Love making linked to global warming?
So what’s new this week? The media houses have been slow in the past few weeks and this is of course linked to the summer holidays but it has not stopped the unnatural phenomenon of global warming effects. It seems almost fashionable to link anything to global warming.
An extract from ‘The Volokh Conspiracy’ blog says, “Have you ever noticed how Global Warming Theory is like some kind of unified field theory of the universe or string theory or something, because to the believers NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, it’s proof of and predicted by Global Warming. If its colder, its predicted by global warming, if its dryer its predicted by global warming, if its wetter its predicted by global warming, more hurricanes yep global warming, no hurricanes the next year yep global warming, Mars heats up yep SUV's on earth driven by big oil execs global warming, end of the ice age yep predicted by global warming theory, increases in teen pregnancy yep global warming making for more love making to avoid thoughts of the heat.”
Live green, die green.
Dozens of recommendations have been made on how to live green. If you are one of those that have become very conscious of the impact you have on nature and have resolved to ‘live green’, then what better way to end your life than to die green? Hindus are being urged to adopt ‘green’ cremation. Enock Chinyenze, Regional Coordinator for Africa – TVE
Environment news in Africa
Associated Press (also in NY Times, Forbes magazine and FoxNews). 1 September, 2007. Climate change could worsen Africa's struggle to feed itself, but simple steps — a cistern to catch rainwater, a solar panel, or hardier seeds for crops — could help the continent's subsistence farms, specialists and activists said Friday. Oslo, Norway.
About 250 researchers, donors, and officials met in Oslo this week for the Second Green Africa Revolution Conference, which follows up a 2004 challenge from former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to revolutionize African farming. Africa imports about 25 percent of its food, and one in three of its residents suffer chronic hunger, according to a report at the conference. That will worsen if climate changes cause rains to dry up in some areas and flood others.
David Stainforth, climate expert at Britain's Exeter University, said change is coming. Although most scientists are hesitant to make detailed regional predictions, he said, "We are certainly looking at a very dramatic situation." "Accounting for climate change could make the difference between the long-term success or the long-term failure of a project like the Green Africa Revolution," he said.
An April report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a network of 2,000 scientists, said that by 2020 an additional 75 million to 250 million people could suffer water shortages due to climate change. Kanayo Nwanze, vice president of the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development, said most African governments are aware of the threat, but are often already overrun by other problems, such as epidemics of HIV/AIDS and other diseases.
"It is not that they ignore climate change, they just don't have the capacity," he said. Nwanze said such steps as rice crops genetically engineered to ripen faster, would help conserve water for other crops. Howard Shapiro, director of plant science and external research for Mars Inc., said farmers could be provided with seeds that are hardier and more resistant to drought.
In many areas, 60 percent of the rainfall runs off before African farmers can use it so "a simple cistern (to collect rainwater) could provide potable water," he said. "Even the smallest amount of irrigation at the right time can save a crop." John Boehmer, of Kyoto Energy Ltd., said African women do 60-70 percent of the farming, and then also haul water along with wood or other fuel to provide heat.
His company is developing a program in which Western industry could finance simple technology — solar panels or solar water heaters — for African families, paid for by offsetting the company's own carbon emission quotas. "This is not aid, this is business," he said. Boehmer said some families' costs would immediately be cut in half, and time would be freed up to farm instead of gather fuel.
AFP. 31 August, 2007. Desertification is creeping up on world agriculture. UN agency
GENEVA (AFP) — Extreme weather patterns are threatening a number of regions around the world with desertification and a steep drop off in food resources, a senior World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) official said Friday. Speaking ahead of a UN conference on desertification that opens next week in Madrid, the head of the WMO's Agricultural Meteorology Division, M. Mannava Sivakumar, warned that the resulting shrinkage in arable land could have severe consequences on food resources.
"There has been an increasing trend in extreme events observed during the last 50 years, particularly heavy precipitation events, hot days, hot nights and heat waves," Sivakumar said. "The combination of these events can lead to land degradation and subsequently desertification," he said, pointing to a fall of between 40 and 60 percent in corn production in Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Lesotho.
