Rhetoric & reality
14 September 2018
Between April and October 2016, I was conducting a study on Chashma Right Bank Canal that runs through Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It was during the height of the frenzied and much-hyped ‘billion-tree tsunami’ by the ruling party of the province.
In May, I witnessed men planting hundreds of conocarpus and eucalyptus trees along the canal. I also saw thousands of eucalyptus trees in the stream bed of the Gambila river somewhere in the vicinity of Lakki Marwat.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:36,
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What is the matter with us?
06 April 2018
Going by his name, Mr Advani seems not to be a Muslim.
Nor too was Ardeshir Cowasjee. But as Venu Advani is now grieving over the air we are breathing, the venerable Mr Cowasjee fretted about everything wrong that the captains of Pakistan’s destiny were committing. Despite his years of lambasting the corrupt, the venal mafia of this country could not be leashed. In the end the grand old curmudgeon of Karachi said, ‘You cannot teach shame to the shameless’.
In Mithi (Tharparkar) I met Lajpat Sharma, a Brahmin and a practicing Hindu. As an official of the Wildlife Department, this man fearlessly confronted the rich and powerful in his drive against poaching. The last three years of his service before retirement about ten years ago he was posted at Mithi. It was his single-minded stubbornness and courage that today the once dwindling population of chinkara (ravine) deer has made a great comeback.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 15:01,
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Poisoning the earth
13 February 2018
Shabbir Ahmad Rana, the Central Zone chief conservator of forests, has got his facts all wrong. This is evident from a letter of October 2017 duly signed by him and sent to the Gymkhana Golf Club management committee in response to a letter written by the committee seeking his ‘expert’ advice on their proposed elimination of eucalyptus trees blighting the green.
Paragraph 2 of the letter reads: “I would also like to clarify that large sized trees do not eat up all water given to grassy lawns but they use only that which leaches down to the deep soil. Therefore, the hoax created by vested interests mafia or those with no scientific knowledge is baseless and highly detrimental to the environment. The reason for water level going down is not the trees but it is due to the shrinkage of water catchment areas in the uphills and foothills and resultantly depth of turbines in plans (sic) has to be increased throughout the province and removal of even all the trees from the province will not subside this problem. The recommendations of the Agriculture University are not, therefore, scientifically based.”
Read more »Labels: Ecology, Governance
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:45,
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The Tree of Life
10 December 2017
I first saw the tree in May 1992 just after I had walked from Thandiani to Dagri en route to Nathiagali. Standing right by the trail, it was impossible to miss the green sign nailed to its massive trunk. ‘Monomental (sic) Tree’, it announced. Below the misspelled line were the scientific and local names Quercus semecarpifolia and Brungi. The sign also noted that the girth of the massive tree was 252 inches, or 21 feet, height 140 feet and age approximately 1,500 years.
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| The Dagri rest house looks pristine but its ceilings collapsed in the October 2005 earthquake |
Three years later, my friend Kashif Noon and I retraced my earlier path and we stood in awed reverence below the towering monument. Shortly, when Kashif was ensconced in the nearby Dagri rest house reading, I returned to the tree to fill our water bag from a spring by it.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:25,
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Why trees matter
04 September 2017
Our relationship with trees is disharmonious. We simply have no understanding of what trees do for us, for the environment and for global ecology on the whole. And then trees are divided between Hindu and Muslim trees. Either that, or some trees are paindu — uncool — and others not.
A few years ago, a bright, educated young woman in Karachi asked to be advised on which tree to plant in her family’s garden.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:52,
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Why Large Biomass and Why Indigenous?
17 May 2017
Global warming is caused mainly by gases such as carbon monoxide and dioxide in the atmosphere. This is a fact now known to everyone except only the stupidest among us. During hours of daylight, foliage captures oxides of carbon and water from the air. Chlorophyll, the substance that makes leaves green, uses sunlight to process the oxides and moisture into sugar for the tree’s food and releases the oxygen back into the air. This process is called photosynthesis.
The less carbon in the atmosphere, the cooler the earth’s temperature. That is an unalterable scientific fact. However, the process of photosynthesis slows down considerably during hours of darkness.
Read more »Labels: Climate Change, Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Invasion of the Aliens
16 May 2017
Pakistanis have the greatest knack for making the worst possible choices insofar as the natural environment is concerned. In 2016, motoring north on M-2, I was very pleased to see large scale destruction of the non-native, water-guzzling eucalyptus underway. On another trip shortly afterwards I was aghast to notice that the stumps, about a metre in height, were left standing. Today, one year on, every cut eucalyptus has transmogrified into 10 that stand about four metres tall and they are still growing. If the earlier trees were each consuming massive amounts of water per day, these new hydra growths are several times thirstier.
