Desire , the mother of all environmental problems ?

About a year back, Greenpeace was campaigning against Nestle with a short video "Have a Break " (You tube link :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BCA8dQfGi0). The campaign was to ask Nestle CEO to stop sourcing palm oil from Sina Mas in Indonesia responsible for cutting hectares of pristine rainforests and impacting the habitat of Orangutans. The video provoked my search for information on Sina Mas and impacts on rainforests , and that is when I decided to stop eating chocolates of any kind. Now I have two reasons to stay away from chocolates 1) For the palm oil and 2) For the aluminum coated plastic cover packaging which is nonrecyclable . It was an easy decision not to buy chocolates, but it was tougher to refuse these when they reach our homes as gifts ... Gifts when refused has the potential to strain relationships . Later, I started using the refusal as an opportunity to spread the word, fully aware that not even 1 out of 1000 would stop eating chocolates ! This is more difficult when compared to asking people to carry a jute bag :-) because you are directly interfering with the most difficult sense organ - the tongue ! Most often, our needs are defined by our desires - the mother of all problems ! So my journey of refusal continued with very less people understanding the impact of Sina Mas on Orangutans - afterall, who is worried about Orangutans ?!!^&

Biodiverisity, the delicate web of life that connects all the species, the symbiotic relationships that has evolved through natural history is normally ignored in our day-to-day consumerism when we deal with environmental impacts. A peep into magazines like Sanctuary Asia and other you tube links, gives me insights into a longer list of objects of my desire to be discarded from my life

1. Leather items : Though there is a claim that it is made from farmed animals just for the purpose of leather, we need to be aware that species like Sand Boa are caught and skinned for leather ; The fashionable items like winter jackets seen in large retail stores like the Wal-Marts , Macys abroad are made of skin from foxes (1 jacket = 20 foxes) ! When a predator species is killed and eliminated, the ecosystem becomes imbalanced

I stopped buying leather , and that was when the new comer in my family a co sister whom I was meeting for the first time in my life gifted me with a leather purse ... Do I refuse, and hurt her sentiments or do I accept and say thank you, never buy leather again as mark of respect to my concern for sand boas and foxes ?

2. Painting brush : I am no artist, but there were occassions in my life where I had a choice to gift a painting brush and colour box to a kid . Many of my friends who deal with destitute kids buy these to encourage and nurture the creative thinking in children. The brush is made by killing thousands of squirrels for the fur on its tail.

3. Kimberley Clark and Kleenux : This is one company that has wipped out the boreal forests in the Northern hemisphere for making tissues from virgin wood. When forests are wipped out from the face of the earth, we wipe out millions of species - known and unknown . It was not just the boreal , but the amazon too that has been wiped out for grain production, corn, biodiesel and paper . I try to take lesser and lesser prinoutouts, but I can never find myself competely devoid of using paper. Am I not contributing to species loss from the face of this earth by using paper ? I had been a spectator to this species loss working in an IT company for more than a decade ... IT firms, are not paperless offices, they are producers of waste from high quality bond paper !!!

4. Switch your lights on and you kill an animal, probably the majestic tiger : India is dependent on hydro electric power and coal for our power genration. Using this laptop by connecting to the grid, I am forced to kill a tiger's habitat... If the dam height of mullaperiyar is increased, then Periyar tiger reserve would lose some of its wildlife to water.. the impacts would be irreparable. If Sairandhri river in Silent Valley was dammed, we would have lost the lion tailed macaques endemic to the region. If gundia hydel project gets sanctioned then we would lose Gundian Indian frog which is found in a single , small area of western ghats . Why is Tata building a port in Dhamra, and why are the Olive ridleys threatened ? The port would become the easiest entry point for transporting coal from Indonesia. So can we count how many species we are already eliminating by swtiching the lights on or depending on a water source far away from us ?

5. Corn the omnipresent: I love tomato ketchup with cutlets . The ketchup and cutlet sounds vegan as long as there is no animal matter in it. Well, there is a hidden monster in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which hides behind most of the processed food. Watch Robert Lustig to know how HFCS is equivalent to alcohol - HFCS can cause liver cirrhosis and no wonder teetotallers of this age end up getting treated for liver cirrhosis (I have to known cases in my family). Where does corn come from ? During the past 40 years, close to 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest has been cut down—more than in all the previous 450 years since European colonization began. While Monsanto razes the rainforests for cultvating genetically modified corn, Minnesota based Cargill cuts Amazon for cultivating soy .. all at the cost of millions of known and unknown species... I need to now stop eating ketchup and other processed food, more for my own health than for the love for Amazon.

