land, particularly the commons, and the people dependent on it, in the name of development.
The Battle for the Poromboke
Poromboke is a Tamil revenue category of medieval agrarian origin that denotes lands set aside as commons for the shared use by communities. These lands posed a curious challenge to Britain’s obsession with turning land into property and roping them into the colonial project of yielding value to the economy back home. Poromboke commons were governed by two rules: they could not be purchased or sold as they were communally held, and they could not be built upon. These lands were untaxed and yielded no revenue to the crown.
From a capitalist perspective obsessed with private property and the act of building, digging and paving, the poromboke commons were worthless. It is no coincidence, then, that the entry of the British into Tamil Nadu signaled the erosion of the meaning of the word poromboke. In contemporary colloquial Tamil, the word has degraded in meaning to a pejorative, used to refer to worthless people or wastelands. The term wastelands, used in the Bloomberg article to describe the bustard’s habitat and the pastoralist’s grazing grounds, was and continues to be used as a weapon to devalorize the commons and dispossess its human and non-human users. The making of the city of Chennai, and its continued growth, is an ongoing history of such enclosures and erasures.
Chennai Floods and Poromboke Extracted from Peril of Climate Activism: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/410014/the-perils-of-climate-activism/
Kanmai before and after solar, 2009 to 2020. The garland-like dark line is the bund of the kanmai. It retains the monsoon water which backs up and spreads out over the lands now covered with solar panels. Source: Google Earth.
Wasted Sunshine
In the semi-arid karisal (black clay) lands of Kamuthi in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, Adani Green Energy operates a 648-megawatt solar photovoltaic project. Ironically, Adani’s sister company in Australia is pushing to operate the world’s largest coal mine in the face of stiff opposition from environmental NGOs and local aboriginal people. In Kamuthi, Adani’s project with 2.5 million solar modules is spread over around 3,000 acres—the size of 1,500 soccer fields.
Ramanathapuram is famed for its centuries-old kanmais (irrigation tanks) that trap water and extend the farming period in this dry, but fertile land. The meikal poromboke (grazing commons), tank beds, and even private farm lands support a thriving livestock economy, specializing in hardy native sheep and goat breeds. According to Seeman Thangaraj, a breeder of native bulls and goats from the nearby city of Madurai, “Farmers allow, even pay for, goats to graze on private lands because they fertilize the fields with their droppings. The fallow lands and the kanmai edges have enough fodder.”
Kanmai before and after solar, 2009 to 2020. Source: Google Earth.
The photovoltaic power station encloses three kanmais and deprives locals of more than 3,000 acres of grazing land. The solar panels are arrayed covering the entire catchment of the kanmais. Global green energy cheerleaders claim that solar power stations like the one in Kamuthi are generators of clean, sustainable energy. But this claim assumes that the land is dead. It hides the energy cycles that are disrupted when 2.5 million panels intercept the sun’s rays, preventing them from striking the ground. Solar energy harvested by vegetation satisfies the fuel, fodder, and livelihood needs of local communities and other life-forms. Managed well, these services can continue indefinitely to support the modest lifestyles of local communities. In contrast, Adani’s project—owned by one of the wealthiest billionaires in India—has a lifespan of about twenty-five years. It hurts local communities, robs non-human life of their refugia, and enriches a prosperous corporation. - Extracted from Nityanand Jayaraman The Perils of Climate Activism https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/410014/the-perils-of-climate-activism/
The Perils of Climate Activism https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/410014/the-perils-of-climate-activism/ Nityanand Jayaraman
Viewing the global ecological crisis solely through a climate lens is fraught with false solutions and spurious dilemmas such as this. This is not surprising. Climate discourse is embedded within a status quo-ist framework, and comes with an unhealthy preoccupation with excess CO₂ in the atmosphere to the exclusion of all other drivers of ecological collapse. With eyes turned skywards, it is easy to lose sight of the multiple causes of our planetary disease which are all rooted in land, and what transpires on it in the name of development.
Even environmentally, climate action is unlikely to succeed as long as it is wedded to growth. And growth cannot be tackled without addressing social injustice. Green growth and Green New Deals are premised on a notion that technological change will enable sustained economic expansion by decoupling GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions.
Articles/Cases refered to: Giant Bird With Bad Eyesight Poses Dilemma for India’s Green Goals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-14/endangered-bird-stands-in-the-way-of-india-s-emissions-goals By Rajesh Kumar Singh Wind and solar projects present threat to endangered bustards
The companies say the Court Order asking for transmission lines in a large swathe of the region to go underground could cost an estimated $4 billion in extra expenses, and jeopardize nearly 20 gigawatts of awarded solar and wind projects.
This article reminds: The bustard won’t go alone...Indian grasslands are a commons that support not just wildlife but also a thriving population of pastoralists and farmers.
The case of Big Solar Projects & its impact: http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/1107-the-karisal-and-solar-project-extract-from-perils-of-climate-activism
Chennair Floods and Water issues http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/1108-chennai-floods-and-poromboke
Capitalism Is Not Green, Nor Will It Ever Be … https://mltoday.com/capitalism-is-not-green-nor-will-it-ever-be/
Yes, “Socialism or Extinction” Is Exactly the Choice We Face https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/extinction-rebellion-socialism-capitalism
Culture of Resistance: The Failure of Individualism https://dgrnewsservice.org/resistance-culture/movement-building/culture-of-resistance-the-failure-of-individualism/
The Deep Green Resistance Book Strategy to Save the Planet https://deepgreenresistance.net/en/resistance/the-problem/the-problem/
Chico Mendes - Peaceful, Green Warrior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE-s2z44O_U
Rethinking Cities
Webinar series :Citizen Urban Initiative, to think through the country’s response to the complex urban challenge:
Reassessing India’s Urban Challenge; Rethinking Indian Cities; Reformulating Response in the context of National Development Challenges.
Opinion: The AI we should fear is already here https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/21/ai-we-should-fear-is-already-here/
AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. We should indeed be afraid — not of what AI might become, but of what it is now.
Will AI be allowed to work increasingly to displace and monitor humans, or steered toward complementing and augmenting human capabilities, creating new opportunities for workers?
These choices need oversight from society and government to prevent misuses of the technology and to regulate its effects on the economy and democracy. (We need to) ..recognize the tangible costs that AI is imposing right now — and stop worrying about evil super-intelligence.
Tom Abeles <
There are a number of conflicting issues buried here. The main issue has to do with the question of why humans need jobs or why these jobs are even needed in a tech driven society. The two top issues are the need for the "job" for a sense of self worth and the need to have a sufficient income. The article mentions that the job "problem" existed when "off shoring" or swapping work overseas for jobs at home Humans displacing humans that is congruent with the issue of AI displacing humans. The issue at hand is the real question of why jobs are needed which becomes amplified by inserting AI. The problem is societal and seen also when the idea of a UBI or universal basic income becomes a real possibility globally as part of the needed shift. It's not the AI.
Sajai Bose: 25 July.. i personally would not be happy to get UBI instead of earning my living (which is no doubt, a pain). so, although i would have very much preferred “...to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner...” i also know that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" in capitalism. so i'd rather keep my job, and
if they want to take that away, im not going to like it.