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| Each eucalyptus trunk left in the ground next to the M-2 is sprouting with over a dozen new trees |
The eucalyptus is not invasive and it does not cause allergic reactions among humans. However, in the early 1990s, research by Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB), Faisalabad, showed that a three-year-old eucalyptus can process upwards of 100 litres of ground water in a 24-hour cycle. In a water-scarce country such as Pakistan, threatened with a dreadful water shortage within the next half decade, eucalyptus should not be seen. Yet the provincial forest departments continue to encourage its plantation.
Read more »Labels: Climate Change, Ecology, Karachi, Lahore
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Learning From the Ignorent
15 May 2017
Forty years ago when one flew over Lahore, one saw a vast sea of green. Today one sees great dusty swathes. Two things happened in the interim. One, the agricultural land around the city has turned into housing estates. Secondly, the centuries-old native trees that adorned that land as signs of ancient wisdom have been chopped down, burned and replaced with exotic dwarf ornamental flora.
Date palm obsession in Lahore
General duty bureaucrats masquerading as horticulturists with blighted visions of water-scarce Arabian desert and California with their date palms and ornamental bushes have in the past two decades engaged in ‘beautifying’ this sorry land that same way. The result is the brown expanse one sees from the air. Sadly, this pattern has now been followed in all other cities with their ‘development’ schemes.
Read more »Labels: Climate Change, Ecology, Lahore
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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No quiet place
24 April 2017
Now, Seattle was chief of the Suquamish Red People of North America when the president of that new country offered to buy the Red Man’s land and put him on reservations. Now, also, the letter is somewhat of a controversy because there exist two versions of it — quite alike in essence, however. Some attribute the prose to a 1970s screenwriter instead of Chief Seattle (also spelled Seathl); others to an earlier writer in the 1930s.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Open Letter to Two Important Persons
20 February 2017
Syed Abu Ahmad Akif
Federal Secretary
Ministry of Climate Change
Islamabad.
6 February 2017
Subject: The Looming Water Scarcity and our Choice of Thirsty Trees
Dear Akif,
Today’s (6 Feb) Dawn carries a report of a conference on the water scarcity that is now a certainty for Pakistan. It is one thing that we are completely mindless of the millions of gallons of clean water wasted every day in official and private bathrooms with leaky WCs. I see it all the time and I can point out at least a few dozen in the building you occupy in Islamabad.
Then there are those educated ignorant who daily have their driveways and cars washed with running garden hoses. Tell them about the upcoming water scarcity and hear, ‘Water is Allah’s gift, it can never run out.’
The government has no scheme to address this wastage. I assure you; simply holding seminars is not going to save our water.
To top it all, since 1960 when Ayub ordered ‘forestation’ in Pakistan we have made only incorrect choices so far as tree species are concerned. First we had eucalyptus, 6 sub-species of it imported from Australia, planted wholesale across Pakistan. In the 1990s Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB, Faisalabad) told us that each eucalyptus was a tube well drawing upward of 100 litres in every 24-hour cycle. We had millions upon millions of tube wells sucking away our precious water.
But no one was listening. Punjab had to thrice – yes THRICE – ban eucalyptus. Even today, thirteen years after the third banning, I see nurseries across this sorry province and the rest of this sorrier country with billions of eucalyptus saplings.
But soon an idiot called Mustafa Kamal (ex mayor Karachi) saw conocarpus in Dubai and imported it wholesale to blight this entire country with this ultra-thirsty bane. Imported from Central South America and Oceania, this tree is a very, very, very thirsty species. In Makran – a water scarce part – where it grows in the tens of thousands, this accursed tree is called Mustafa Kamal! Folks plant it because ‘it grows fast’. I have never figured out why we are in such a hurry to get to a green desert hell.
Incidentally, retired foresters who were at the forefront of the eucalyptus invasion back in the 1960s also said that tree grew fast. This is patent rubbish. Our collective inferiority complex forces us to choose imported trees.
Dubai has learned its lesson: they have eradicated the curse of the conocarpus. But they learned their lesson only when its roots burrowed into and damaged water mains and sewers. We, sadly, will not learn ours even then. Couple the tree’s thirst with the very high release of allergens. If paper mulberry (imported from China circa 1960s) was not enough to put sense into our puny heads, neither will conocarpus. God willing, we shall all die of asthma!
