Thoughts in the hour of darkness

Iattempted to file this column piously early so that, if the passion arose, the computers this column is likely to pass through at this newspaper’s office could be switched off in time for Earth Hour on Saturday evening. Not that I take part in Earth Hour — but there was a time when I did — and I remember the feeling. Running through the house like Wee Willie Winkie, turning out every light in our home, and alarmingly, on occasion, in other people’s homes. But that was when the Earth Hour was still a new idea. Much has changed since those days.

In less than a decade, the Earth Hour has scaled up rather impressively from its singlelocation beginning as a World Wildlife Fund event in Sydney in 2007. Everyone seems to be keen on the event now. We even got a message from the BSES, the distributor of electricity in Delhi, saying: “Join the global Earth Hour movement. Switch off lights and non-essential electrical appliances on Saturday, March 28 from 8.30 PM-9.30 PM.”

In the early days, to the irritation of tourists, the UN headquarters in New York City, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Houses of Parliament in London put out the lights between 8.30 and 9.30 pm, local time. I am not sure if that happens still. The organisers expected 7,000 cities in 172 countries to switch off this year, producing a wave of darkness marching across the globe.

Earth Hour has been a stupendous public relations success, getting people to feel good about token participation in the green movement, and subliminally driving home important messages about conserving energy, containing pollution and the general need for humanity to reduce its footprint on the world. One only wishes that the lessons learned were applied in everyday life.

Because symbolism makes sense only when it is backed by rational steps to help achieve what you seem committed to. In India, where 400 million people live without electricity, turning out the lights for one hour every year by privileged, urban Indians may be a great measure, but it does not help. In our country, saving the environment requires us to not just value electricity and switch it off, to light up the lives of those untouched by electricity.

Because the alternatives to electricity are traditional fuels like cowdung cakes and firewood, which kill lakhs every year through their poisonous fumes. Just the use of these fuels in chulhas for cooking kills about 4,00,000 every year. Women and children are the worst affected.

Besides, they say burning biomass as cooking fuel accounts for three times the black carbon air pollution as all other air pollutants together. And we must not underestimate the polluting ability of either our traffic or our industries. Fuel adulteration makes these fumes much more poisonous than in other countries. In general, thanks to air pollution, Indians have 30 per cent lower lung function than Europeans.

If we want to be environment friendly, we need to focus on cleaner fuels. And fossil fuels are not the only option. We depend on thermal and hydel power, but in a sunny country like ours we seem to have largely ignored renewable sources like solar power. Even biomass fuels like dung can be used to produce biogas, a cleaner and more efficient fuel than dung cakes. We need to customise our concerns to fit our problems.

But copying is so much simpler. Why else would we be overrun by architects eager to popularise glass and concrete monstrosities? Lifted straight off the streets of Chicago and Rotterdam, which are unpleasantly cold, these are designed to conserve heat, while South Asian architecture must dissipate it. Today, our urban skylines are littered with buildings which are made habitable by non-stop air conditioning. Though architects like Laurie Baker have worked towards an Indian idiom, their work has been celebrated as boutique, quite ignoring the fact that it addresses a universal need for energy-efficient buildings in an energy-deficit nation.

One would have expected the quality of air we breathe to be a political issue featuring in election manifestos, but we are happy to leave the thorny issue to courts. Just like we have shrugged off the matter of poisons in our food due to pesticides and hormones. Now, deeming strategies like traffic management and enforcement of parking rules to be superficial, the Delhi HC has pulled up the Delhi Pollution Control Committee and demanded a comprehensive action plan by April 15.

The fundamental reality that a green plan for Delhi — and other Indian cities — must acknowledge is that, apart from the obvious success of the metro rail system, public transport remains depen- dent on fossil fuels. Converting buses from diesel to natural gas was a step in the right direction but cities in other countries took the next step long ago, converting to trolley buses that run on electricity, combining the environmental cleanness of the tramcar with the flexibility of the bus. Amazingly, in India we are busy getting rid of clean traffic options — like Bengal’s determination to exterminate trams and cycle-rickshaws.

So whether or not we power down our computer and turn off the lights during Earth Hour, if we are concerned about the Earth, we need to address our own problems of brutalising the environment. Switching off lights and having a pretty candlelight dinner (wax candles pollute robustly) may be celebratory, but it primarily celebrates the selfindulgence of the privileged urban Indian in this hour of darkness.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com