Change In Plans

Greetings and Merry Christmas from Cape Town.  Despite a fair amount of economic gloom this December, this post is about a series of hugely encouraging signs that we have seen in our travels over the last several months.  

India (the person) gave me a copy of Tom Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded” for Christmas. His basic thesis is that we are in a global crisis of environmental change, crowding, and increased consumption. We all (led by the U.S.) need to develop new, lower impact, ways of doing pretty much everything.

Reading the book got me thinking about phenomena that we have observed in our travels that could lead you to believe that Friedman’s “Code Green” revolution is already under way.  These phenomena are all sort of related, so it is difficult to put a good structure around them.  So, in no particular order here are some encouraging signs:

Proliferation of connectivity - cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet are changing the developing world. The old streets of Fes and Marrakesh are medieval, but the rooftops are swarmed with satellite receivers.  We have had cell coverage almost everywhere we have traveled, and we have seen handsets being used in the most remote places, and by people who are very low on any socioeconomic scale (eg, the Chinese Net fishermen in Kerala, India).  In South Africa and India, cell phones are used widely for commerce, for entertainment, as well as talking.  We have also had wi-fi almost everywhere, and have seen public internet access (eg, cafes) everywhere else.  I think this connectivity is inherently good: more informed choices, less scope for fundamentalism, closer societal bonds, more fun.

Alternative energy - India does not have much petroleum, natural gas, coal, or firewood, but it has plenty of cow manure.  We saw simple biogas converters everywhere: mix water and manure in an airtight box, let it sit in the sun, and pipe out the gas for cooking.  We saw windmills all over India and Spain.  We saw solar water heaters on every house on the Turkish coast.  These are all pretty small scale (except the windmills), but they seem to work well and are cheap.  Because air quality is so terrible in India, use of LNG/CNG buses and motor rickshaws has been mandated (and enforced) in many cities.  I don’t know what the economics look like, but they are probably not terrible, and have made a big difference.  The experimentation is probably most important.

Mobility of labor - sitting in Abu Dhabi airport in the middle of the night, watching the great Gulf States job swap, was amazing.  Thousands of South Asians flying to jobs, however humble, that are better than anything they could find at home.  Migration of people across borders creates challenges (my guess is that South Africa’s real population is ~20% illegal immigrants) as well as opportunities.  But remittances greatly support the weakest economies (Nepal, Zimbabwe and Malawi, undeveloped India), and middle classes get formed.  Moving around also expands horizons and aspirations.

English-speaking (and reading/writing) kids - even in places with cripplingly low adult literacy (Morocco, Nepal, parts of India), we saw endless streams of uniformed schoolkids.  Everywhere, the vast majority of kids over the age of ten spoke to us in English.  Every kid that Zola has interviewed could read and write, and had grand aspirations for his/her own life.  Parents we met made their kids’ education a huge family priority (eg, the dirt-poor Moroccan family on the edge of the Sahara, sending their 8-year-old son to boarding school 10 hours away).  

Local and global optimism - every country we have been to, including our own, has a lot of problems.  Outside of the most-developed countries (U.S., Canada, Japan, Spain), what we heard from the vast majority of people we spoke to was great optimism about the future.  India, Ireland, and Turkey, in particular, seemed to be bursting with self confidence and impatient enthusiasm.  The individual behaviors that we observed seemed to support these optimistic words: investing in new equipment, planting new crops, educating girl children, starting new businesses, protecting the environment.  All autumn we would get a daily dose of despair from the New York Times on-line, and then see exactly the opposite in the streets of Delhi, and Istanbul, and Pokhara, and Cape Town.

It is Christmas morning.  My sister and her family arrived yesterday (hooray!).  Stockings and presents are opened, and everyone is anxious to get to the beach.  Merry Christmas.