Last year, NHA removed thousands of eucalyptus; I was very happy and hoped the empty space will be taken up by indigenous species. Perish the thought, however. Hundreds of thousands of conocarpus have taken up that space! Not only that, those who cut the eucalyptus did not know that the stumps left behind coppice wildly. Like the Hydra, each stump erupts into a dozen new trees.
Now, we have millions of more eucalyptus along M-2 that will be sucking up hundreds of times more water from our dwindling aquifer. And in between these forests of eucalyptus are rows of conocarpus. I will needlessly reiterate: both trees draw heavily from the water table. They are in a great way guilty of depleting our sub-soil water.
My question is: why are we so stupid?
Will I be asking for too much if I request you and Shahid Tarar, under whose sway the Motorways fall, to order an immediate eradication of conocarpus and eucalyptus? The space must be given over to indigenous species. That way, you will also give respite to our birdlife which, with the wholesale destruction of habitat, has been pushed into small pockets.
There are other things we need to talk about. Mainly our infatuation with palm trees and dwarf species. I can only tell you that arresting climate change will forever remain elusive: all your initiatives are self-defeating if you at the same time blight this land with alien and thirsty species. To play a positive and telling part in arresting climate change, you need trees of large bio-mass. Trees like our pipal, banyan etc.
Yours sincerely,
PS: Email address given below is defunct. Current address: odysseuslahori@gmail.com
CC:
Shahid Ashraf Tarar
Chairman National Highways Authority
Labels: Ecology, Governance
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Ignorance is Bliss
13 February 2017
My recent question why we are so stupid has gone unanswered. But all indicators point to the fact that we are. We are nothing but stupid. And we are ignorant to boot. Friends in India, having read that blog, told me that they too had for a very long time been infatuated with the water-guzzling eucalyptus. But they learned the truth and now the pestilence of this Australian tree is being removed from Indian soil.
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| Conocarpus saplings on N-5 near Thatta in August 2012 |
We too should have learned that same lesson, especially after the 1990s findings of Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB, Faisalabad). For the first time we learned how every tree was like a tube well squandering away our subsoil water. We may not have been water-scarce in 1960 when idiot politicians ordered self-serving forest department officers to turn Pakistan green.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Why are we so stupid?
09 February 2017
In a Special Report on horticulture in The News on Sunday a couple of years ago, the Head of the Botany Department of Punjab University said something very clever and apt. She said the national infatuation with imported species of flora was an indication of our deep seated inferiority complex that leads to a desire for all that is foreign.
Unsurprisingly, over the past four decades this good land has been blighted with all sorts of imported rubbish. From the eucalyptus invasion of the 1960s abetted by incompetent and corrupt officers of the forest departments to PIA cabin and flight crews who introduced araucaria in the 1980s, we have done everything wrong.
Read more »Labels: Ecology, Islamabad, Karachi
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A nation of tree haters
08 November 2016
Some years ago, having seen a lovely pipal fronting an empty plot near a friend’s home, I would carry on about the beauty of the tree. The tree stood their magnificent, gorging itself on atmospheric carbon dioxide; holding the carbon in its body to reduce global warming, it spewed out pure, unadulterated oxygen so that no life on earth may die of asphyxiation. The plot being unoccupied, the tree had been there undisturbed for decades.
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| The tree on the highroad south from Jalandhar to Ughi |
But then my friend told me the plot had been purchased by some yahoo who was going to build a home on it. I said I would bet my last rupee that the first thing that foolish buyer would do is to chop down the tree.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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We are being bitten back
07 November 2016
Many years ago Edward Tenner wrote a thought-provoking book titled Why things bite back. It was all about Nature reacting to what we know as technological advancement. That is, the unintended consequences of what we do to the planet Earth.
We of Pakistan are unfortunately blissfully and utterly ignorant of such ‘inconsequential’ matters. On page 18 of Metro, Dawn newspaper (5 Nov 2016) carries an item about a mayor from some Japanese town visiting Sialkot and planting a sapling in some school or the other.
The accompanying image shows an araucaria being planted!
I do not expect a Japanese mayor either to know about our indigenous flora or to really care about our ecology and what we plant on this blessed land to blight it ever further. Nor too do I expect any such consciousness from the cock-eyed school teachers, bureaucrats and politicians who attended the planting ceremony. Even if there was an official of the Forest Department in attendance, it would be way too much to think he would know any better than planting the araucaria.
