In the Morning, Bill McKibben Said I'll Become an Emergency Rescuer in 30 years. By Evening, I Became One.
The day was September 3, 2021. I had to travel to my ancestral village urgently to attend the last rituals of my uncle who had just passed away. I now live in the Madhesh plains in Nepal nearly 200 km away from the village in Mahabharat mountains. Nepal’s Madhesh lies south of the Mahabharat range of mountains adjoining the ice-capped Himalayan range.
We had barely traveled for 15 minutes when we were stuck in a traffic jam created by a landslide ahead caused by relentless rain that had poured down the previous night. As the day passed, I fretted and fidgeted as my plans to join work two days later slowly evaporated. Frustrated, I turned to my podcast app and started listening to an episode of Solvable in which Bill McKibben was interviewed.
In the show titled 'Addiction to Fossil Fuels is Solvable’, Ronald Young Jr. opens the interview with this: Bill, I'm 37, I’m unmarried and with no kids. I would love to get married and have kids within the next three years by the time I’m 40. I want you to imagine my child and tell me what the world looks like for them when they are 30. So, I’d be 70 and they’d be 30. [What will happen] if we continue on the path we are on?
McKibben: Well, we’ve got two ways. One bad way and the one somewhat better way. If we continue on the path we are on, if we choose to make a kind of slow transition to renewable energy, if we don’t have government pushing the pace, if we don’t treat it like a kind of war effort, then the temperature is going to mount very rapidly and by 2050 we’ll be really at a point where we’re dealing with just such an endless onslaught of disasters, one after another, just coming ever faster at us, that no matter what your child has put through or they are trained for, their job is going to be emergency response because that’s what human being are going to be doing.
That stung.
At that time my only son was nine months old. I too was worried about his future and had written a guilt-ridden piece in Nepali after his birth. But before listening to McKibben that day, I had never visualized his (and our) future so vividly.
Eventually the bulldozers cleared the roads and we moved ahead. After all, nature has kept creating problems and humans have been solving them.
So we thought.
By late afternoon, we were about 30 km away from our destination but were halted again by an enormous landslide. It became clear that the heavy unseasonal rain had fallen unevenly across Nepal and some parts were deluged so badly that entire hilltops had tumbled with no regard for human settlements or infrastructures.
This time, people had surrendered to nature’s ways and had started traversing a heavily disrupted 10 km stretch of the road on foot.
We abandoned our motorbike in the nearby settlement and joined the caravan. We planned to cross that 10 km stretch in two hours and spend the night in the safety of Kushma Bazar on the other side.
In two hours, though, we had hardly crossed the halfway mark, thanks to the thigh-deep mud and the numerous circumambulations that were necessary to avoid the innumerable landslides on the way. Many had abandoned their footwears to save their heads.
Realizing that the journey was going to take much longer than anticipated, people were panicking. The risk of new landslides amid the impending darkness of the evening scared even more people as the light rain had persisted through the day.
Fortunately, I’ve never been in an active war zone but that day I felt that the plight of those frightened people trying to escape nature’s wrath was comparable with that of people fleeing conflict to safety. Besides, many societies are now going through the double whammy of weather extremes and conflicts, former often feeding the latter.
The disaster had hit this relatively developed part of the country accessible with black-topped roads so abruptly that people were left carrying the sick in a stretcher on their shoulders in such a risky road.
The dusk was setting fast as we reached the last 4 km-stretch of the road . As we hurried up a steep section of the road laden with giant boulders, I noticed something strange with a small group of people walking in front of us: they were policemen carrying a dead body strapped in two bamboo poles.
In Nepal (in normal times) it is customary to offer your shoulder to the dead body on such occasions. When I blurted ‘May I…’ the man carrying the body at the head end pleaded with me to take over and transferred the bamboo poles in my shoulders.
In two more minutes, the other man too gave up, saying ‘I can no longer carry it, or else I’ll collapse’. I asked my nephew, my travel-mate, to take over. Then we started to move up a trail that was slippery and almost vertical, rediscovered hastily in the day to bypass the enormous rock that had collapsed into the road ahead.
The policemen said that all day they had been excavating the dead bodies from the ruins of a house swept away by a landslide in the neighboring village. They had missed lunch and were miserably hungry and thirsty besides being deathly exhausted by the time we met them. The area had lost electricity as well as telephone connection. So they were deeply worried about the fate of their own families.
We shared with them the little water and some biscuits that we still had as we rested in the broader part of the trail.
The emergency rescue system was clearly overwhelmed in the district. For the whole day, the entire government machinery was deployed in rescue and retrieval of dead bodies from collapsed houses, so the bulldozers were not even ordered to start clearing the roads yet. Policemen were forced to walk to faraway villages which were normally accessible by road. Ordinary people were just staying put, paralyzed and terrified by the prospect of additional damage that could be caused by more rain. Rumors about a large number of casualties swirled but there was no way to confirm.
Later on, it turned out that 11 people had lost their lives in a small area that night.
As the policemen were still too exhausted to give us relief, we kept resting and then carrying the dead body again. As I changed to the rear position, I could smell the wet soles of the deceased even though putrefaction was yet to set in. It was almost 9 pm when we reached Kushma carrying the dead body with aching shoulders and tender soles. I had walked barefoot all the way as one of the policemen carried my muddy slippers because a slipped foothold risked many lives in a crowded trail full of panicked people.
