Notes from India: “Clean Lucknow, Green Lucknow”

I’ve spent my entire life in India, but have yet to see a trashcan anywhere on the streets. I guess that’s the reason why there’s a big pile of garbage at most street corners, especially in the residential areas. In some locations, however, the government hires street sweepers to clean the streets of garbage. My family, and others in our neighborhood in Lucknow, burn any garbage left on the street so there are no smells, no germs in the air, and no filth outside the house.

The hillsides are littered with trash. Photo: The Small House Society

Since we don’t have separate dumpsters for recycling, people carrying large plastic bags on their shoulders pick empty plastic bags and bottles, glass bottles, and other items from the piles of garbage on streets. These items are sold, then recycled. Since most of the empty plastic and glass bottles are used and reused for storing spices, creams, oils, food, and other items, they typically aren’t thrown away unless they’re broken.

Food leftovers are generally given to the maid of the house, or put out for cows, birds, or dogs on the streets to eat. But the sad part about this is that some people discard food leftovers or peelings in plastic bags, and unsuspecting cows or buffaloes eat through the plastic bags to get to the food. This can lead to sickness and death for the animals.

On the brighter side, it’s very encouraging to know that hill stations like Nainital and some others don’t allow use of plastic bags to discourage people from throwing it in the lake, which is the focus of tourist attraction.

City streets are covered with litter, and paan stains mar the walls. Photo: Makur Jain

Items not thrown out on the street — such as non-composting paper, metal, and some plastic garbage — are sold to a kabari (trash/garbage collector). The kabari then sells the items to someone who can sell them further or recycle them. Some of these kabari ride three-wheel bicycles through residential neighborhoods, stopping and buying recyclable materials, such as old newspapers, metal things, glass or plastic material, old appliances, etc., from people who call out to them.

The animal dung out on the streets continues to be a nuisance to the cleanliness and hygiene of the city. There was a time when the local milkmen would have small houses and pieces of land throughout the city. They kept their cows, buffaloes, and goats there, and used the gobar (dung) as fuel. They’d collect it, dry it, and make flat discs of it to be used as fuel to cook food. It was possible for them to do this, because the dung would be on their fields or on the nearby streets, where they could collect it.

Three-wheeled cars share the streets with cows in Lucknow. Photo: Small House Society

Ever since the government moved the milkmen out of the city, the stray cows’ dung on the streets just ends up on tires and shoes, and becomes a stench. Even if these wandering urban cows belonged to someone, it would be humanly impossible for the owner to keep track of them and collect the dung of his cows from the various streets they walk on. On a more positive note, there are gobar gas plants that allow the gas from gobar to be used as fuel.

One would be surprised to see the dumping grounds here. It’s a huge piece of land where the garbage is left for years to rot! But there’s good news also. Sometimes the government or the city’s development authority, for example the Lucknow Development Authority (LDA), will press the garbage with road rollers into the ground for months, then cover it with mud or concrete. Then they sell that land as residential or commercial property - using garbage as landfill.

India has lush vegetation and abundant natural beauty. Photo: Makur Jain

Another form of garbage that can be seen all over India on walls, buses, streets, and many government offices is the remains of spit from paan (betel leaf). This tobacco spittle becomes our “social bookmarks.” It’s funny and ironic that every place or wall where it says थूकना मना है। (Do not spit), people make sure they spit on the word मना (not), so the remaining words are थूकना …है। (Do … spit).

The paan stains, as well as cigarette and bidi butts, are littered everywhere. But we’re making progress. The Supreme Court passed a law last year on October 2, prohibiting smoking in all public areas. The Delhi High Court has also banned smoking from being shown in movies.

What’s surprising is that a lot of people contribute toward a “greener India” without even knowing it. Since most cities have small markets in every neighborhood, people just have to walk a couple of blocks and can find almost everything one needs for day-to-day living, thus reducing the pollution from vehicles. Also, Delhi, Lucknow, and other cities have small three wheeler auto-rickshaws that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), which is more environmentally clean.

We are taking small steps in my country, but we are making progress. We are moving toward “Clean Lucknow, Green Lucknow” (the slogan painted on numerous railings, walls, buildings, etc.), and thus toward a greener India.

Makur Jain, Ph.D.