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Amaltas at its best
02 September 2016
Related: Salman Rashid’s archetypal Amaltas
[This image by Rahat Dar of The News]
Labels: Ecology, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The shade that scorches
22 July 2016
An ignorant military dictator and his equally misguided ministers first forced the Forest Department to increase forest cover in the advent of the 1960s. Since the survival rates of local saplings were as low as 15 per cent, the eucalyptus – imported from Australia and not fed upon by any subcontinental animal – was favoured; thus starting the practice of destroying forest cover with wholesale plantations of water-guzzling eucalyptuses.
Trees being felled from Gulberg Main Boulevard to make way for the signal-free corridor project
Towns expanded, chewing up what was once forest and farmland. Large tracts of well-forested land were cleared of trees hundreds of years old, and were replaced by new roads and newly laid out parks. Hills that were once clad with pine trees, but had since been denuded due to erosion control post-Partition, were generously carpeted with eucalyptuses. When the old intercity road, once passing under tunnels of acacia, neem, pipal and shisham, was widened, the old trees were cut and replaced with eucalyptus trees. By the late 1970s, eucalyptus was seen from Sost, on the Chinese border, to Jiwani on the Balochistan seaboard, and from Nagarparkar in Sindh to the hills of Bajaur and Swat. Yet, no one connected the drying up of springs to the introduction of the ever-thirsty tree.
Read more »Labels: Birds, Ecology, Herald, Lahore
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Water Shortage
04 July 2016
Many years ago my guru Sardar Naseer Tareen of Pishin, resident of Quetta, told me an interesting story. Some relatives of his from Qila Saifullah phoned him to seek his help in getting a teenage son admitted in the mental asylum at Lahore. Without going into detail, Sardar sahib invited the family to visit him in Quetta together with the boy.
When the family arrived, the preliminary conversation with the ‘insane’ boy showed a very bright young man who was doing rather well in school. He read a great deal and was quite well informed on the world.
Sardar sahib took the parents aside to ask what really was the matter, for to him nothing seemed amiss. The boy was starkly unhinged; totally off his trolley, said the parents in unison. Sardar sahib demanded to know the ground they had for this unseemly assertion.
‘Why, the boy is always carrying on about the country running out of clean drinking water!’ said the father.
‘You fools,’ Sardar sahib exploded, ‘it’s not this young man who has lost his beans. It’s you who have no bloody sense at all. We are running out of water. And Quetta before any other city.’
Read more »Labels: Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Water in the Wilderness
14 May 2016
Written by Mehjabeen Abidi-Habib, Richard Garstang and Rina Saeed Khan – all of whom have substantial experience in working and reporting upon environmental matters – the book essentially deals with water issues. However, it is more than that. Water in the Wilderness is a tour de force across the cultures of Makran, through the western lakes of Larkana and into Cholistan. Thence it takes the reader to Deosai, Shimshal, Shandur and Chitral. At the same time, this is an excellent eco-tourist guide.
Read more »Labels: Book Review, Books, Ecology
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Flower festivals, anyone?
03 May 2016
My good friend Murtaza Solangi spent some of his long journalistic years in Washington DC. There, he says, he waited through those harsh winters for the cherry blossom to break out on the borders of the lake or pond or whatever that body of water is. He asked me if I had ever seen it, but the nearest I’ve been to DC was when I was briefly in New York three decades ago. It is in May, says Murtaza, that they have their Cherry Blossom Festival, a great binge of gaiety, song, dance, food and drink.
Murtaza says that these trees were gifted to DC by the Japanese emperor at the end of World War I. This is not the fruit-bearing species, just the flowering one and its sole purpose is to bring beauty and colour to the landscape. The Japanese have long had the original cherry blossom festival and when I checked Google, I discovered that several US and Canadian cities now follow the Washington DC model.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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And no birds sing ...
21 December 2015
Growing up in Lahore in the middle of the last century, any child would have taken the drone of grey hornbill wings overhead, the mocking laughter of the golden-backed woodpecker and the oh so beautifully honeyed flute of the golden oriole for granted. They may not have known the names of all these birds, but the songs, these and many more, were familiar. These songs were heard from the Mochi Gate garden through The Mall and Davies Road. Lawrence Garden and Governor’s House simply tossed them out like embers from a lively fire. Gulberg echoed with them and the cantonment was just one huge ecosystem alive as alive can ever be with birdsong of a hundred different notes. And Model Town was simply very much more of the same. Barely 10 kilometres from the city centre, villages like Bedian, Shadiwal or Bhekewal were primal forest.Labels: Birding, Birds, Ecology, Lahore, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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