"Only about 11 percent of the global land surface can be considered as prime land, which must feed a world population of 6.3 billion today and the 8.2 billion expected in the year 2020," he added.
Reuters. 30 August, 2007. How to clean up the slums -- cook on garbage. Barry Moody. Nairobi.
Entering Nairobi's fetid slums the senses are first assaulted by a gagging stench and the sight of garbage everywhere, some even hanging from trees or smoldering in acrid fires. The city government does not recognize the "informal settlements" where more than 60 percent of the population live, so no services are provided and no garbage collected. The result is frighteningly unsanitary conditions.
Rubbish, "flying toilets" -- excrement in plastic bags -- and even aborted fetuses pile up in dumps along the muddy tracks or find their way into the rivers, where children play along the banks. Garbage pollutes the air and seeps into ground water, or is picked over by pigs and other farm animals, its toxins entering the food chain and causing intestinal diseases. Now a "community cooker" project in Africa's biggest slum, Kibera, offers a way not only of getting rid of garbage, but of creating work for unemployed youths, and providing hot water and cooking facilities.
The people developing the project, a Nairobi architectural practice, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and a Kenyan non-governmental organization, hope it can be a prototype for cookers all over Africa.The cooker, dreamed up by Kenyan architect Jim Archer, has taken eight years to develop and is still overcoming design problems. "My thinking was how do we get rid of the rubbish and ... how can we induce people to pick it up. Then I thought, well if we can convert it to heat on which people can cook..."
Industrial incinerators from Europe would cost $50 million. "This was way out of the realms of reality ... and it wouldn't give anything back," Archer said. He set out to design and find financing for a simple, labor intensive device with a minimum of moving parts that would be easy to repair and require no imported technology. Archer consulted engineering companies in Britain. "They just couldn't understand simplicity. They could computer control it. They could mechanically handle the rubbish. But we want this to be labor intensive because there are so many people with no jobs."
Firebox Francis
Then Archer found brass foundry worker Francis Gwehonah, nicknamed "Firebox" because of his remarkable self-taught skill at furnace building. "It is a talent in me. I haven't gone through any kind of training," says Gwehonah. First attempts to burn the rubbish produced choking smoke and soot that brought complaints from Kibera residents that the cooker caused more pollution than it eliminated. By trial and error Gwehonah found that if he superheated a steel plate in the cooker he could ignite discarded sump oil, another pollutant.
By vaporizing droplets of water to split off the oxygen and mixing it with the burning oil, he has pushed up the temperature to more than 600 degrees centigrade and is working to get it even higher to destroy all the toxins in the smoke. The scheme, run by a community group in Kibera's Laini Saba area, where 50,000 people live, has more benefits than burning garbage. Local youth workers who go door to door collecting rubbish -- for which they are paid a small fee by slum dwellers -- can exchange it for cooking time or hot washing water.
John Githinji, from the 40-strong youth group that collects the rubbish, stoked the furnace with sweat pouring from his face. "People throw rubbish on the ground and it causes sickness," he grunted through the smoke. Water will also be boiled for drinking and eventually the cooker will be used for baking bread and cakes to sell. "The trash has started to help us a bit after the cooker came. There are less diseases like diarrhea and the environment has improved. ... I think burning the rubbish will bring good health to this community," said Patricia Ndunge as she fried onions on the cooker.
About 60 percent of the slum rubbish can be burned if the temperature is high enough. Much of the rest can be sold to recycling companies. The project, funded by Archer and his business partner, UNEP and a local paints company, has cost around $150,000 to develop, but once the prototype is perfected, future cookers should cost less than $10,000. Kenya's big supermarket chain Nakumatt has pledged to fund at least 20 more slum cookers and Archer believes they can eventually be adapted to distil dirty water, fire pottery kilns and operate scrap metal foundries.
"Most people dump in rivers and roadsides, on top of roofs, or on railway sidings. Finally there is somewhere we can take our waste, " said Celine Achieng of the Umande Trust NGO working in Kibera, where more than 800,000 people live. "This will solve a lot of problems. We are trying to change perceptions to persuade people not to take their waste to the river."