Contributing Writer

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

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Notes from Serbia: Ending Litter through Laws and Education

Blue Planet Green Living invites our readers around the world to send us reports about the environment in their home countries. In the first of the “Notes from ….” series, we published a post from Jagdish Poudel, an environmental science student from Nepal. Today, we are pleased to share a report from Snezana Pavlovic, a 25-year-old student of Balkan languages from Niš, Serbia. “Avoiding pollution and ecology are my passion and hobby,” Snezana writes.

Uvac River, Serbia

In her post today, Snezana introduces us to a beautiful nation that is plagued with plastic litter. She tells us how her government is taking steps to not only deal with this problem, but also to teach children how to protect the environment. We invite you to read Snezana’s post about her nation and to be challenged by the Ten Ecological Laws she presents to us from Serbia.

“We can impose punishments against those who pollute, and we can establish European ecological laws, but we won’t achieve anything if we don’t set forward the conscience of the nation about how important it is to protect our environment,” says Miladin Avramov, secretary in Serbia’s Ministry for Environment and Location planning.

Plastic bags and other litter on a Serbian highway

Protection of the environment could become an optional subject in Serbian elementary schools. An initiative to include ecology in schools was established by the Ministry of Environment, in order to develop young people’s conscience about the environment. The Serbian Ministry of Education is supporting this idea, and just started working on the concept. They are currently considering whether children will learn “protection of the environment” in low or in high grades and for how many hours during the week.

“The youngest are our main focus, because they study very fast, and they are able to transmit their knowledge to their friends and parents,” says Director of the Institute for Protection of Nature in Serbia, Lidia Amidzic, Ph.D.

“It is amazing how many kids want to know everything about plants, how they grow and how to take care of them. Also, they are very interested in animals too,” emphasizes Amidzic. “Kids have humane feelings toward nature, and that’s why they can transmit this positive habit to adults, who unfortunately, often have inappropriate and environmentally destructive habits that are very difficult to change.”

Litter mars the landscape in Veranje.

A PROBLEM WITH PLASTIC

Vranje is the first town in Serbia to forbid the use of plastic bags, and that restriction will start in 2010. This decision was made by the government of Vranje because of the very bad influence of plastic on the environment.

Six years ago, Vranje also was the first town in Serbia to set up a waste disposal site, yet they now have a problem with plastic garbage.

“When the site was developed, it was expected to last for 22 years, but because of the accumulation of plastic articles, the expiration date of the site will be shortened,” says Nela Cvetkovic from the government of Vranje.

A single grocery store in Veranje distributes 600 plastic bags a day.

The accumulation of plastic in the landfill was one of the reasons the city decided to restrict plastic bags, just as the European Union does. “We have one year to do that, and we will use that period to educate our nation about the bad influence of plastic bags, and also to warn manufacturers to focus on other products,” says Cvetkovic.

To produce 1kg of polyethylene from which plastic bags are made, 2 kg of carbon dioxide are dumped into the atmosphere. A single market in Vranje distributes 600 plastic bags every day.

To solve the problem of plastic garbage, most of the countries of the European Union introduced taxes on plastic bags that fall on sellers’ backs. In this way, Ireland’s consumption of plastic bags has been reduced by 95%. This is the goal we hope to achieve in Serbia.

TEN ECOLOGICAL LAWS

Following are 10 ecological laws that we try to respect in my country:

Vranje, Serbia

1. Don’t expect from nature more than you gave her.
2. Protect this planet, because we don’t have another, and we won’t get a new one.
3. Take care of the air before you take time to admire the sky.
4. You must know that the planet and nature will be good only if you are smart.
5. Remember that the life of a tree is assurance for the tree of life.
6. Don’t let the birds give up from their return home from the South.
7. Count the price of preserving nature in the price of every product.
8. Don’t look for a hole in the law of nature.
9. Think more about waste so we don’t end up in it!
10. When you build, don’t steal from nature – share with it.

Take care of the environment, and we will avoid the end of mankind.

Snezana Pavlovic, Student
Univerzitet u Nišu
Filozofski fakultet
Niš, Serbia

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

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My 5: Snezana Pavlovic, Niš, Serbia

Peace Corps Volunteer Teaches Green Living in Namibia

Seated across from me is a gentle, silver-haired woman. She speaks in soft tones, gesturing slightly from time to time. Her manner is warm and welcoming. You could easily call her mild-mannered. But don’t let her appearance fool you. Miriam Kashia is a force to be reckoned with when there’s a job to be done. And that’s just the spirit with which she tackled her recent Peace Corps assignment in Namibia, home to some of the world’s most impoverished people.