6. Palm Oil : Recently I watched "Greenthemovie" (http://www.greenthefilm.com/) and that was when the whole gamut of our consumerism and desires came into a full perspective. Sina Mas and palm oil are beyond Nestle and chocolates - palm oil is used in a multitude of products including cosmetics. Well, if I have to stop all of them, I would need to truly become a sadhu... I am not saying it is impossible, it is just that I need to keep a close watch on my desires and every product and material I buy !

We still have a long long way to go ... It is easy for me to avoid milk from another species, obviously for reasons that are known about adulteration in milk production , but what about the electricity we use and palm oil that we are unaware of ?

According to Garfield " Anybody can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discpline " .. Well, I am working on it - my desires :-)

Let cow be in our cities and not in our forests...

In year 2008 I got in touch with an unsual man, Vellore Srinivasan. His passions are afforestation in Vellore hills to keep Vellore cooler , giving job opportunities to people by contributing towards environment (rather than destructing nature's web) and last but never the least, proving to the world how one can make money from waste rather than spending money in displacing and dumping waste. It is my urge to understand solutions to this panacea that I worked with Srinivasan in implementing the AID (Association for India's Development, Seattle Chapter) sponsored zero waste management project in my apartment ( Tungabhadra Block, NGV, Bangalore) (In spite of the many warnings I recieved from people about his "stupid" ideas of involving cow and chicken in waste management ). To me, he made more sense than the arm chair environmental specialists who never dared to try. He is a grass root level person, who could convert anything that you trash to wealth. His main connection with nature is the holy cow - to him, cow urine and cow dung can transform any biodegredable waste into useful manure. Many times when he insisted a zero waste centre MUST have a cow, we all laughed at him. Through his practical experiments he has proved that cow produces 1/4 th of what you feed as cowdung in less than 48 hours. Then why not segregate wet waste into cattle eatable food and feed the cow to convert into dung which will eventually transform food waste ?

Cow dung as a solution to waste stink

The day I was faced with a stinking issue in my 220 apartment level community compost bed, I realised what Srinivasan was trying to make me understand. I poured few litres of cow dung slurry only to reliase how it can act like a switch subsiding the stink. Dipping food waste into cow dung slurry is an important step to accelerate the process of composting . Cow dung is nothing but a bacterial innoculant.

Later, when I had to keep fish waste in my house overnight till the next waste collection happens,I tried something more magical. By then I had learnt how to make panchagavya from Srinivasan. I poured 20 ml of panchagavya into the waste bin where the fish waste was dumped . Next day morning I opened the lid and realised there was no smell.. The bacteria in panchagavyam was doing the job for me overnight. In Srinivasan's words, these are unpaid workers converting our waste into useful resource free of cost. How to make panchagavyam (Photos)

https://picasaweb.google.com/114537715609910052557/PanchagavyaPreparationForOrganicFertilizer#


Benefits of Panchagavyam :

When I planted the idea of making panchagavyam in our land in Wynad as a substitute for ordinary fertilizer / pesticide, everyone laughed at me. Especially when I said we need 1kg ghee to be mixed with 5 kg cowdung. No one understood that it was economically and environmentally more viable to spend money on ghee rather than on chemical from monsanto. Thanks to the news about endosulphan that was flashing across kerala, the people who were managing our land had some patience to try out the Panchagavya recepie I shared. The immediate effect was on the few coffee we had on the sides. My uncle jokingly said, the coffee seeds resemble small coconuts after applying panchagavya . Later when we started making panchagavyam in my apartment Tungabhadra, NGV in Bangalore, I started experimenting on my plants. The amazing effect was on the tomato that was never planted by me. The pots were treated with panchagavyam every 15 days and it was amazing to see how the little space in my terrace was turning into a small garden . Panchagavya is known to improve the immunity level in the plants . If made using the products of the same cow , as per the prescription in ancient texts, it is also known to be a cancer drug that can be consumed by humans. Many temples in India add panchagavya into the theertha that they serve. Like cow dung, cow urine is used as a bio pesticide mixing with neem cake.