Vanguard. Erosion Wrecks Havoc in Imo. Lagos, Nigeria.
Scores of residential homes, public buildings, roads and farmlands are on the verge of being swallowed by gully erosion in parts of Ikeduru local government area of Imo State. Speaking after taking journalists on a tour of erosion devastated Ugirike and Okwu communities, the state Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport, Chief Chuka Odom, identified Owu Amakohia, Onuoma, Avuvu, Eziama as some of the communities currently threatened by erosion. "A passenger vehicle recently plunged into the abyss created by erosion at Ugirike. Granted that no life was lost in that accident, we may not be that lucky next time", the Commissioner said. In his opinion, over 70 percent of Imo people live in rural communities adding that if they are having problems with food security, they should not have problems with communication. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708310130.html
New Times. Ministry Sets Anti-Desertification Plan. Kigali, Rwanda
The National Action Programme (NAP) to fight desertification will be ready by October this year, Lands and Environment Minister Christophe Bazivamo has said. The programme is required by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).Rwanda is among the African countries that haven't yet submitted the NAP to UNCCD secretariat. Other countries behind schedule include Cameroon, Angola, Somalia, Libya, Ivory Cost and Central Africa. "We delayed to have NAP in place as early as possible but they (UNCCD) should realise that our efforts to halt desertification have reached at remarkable stage," Bazivamo said yesterday. Bazivamo said that NAP's key role will be to promote the UNCCD activities in the country. Tree-planting on degraded land, the fight against soil erosion through ploughing of radical terraces in hilly areas are some of the activities required. He said that the ten-year national action plan that encompasses the required UNCCD effort and other essential activities for protection of land and its vegetation cover is in place. http://allafrica.com/stories/200708310377.html
The Nation. Floods 'Sweeping Chemicals And Plastics Into Lake'. Nairobi, Kenya
Flooded rivers are sweeping chemicals and plastic bags into Lake Nakuru thereby frustrating efforts to conserve the lake. Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) employees said the plastic bags and poisonous chemicals find their way into the lake because of limited capacity to control such pollution. KWS employees based at Lake Nakuru National Park said they were having difficulty in controlling pollution posed by the floods that carried with it waste products. In their bid to control such pollution, they said they were now forced to collect the plastic bags manually because some of them are blown off into the park by winds. http://allafrica.com/stories/200709030932.html
BuaNews. South Africa: Mbeki Urges SA to Grow Trees for Food, Tshwane, South Africa.
President Thabo Mbeki has called on South Africans to grow trees in order to provide food and to green the country, making it more beautiful. "Let us grow fruit trees, let us green our land and let us build parks," he said at the Arbor Day celebrations in Ga-Rankuwa, Saturday. He pledged his support and called for the nation's support for the Trees for Food Programme, an initiative of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry to plant more than a million trees each year, most of which are fruit trees. In this regard Mr Mbeki expressed his gratitude that most of the trees would be fruit trees, and would thus boost food security in the country. The President joined hundreds of residents of Ga-Rakuwa, north-west of Pretoria to mark Arbor Day and to launch the National Arbor Week, which is held annually from 1 to 7 September. During Arbor Week the department and other stakeholders undertake a major national awareness programme, reiterating the value of trees and the department's key role towards sustaining people's livelihoods now and for future generations. This year it is marked under the theme: "Plant a tree - Grow our future". http://allafrica.com/stories/200709030166.html
This Day Nigeria: Desertification Threatening Us, Says Lamido. Lagos, Nigeria
About 35 per cent of the total land mass of Jigawa State is under threat of desertification, Governor Sule Lamido has declared. The Governor made this declaration in Kanarya, a village on the outskirts of Dutse, the state Capital while launching this year's tree planting campaign. Noting that the state is one of the eleven states prone to desertification in the country, he said the only way to stop the menace was to carry out massive tree planting. According to him, this would help the state create shelter beds which would halt the progress of the menace and lead to a gradual reclamation of areas already claimed by desertification. He reminded the populace that desertification was just one of the ecological challenges threatening the economy and physical wellbeing of the citizens of the state. He listed floods, gully erosion and attacks of Quela birds as some of the ecological problems facing the state. He however reported that the state is hopeful of receiving federal government's assistance on some of the problems. http://allafrica.com/stories/200709030865.html
SPX. 30 August, 2007. Discovery Could Help Stop Malaria At Its Source - The Mosquito. Staff Writers. Troy NY
As summer temperatures cool in the United States, fewer mosquitoes whir around our tiki torches. But mosquitoes swarming around nearly 40 percent of the world's population will continue to spread a deadly parasitic disease - malaria. Now an interdisciplinary team led by researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has found a key link that causes malarial infection in both humans and mosquitoes.
