Global Insights: India’s Revival, Sahara Greening, and More
India’s Economic Revival
The idea that India is a poor country is a relatively recent one. Historically, South Asia was always famous as the richest region of the globe. Ever since the great Greek conqueror Alexander penetrated the Hindu Kush in 329 B.C., Europeans fantasized about the wealth of these lands where precious jewels were said to lie scattered on the ground like dust. During the 17th century, the Indian Mughal emperors were rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. For their contemporaries in distant Europe, they were potent symbols of power and wealth. By the 17th century, Lahore had grown even larger and richer than Constantinople and, with its two million inhabitants, was much bigger than either London or Paris. What changed was the advent of European colonialism. Following Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498, European colonial traders to India — first the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British— slowly destroyed the old trading network and imposed a Western imperial system of economics. It was only at the very end of the 18th century that Europe had for the first time in history a favourable balance of trade with Asia. The era of Indian economic decline had begun. By 1870, at the peak of the British dominion, India had been reduced for the first time to a Third World nation, a symbol across the globe of famine, poverty and deprivation. Then, what is happening today with the rise of India and China is not some miraculous novelty — as it is usually depicted in the Western press — so much as a return to the traditional pattern of global trade in the medieval and ancient world.
Greening the Sahara
Surprisingly, the fertile fields of cauliflower and melons growing in a vast stretch of sand near Cairo’s pyramids are all too real. Tarek el-Kowmey points proudly to the banana trees he grows on what were once Sahara sands near the Development Centre where scientists experiment with high-tech techniques to make Egypt’s desert green. “This used to be just sand,” he said. “Now we can grow anything.” With only 5% of the country habitable, almost all of Egypt’s 74 million people live along the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea. Egypt’s population is expected to double by 2050, and already crowded living conditions will likely get worse. So the government is keen to encourage people to settle in the desert by moving ahead with an expensive plan to reclaim 3.4 million acres of desert over the next 10 years. But to cultivate these areas, the government will need to irrigate the land with the scarce water resources of the Nile River because rainfall is almost non-existent. Government authorities believe that greening the Sahara might be Egypt’s best hope of bringing prosperity to its people. However, the plan has raised controversy among environmentalists. They think that authorities should focus on eco-tourism rather than agriculture, which might not be particularly profitable and could destroy fragile wildlife habitats that might otherwise be an attraction for tourists. They affirm: “We have long considered the desert the enemy we have to fight. But the desert cannot be conquered and we should live in harmony with it. Let’s enjoy the desert as it is. There’s enormous economic value in the desert without water.”
Cleopatra Was not Killed by a Snake
The Queen of the Nile ended her life in 30 BC. According to legend it was the bite of an Egyptian cobra which caused her death. After losing the Battle of Actium, her Roman lover, Mark Antony, is said to have committed suicide. Cleopatra did likewise, according to tradition, by killing herself. Her legacy survives in numerous works of art and the many dramatizations of her story in literature and other media. Cleopatra is usually portrayed as a great beauty and her successive conquests of the world’s most powerful men are taken to be proof of her aesthetic and sexual appeal. Now Christoph Schaefer, a German historian and professor at the University of Trier, has presented evidence on a television programme that drugs and not a snake were the cause of death. He said that the bite of a snake would have given her an agonizing death over several days. “Queen Cleopatra was famous for her beauty and was unlikely to have subjected herself to a long and disfiguring death,” said Schaefer, the author of a best-selling book in Germany called Cleopatra. “Cleopatra wanted to remain beautiful in her death to maintain her myth. The last female Pharaoh probably took a lethal cocktail, which, back then, was a well-known mixture that led to a painless death within just a few hours. We consulted eminent zoologists and toxicologists and they said that a snake bite would have been too uncertain and taken too long,” Professor Schaefer added.
The International Year of the Potato
The potato is currently a worldwide star. The United Nations declared 2008 as “The International Year of the Potato”, with the goal of calling global attention to the important role of this nutritious plant. Only in Antarctica is the potato neither cultivated nor consumed. The potato was domesticated by pre-Colombian farmers eight thousand years ago from species that grew in the wild near Lake Titicaca. For the residents of the Andes, the potato represents an irreplaceable product in their daily diet and, during many centuries, they selected potatoes based on their flavour and resistance against the adverse climate of the Andes. However, it’s not just that: the vegetable is a part of their culture and way of life, being integral to certain legends and traditions. The International Year of the Potato is raising awareness of the key role played by the “humble tuber” in agriculture, the economy and world food security. The potato should be a major component in strategies aimed at providing nutritious food for the poor and hungry. This “food of the future” is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labour is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world. The potato produces more nutritious food more quickly, on less land, and in harsher climates than any other major crop. Over the next two decades, the world’s population is expected to grow on average by more than 100 million people a year. Over 95 percent of that increase will occur in developing countries. The potato will surely be an important part of efforts to meet those challenges.
The Truth About Bears
The wildlife biologist, John Rogers, had spent thousands of hours studying North America’s black bears. He shot them with tranquilisers before fitting them with radio collars. He took their blood and studied their DNA. And he tracked their movements and marked them on maps. But none of that had allowed him to really know the creatures. Rogers finally decided that he couldn’t hope to know bears unless he won their trust. And so he abandoned scientific detachment and took the controversial step of forming relationships with his study animals, using food to gain acceptance among an extended bear family in Minnesota. Now, he has abandoned almost everything he knew, or thought he knew, about bears. They do not like honey. They are not even that crazy about berries or nuts, if they have a choice of larvae in a tree trunk. And they are not dangerous. “In all my 42 years of working closely with bears, I have not found a way of getting a bear to attack. The more I push, the more they try to get away. If they wave their arms aggressively, it’s just a way to keep me at a distance while they find a way to escape. It’s humans who are the more dangerous animals”, he said. “If you look at statistics, one black bear out of a million kills somebody. Among humans, it’s one person out of 18,000 who kills somebody. So you could see why I would feel a lot less comfortable in the city than in the woods next to a bear.”
What Should We Do about Climate Change?
Climate scientists are telling us that the earth is warming, we are causing it, and we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions to lessen the effects. So what should we do? Firstly, we should either use less energy, or use renewable energy sources, like solar panels. These panels are now providing energy in Europe more cheaply than nuclear generators, and without the waste products. In Australia, peak energy demand is on hot summer days, when solar energy is most abundant. So, it makes sense to use solar energy to help meet this peak demand. Most importantly, we must stop listening to disinformation. Arguments that deny the existence of climate change have been repeatedly shown to be false and misleading. Claims that climate change is a hoax, or a conspiracy, or that climate scientists have deceived the public, is an inversion of the truth. Climate change denial is false propaganda. As a matter of fact, ninety-seven percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening. The time for skepticism about climate change has passed. However, people should be encouraged to critically examine evidence and motivations. Thousands of scientists can’t have been fabricating evidence and theory for over a hundred years in a conspiracy. Perhaps there is a hidden reason. Maybe some industries could be sponsoring a disinformation campaign, because they will lose billions of dollars in profits if people use less or alternative forms of energy. Keep in mind that the cost of prevention now is less than the cost of trying to fix the damage later.