In essence Panchagavya improves immunity in plants, cures infested plants of diseases, reduces 30% water requirement in plants thus helping plants to survive in high drought conditions , improves fruition and flowering in plants.. It is the improvement of fruition that I saw in my garden in the form of tomatoes !

Why shift goshalas away from cities ? :

Like waste, cow is a misplaced resource in the forest. They destroy the grasslands by overgrazing thus impacting the foodsource for chitals and other herbivores. When the habitat for chitals are lost to grazing, then the apex predator tiger would suffer thus triggering series of man-animal conflicts closer to the fringes of the forest. The recent killing of tiger by villagers in this horrifying episode described by Prerna Bindra is a clear case of men and cattle infiltrating into tiger's territory http://indianaturally.blogspot.com/2011/12/editorial-tigerlink-nov-2011.html

The government is deciding to shift the goshalas from cities to far away areas. The IT kids who are averse to seeing the cow cross the road while travelling with their American client probably want cities devoid of cows - this is what the American way of life has taught them. While Americans dump their mixed waste into pacific ocean to create the "great pacific garbage patch " (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch) , they ensure their cities are clean by sheer 'displacement of waste' . These IT kids who contribute 50% of their salary to produce waste are alien to the whole idea of how cow's dung and urine are solutions to the eye sore they deal with in Indian cities .

Cow is a sacred animal for the Indians. I am not religious to worship the cow , neither do I eat beef ( not because of religious sentiments but to reduce the intake of food grains , energy and water towards the meat industry) . Experience has taught me the importance of cow for its dung and urine . Probably these are more valuable for us than cow's milk in future - it has the property to keep our cities devoid of diseases caused by waste dumping ! Let the cow remain in our cities and not in our forests !

Operation "Bee Sting"

Apis Melifica , is a familiar household name in my family. My father, a staunch practioner of homoeopathy used to stock this medicine in the house. I always carried this medicine whenever I go on trips into the forest . We carry this for any insect bite. The few insect bites that I have experienced left faint rashes on my skin .

The love for nature Rajesh and I carry in our heart has prompted us to own a small peice of land in Panavalli , Mananthavady along with few other cousins and uncles. We call it "Ettaekkar Ecospace" (http://www.ettaekkar.com/ )(8 Acre Eco space is the English translation) - the idea is to primarily afforest the land. The 8 acres we have is devoid of trees - thanks to the efforts of the earlier care taker prior to us owning the land . He wanted to make some quick buck and chopped off 8 truckloads of trees !!!

Operation Bee Sting
8th Jan 2011 was a special day, we were on our routine trip to "Ettaekkar Ecospace" - an attempt to show this space to my parents and brother . My brother, who is on his vacation from US, was elated to see the new planting of indigeneous trees on this land. Some space was dedicated for growing vegetables without any chemicals or pesticides. We were able to pluck "payaru " from the garden.

Around 1pm in the afternoon we started from Ettaekkar to visit a small paddy field we had bought recently . The paddy field is close to the Kabini river - the same "papanassini " that flows from the famous Thirunelli temple. We parked our car near the bridge and decided to walk on the paddy field. Since the sun was on our head, my mother decided to walk with a large umbrella. The caretaker, Rajesh and I were leading the way - I noticed a small bee on my duppatta and was about to carefully take it off without hurting ; suddenly I realised there was a swarm of bees above my head and they were all set for their sting operation on me. Before I could lift my head, I could feel the buzz inside my ear, closer to my eyes - nature gives you instincts and inner voices - all one needs to do is to listen to those instincts - there is no prior learning in such instances and every experience is fresh . My inner voice told me to protect my ears and eyes and I used my hand, my duppatta as shield. I saw Rajesh running towards a small room and we realised that running doesn't help - the bees can follow you with much more vigour. I could feel the sting on my hands, face and head. The caretaker's inner voice told him to go towards the Kabini river ; he called out "jump into the river" - we followed him . I could feel that more than the pain it was a sudden pang of hunger that overpowered me. The hunger gave me a feeling that the river was far away for me to reach - frankly the pain was nothing compared to the hunger. After some struggle that felt longer than the absolute sense of time, we managed to touch the cool waters of Kabini - aka Papanasini (meaning that which washes your sins away !). Dipping in the water I thought, may be the bees were a reason for me to wash my sins away ... In the network of Karma, who knows what is in store for my soul ! The few minutes I spent in water , was definitely one step ahead for my soul - we are insignificant in front of the bees - a well orchestrated team work of these magnificent creatures, carriers of pollen and biodiversity can wipe out people.