Peace Corps volunteer Miriam Kashia. Photo: Julia Wasson

For full disclosure, Joe and I have been friends with Miriam Kashia for a few years. We had heard something of the difficult decisions she wrestled with while weighing a two-year commitment as a Peace Corps volunteer against a full, active life in our community and a thriving psychotherapy private practice. In November of 2005, she accepted the opportunity to make a difference in the larger world and embarked on a two-year adventure that many people nearly a third her age find arduous and challenging.

Kashia returned to the United States a year ago, in January 2008. She’s had time to reflect on her experience, and to see from a distance the effects of the work she did half a world away. I interviewed her in her Iowa City home. What follows is Part 1 of a two-part interview.

BPGL: Describe your Peace Corps assignment.

KASHIA: I was assigned to Namibia, which is on the west coast of Africa just above the country of South Africa. It’s been a democratic country since 1990, when it gained its independence from South Africa following a 30-year war. As a point of interest, Namibia is the only country in the world that has environmental protection written into its constitution.

My job there was to work in a small community of about 6,000 people, counting the surrounding settlements and farms in the countryside. I was called a health worker, which could look many different ways. For me, it meant I was assigned to an organization called CAFO, the Church Alliance For Orphans, under the Namibian Council of Churches. Because Namibia has an HIV infection rate of 22 percent of the population, there are a lot of orphans and vulnerable children in the country, so that was my primary assignment. It was very challenging, as the Peace Corps almost always is.

BPGL: In what ways did your work relate to the environment?

Serious drought is exacerbating the spread of desertification. Photo: Miriam Kashia

KASHIA: As in most places, there are a lot of environmental issues. In Namibia, the issues mostly tend to have to do with water. I lived on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in the south of Namibia. They used to have wildlife roaming free there — giraffes, elephants, and lions, etc. They’re long gone, partly because they were hunted, and partly because it’s too dry for them there now. The country’s becoming increasingly drier, and there’s a lot of drought.

The water tables are falling, so even though the water in Namibia is probably just about the best in Africa — it was safe to drink in almost the whole country — it’s becoming more scarce. So, drought is an increasing environmental problem.

Something that contributes to the drought is a process called desertification, which is an expanding problem in Namibia. Desertification is caused sometimes by natural causes, such as less rainfall, and by global warming. It’s being exacerbated by the practice of African people cooking over open fires and cutting all the brush and trees in order to have fuel. Not only does this create a big problem with (mostly) women having to go further and further out into the veldt (savanna or desert) in order to find something to burn for cooking, but it depletes what few plants there are, and it increases the desertification problem. That results in less and less water. It’s a problem that is increasing exponentially as we speak.

BPGL: What other environmental problems did you see?

Litter is a serious environmental problem in Namibia. Photo: Miriam Kashia

KASHIA: Litter is a terrible problem in Namibia, as I believe it is in most African countries.There’s just not much consciousness about that. It’s a visual problem, but it’s also a health problem. Everything gets dumped anywhere. Especially around the towns, there are just thousands and thousands of wrappers, packaging, broken glass, and plastic bags. If a goat eats a plastic bag, it will probably die, because the bag plugs up its digestive system. Since a lot of people’s livelihood depends on raising goats, that’s an economic problem as well. Litter looks dirty and is dirty, so that’s a health problem, which also affects tourism.

BPGL: Do the Namibians not care how it looks? Are they not aware of it?

KASHIA: My own understanding is that the development in African countries, and probably elsewhere in the world, happened very rapidly. They went from no packaging to all this modern packaging in a generation or two. They don’t have the resources for adequate garbage pickup or adequate garbage cans. Nor do they have the mentality that you don’t throw things on the ground. So, one of the projects that I undertook there was a litter cleanup project. But, in truth, it was like removing water from the ocean with a thimble, to try to and make a dent in that.

BPGL: Did you change any minds about litter?

KASHIA: Yes, I did.

The CLEAN Club picked up litter in their community. Photo: Miriam Kashia

And that brings me to another topic, a secondary project, which is optional for Peace Corps volunteers. We’re invited, if we see a need, and it corresponds with something within us — an interest or a passion — to create a project of our own. So I started a club for learners, which is what students are called in Namibia, an environmental club. We called it the CLEAN Club, which is an acronym for Club for Learners on the Environment, AIDS, and Nature. Every fourth week, we focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and education. And the rest of the time, we did environmental projects and environmental education.