In Kushma, the otherwise vibrant district headquarter, darkness and silence ruled. I remarked to my nephew that the heavy rains, in a single night, had pushed Kushma from IT age to Stone Age.
Feeling depressed reading so far? You’ll feel differently when you finish reading this rambling piece.
Paradoxically, that 2021 trip was the one to my ancestral village I enjoyed the most, ever since migrating to the city more than a decade ago.
Previously, all of my trips back to the village were made in winter or dry season. I no longer found the childhood village of my imagination as the dusty roads and smoggy skies looked utterly dystopic. Plastic, noise, dust and smoke, everything seemed to successfully invade the countryside from the city. The cities I saw were always congested, noisy and mostly filthy, so I was less judgemental towards them. But the image of idyllic villages from childhood always grated my sensibility when revisiting the new ‘developed’ village of my adulthood.
Not this time. The rain had washed everything sqeaky clean, from the skies to the soil and stones. Everywhere I saw, there was greenery. Even some abandoned human residences were reclaimed by the bush. The crisp, cold air blew past our nostrils and ears—as it did during our childhood—as the next day grew warmer after the rain stopped completely.
All day, the taller mountains were embraced by the milky-white mist as if in a haste to make the most of an ephemeral love affair. Water sprouted from springs everywhere and flowed with the carefreeness of a child even along the trails and dust-tracks.
The sky was so sparklingly blue that, watching it, you could once again imagine being a toddler marveling if a ladder at a mountaintop would deliver you there.
On day 2, we reached the village and caught up with some rituals and went swimming in the cold water of the local stream. The torrent of milky white water massaged every part of the body to total painlessness as it fell from a height of several meters.
After all, nature can heal itself and us if given breathing space. If only we reduced the rate at which we are purloining and poisoning it.
Some friends ask me: don’t you feel despondent thinking and talking about the climate crisis all the time?
Sometimes I explain to them what this particular experience has taught me.
All of us are almost there at the cliff now but many people less fortunate than ourselves have already moved past that. We too are heading rapidly in the same direction—some of us aware of it, some not so and some others in active denial—and the momentum to keep moving is so strong it is hard to believe that it is still possible to change course and slow the downhill journey.
That never means it is impossible to change course, for the sake of our children if not for ourselves.
For me, the best part of that journey was that we could lend a helping hand to the exhausted, thirsty and hungry policemen. While the event of the landslide was beyond my control, helping them was not. Neither is telling the tale of that day and spreading awareness, the way I am doing it now.
Those policemen bitterly complained to us that the entire village showed up at the site of excavation, turning it into a spectacle, but no one came forward to help them with the tedious physical labor of transporting the mud and rocks. None offered them food, let alone accompanying them to help carry the body.
When it comes to the climate crisis, its mitigation and adaptation to it, that kind of attitude creates a HUGE problem. We often tend to wait to act until it impacts our family members directly. Until then, we want to have the cake and eat it too.
We want to ride the SUVs, wear fancy clothes, eat foods that come from animals killed in another continent and so on. Yet we want fresh water to drink and clean air to breathe. Even as we pump pesticides and other carcinogens in our body, we want to live a cancer-free life.
If we have to stick our necks out to protest against those hijacking our right to fresh water and clean air, we wish somebody else, apparently less risk-averse than ourselves, did that for us.
Even when we are genuinely worried, a mix of inertia, cynicism and a sense of helplessness in the face of the enormity of the problem keeps us frozen in place. Particularly in the under-developed world, the climate fatalism resulting from this mix has proven highly deleterious among the educated youth. Until reading Naomi Klein’s consequential 2014 book This Changes Everything during the first covid lockdown in Nepal, even I felt some paralyzing effect of that mix.
If we fail to extricate us from that paralysis, we have to wait for death and destruction around us to awaken ourselves. By then, though, it will be already too late and our own lives will be in jeopardy.
If you still find this over-all story depressing, please continue listening to the ‘somewhat better’ scenario for our children that McKibben explains in the podcast. Spoiler: he says that for our children to have any shot at an occasionally stable life, the only thing that should be burning hereafter is the sun.
Whatever you do to contribute towards that goal helps humanity. And it helps you even before that, giving you a sense of purpose, community and meaning in life. While helping the planet, that also helps you preserve your mental health and to cope with these disruptive times when everything seems to be falling apart.
If even that doesn’t lift your mood, please enjoy the resounding music of this majestic insect that now sings as beautifully as it did during our grandfather’s time but I could only capture it in my camera, for the first time in my life, during the same trip:
This is the translated and slightly edited version of a chapter from my upcoming Nepali book Nun-tel: Bigat tira pad yatra (Salt and kerosene: a trek to the past). The book is a tale of our village focusing on how it has evolved over the lifespan of the four generations in our family, from my grandparent’s journey to British Burma to my dad’s tenure as a soldier in Indian army to myself as a white collar professional, and to my son with uncertain future. The book is expected to be out in January 2023.
p.s. I visited Kushma this year on my way back from Annapurna Base Camp. The people there, including my relatives, have largely forgotten the trauma of last year’s landslides. At best it is now a nightmarish memory that they think is unlikely to recur anytime soon. I doubt anyone ever worried about linking those events to the larger pattern of weather extremes like this year’s mega-droughts in China and mega-floods in Pakistan and discussed about preparedness and potential mitigation measures for future disasters, let alone this being an electoral issue in the polls that are slated for next month. Our heads are deep in the sand indeed.
ICYMT