Importance of bees in the eco system and their collapse :
I was reminded of the Avaaz campaign that I had signed a few days back - it said bees all over the world are facing extinction due to the rapid use of highly toxic pesticides. 90% of the plants we grow are pollinated by bees. Bee populations are found to be recovering in countries where these chemicals are banned. The avaaz campaign was to push US and EU to join the ban. Scientists speculate environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition and pesticides (e.g.. neonicotinoids such as imidacloprid), cell phone radiation and genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics, for the colony collapse syndrome (CCD) or honey bee depopulation syndrome ( HBDS).

I went to check the name of the sub species that had attacked us . It was Apis Dorsata ! supposed to have the most ferocious sting on earth - Awesome to have stung by this magnificent being and to be alive to tell this story to all of you !

Bees do not attack unless you disturb them - it was a group of naughty school children who decided to play a prank...

After effects of bee sting
After we got out of the water exhausted and relieved from the attack, we assesed the damages - The care taker, Rajesh, myself, my father were badly stung. My mother and brother survived couple of stings - thanks to the umbrella that my mother carried ; my brother proved that though he lives a sedantary life in USA, he is still capable of running 1 km non-stop , in case of an emergency that has a direct impact on his life :-)

The remote of our car was malfunctional after Rajesh came out of the river. I lost my eye glasses and one slipper - the cost of my expensive glass felt neglible. We got into our car and sped towards a homoeo dispensary nearby. We took Apis Melifica 200, which is made from the sting of the bee species Apis Mellifera. Soon three of us who were badly stung (Rajesh, my father and myself) started vomitting everything that we ate immediately after the sting. My hunger that overpowered me made me to hog on to peanuts and til laddoos. We could feel the medicine had started acting on us , homoeopathic way of expelling poison is through the extremities. Vomitting was followed by diarreah . I happened to see my face on the mirror of the car - my lips had swollen.

Thanks to the efforts of the care taker and his family, he got us out of the mess we faced with the immobiliser of the car, we were on our way back home by 7:30 PM in the evening. The car refused to start in the afternoon and as a blessing in disguise, Rajesh and my father could take complete rest at Mananthavady. A badly stung Rajesh was fit and fine to drive the car.

Symptoms of Apis
My father who is an asthmatic, complained of breathlessness immediately after the sting. He looked up the symptoms of the medicine in materia medica, and saw that the sting affects mucous membrane !

I started day 2 with a swollen face , the day was spent lethargic occassionally sleeping. The pain was not extruciating, the swelling was on the finger tips and palm. Day 3 , I could feel the swelling move down to my feet and after a mid day nap, the swelling had completely disappeared. Day 4 went quite normal. Day 6 afternoon onwards, there was itching sensation on both the palms. The itching woke me up at 1:30 AM in the night . When I discussed this with Rajesh and my father in the morning , they also shared the same symptom. We changed our medicine to Ars Alb 200 , which would expel the toxins. I started doubling the quantity of water I intake to expel the toxins, I can see that the treatment is working on me.

Modern doctors, mostly in Eastern Europe and Korea, still practice bee sting therapy. A patient may be stung up to 80 times in a session. This treatment is used to treat arthritis and diabetes. I got the answer to the reason for my sudden pang of hunger - if the bee venom is a treatment for diabetes, it must have reduced the sugar levels in my body !


Human Insensitivity
Only nature can cure us of our chronic disease of ego. In front of the magnificence of mother earth, we are mere links in the web of life. We need to learn to respect her creations . Greed does not take us anywhere, nor would powerful positions. The bees are not to be blamed for this - the mistake is ours , we were insensitive to the presence of the swarm of disturbed bees. The five senses that nature has created us with , were not utilised to the fullest extend to be "aware" of the danger ahead. Everything in nature survives with this awareness . Human beings have come a long way that we mask our senses with the overuse of mobile phones and music playing through ear phones. Long way for us city dwellers to learn to live in the present and be aware of the air, water and earth we depend on ! I can claim that beyond the name Apis Mellifica, I understand the species more from this experience.

View link for pictures http://picasaweb.google.com/meera.rajesh/8thJan2011MananthavadyBeeSting#