BPGL: How many students participated?

KASHIA: It was made up of between 25 and 35 high school kids. They joined because they wanted to be in it, and they attended very regularly, which is pretty much a huge success story. I had very little in the way of support for running this club, because I was doing it on my own. So, I had to be there every week, and I had to do all the preparation. I didn’t have access to email.

There were no environmental resources to speak of in the schools or the library, so I sort of had to work from what I knew in my head. But I think the kids learned quite a bit about environmental issues, such as population, water use, and alternative energy. I also called in local people, such as a science teacher, who talked about the water table and desertification. And I invited a businessman who had a private business setting up windmills and solar energy on some of the larger farms. They came in and talked to the kids.

BPGL: What was the response of the students?

KASHIA: I tried to make it fun, and they were very interested. They’d never been exposed to this information. Keep in mind, Namibia is a country twice the size of California, with a population smaller than Iowa. Population as a problem doesn’t resonate with them. So when I talked about the world being overpopulated and that being a problem — one of the core problems behind environmental degradation — that was news to them.

BPGL: What activities did the CLEAN Club do?

The NaDEET environmental camp. Photo: Miriam Kashia

KASHIA: I took them on two environmental trips, which were funded entirely by my friends and family here in the U.S. That was quite wonderful for the kids. It’s very expensive to travel, and I had to hire a bus to do it. We went to NaDEET, which stands for the Namib Desert Environmental Education Trust. It was started by an American woman about seven or eight years ago for the sole purpose of educating young people in Namibia about the environment and environmental concerns.

NaDEET is an amazing camp. It’s entirely off the grid. The kids learned about preserving water and did all the cooking with solar ovens and stoves. They had a lot of creative projects and interesting forays into the desert, including a night scorpion hunt! The kids loved it and learned a great deal. I also loved it and learned a lot. I wish we had camps like that for kids here. The whole thing was run on a sustainability model, with a focus on learning about Nature so we can protect it.

The other trip I took the kids on was to the Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia. It’s the second-largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon. We arranged to stay at a fancy tourist lodge there, which graciously and generously housed and fed 23 kids, myself, and one other adult. They loaned us their tourist guide to take us around. He taught the kids about the canyon, about the environment, and about plants and animals in the vicinity, which was just great. Most of the learners in the CLEAN Club had never been more than a few kilometers away from our small community of Karasburg. So, these trips were an enormous experience for them.

The learners baked bread in solar ovens at NaDEET. Photo: Miriam Kashia

The CLEAN club also did some litter cleanup projects in our community, which I mentioned, so I know their consciousness got raised. And I know they started talking to other people about it. It was gratifying.

BPGL: What role, if any, does the Peace Corps take in protecting the environment of Namibia?

KASHIA: Most of the Peace Corps volunteers in my group of 60 were teachers. they had the option of including environmental and AIDS awareness in their curriculum. The group after mine, who came a year later, in 2006, were all given solar stoves by the Peace Corps to take to their sites all over the country. These were to be used personally, as well as to demonstrate and teach people how to use them. So that’s a very positive effort which can help reduce desertification. They bought the stoves from a company in Namibia that makes them and gave them to the Peace Corps volunteers.

We made a solar oven at NaDEET, when we did small-group projects. We divided into small groups to do projects. We used cardboard boxes, newspaper, a piece of glass, tape, and black paint. We put the boxes one inside the other, with newspaper in between for insulation. We painted it black, then got a piece of glass, like window glass, to put on for a lid. Put some meat and rice in it, put it in the sun for a couple of hours, and you have dinner!

Women carry firewood for cooking over long distances. Photo: Miriam Kashia

The problem with getting people to change their technology in terms of fuel and cooking resources is that it tastes different. They’re used to cooking in one of the classic African, three-legged pots over an open fire. Food tastes different when you cook it in a solar oven. People have to get used to the idea that then they don’t have to spend two or three hours every day going far afield and cutting brush to burn. Maybe when they have a chance to observe it over a period of time, they will get the message.

Part 1: Peace Corps Volunteer Teaches Green Living in Namibia (Top of Page)

Part 2: Seeking Sustainability in a Harsh and Beautiful Land

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

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My 5: Miriam Kashia, Peace Corps Volunteer

Children Raising Children: Documenting Africa’s AIDS Crisis