If this link in the chain of infection can be broken at its source - the mosquito - then the spread of malaria could be stopped without any man, woman, or child needing to a take a drug. The researchers' discovery will be published in the Aug. 31 edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The team found that humans and the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite share the same complex carbohydrate, heparan sulfate. In both humans and mosquitoes, heparan sulfate is a receptor for the malaria parasite, binding to the parasite and giving it quick and easy transport through the body. The team was led by Robert J. Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer.
"The discovery allows us to think differently about preventing the disease," Linhardt said. "If we can stop heparan sulfate from binding to the parasite in mosquitoes, we will not just be treating the disease, we will be stopping its spread completely."
Malaria parasites are extremely finicky about their hosts, Linhardt explained. Birds, rodents, humans, and primates all can be infected with malaria, but each species is infected by a different species of mosquito - and each of those mosquitoes is infected by a different malaria parasite. In other words, there needs to be a perfect match at the molecular basis for malaria to spread from one species to another, Linhardt said. Researchers have long understood this deadly partnership, but the molecular basis for the match had never been determined.
"The discovery marks a paradigm shift in stopping malaria," Linhardt said "Now, we can work to develop an environmentally safe, inexpensive way to block infection in mosquitoes and not have to worry about drug side effects in humans." Malaria kills over one million people around the world, mostly young children. And the problem is growing, Linhardt noted. As the Earth heats up due to global warming, outbreaks of malaria are being reported higher up the coast of South America and Mexico each year, he said. "Unfortunately, there is little direct funding on malaria in this country outside of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, because it is not considered a major threat in this country," Linhardt noted. "We do our research on a shoestring. Malaria research funding needs to move higher up on the scientific priority list."
Linhardt and his collaborators were the first to discover the link between the spread of malaria in humans and heparan sulfate in 2003. Those findings were also published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. In this earlier study, Linhardt compared the receptors in the liver of humans to those of rodents. The liver is the first organ to be infected by the malaria parasite in mammals. The researchers found that heparan sulfate in the human liver was the unwitting transporter of the disease to the human bloodstream. The receptor found in rodents was a different heparan sulfate.
The next step for Linhardt, outlined in the current research, was to determine if heparan sulfate was also present in the species of mosquito known to spread malaria to humans, Anopheles stephensi. To make this key link, Linhardt and his current research team, which includes Rensselaer doctoral students Melissa Kemp and Jin Xie, enlisted the help of New York University physician and entomologist Photini Sinnis. Sinnis and her team at NYU provided their entomological expertise and the ill-fated mosquitoes needed for the experiments. After finding heparan sulfate in mashed mosquitoes, the researchers needed to determine if heparan sulfate was in the mosquito organs known to host the malaria parasite. If so, it was likely that heparan sulfate was the reason malaria spreads from mosquito to human and human to mosquito.
In mosquitoes, the malaria parasite infects the digestive tract. A mosquito bites a human who carries the malaria parasite in his or her bloodstream. The parasites move into the bug's gut and then to their salivary glands, allowing the mosquito to infect another human during its next blood meal. To isolate a two-microgram salivary gland and the four-microgram digestive tract from each mosquito required the extreme skill of Sinnis and her team, which included Alida Coppi. Once isolated, the guts and glands were analyzed by internationally renowned microanalysts Toshihiko Toida, Hidenao Toyoda, and Akiko Kinoshita-Toyoda at Chiba University in Japan. Heparan sulfate was found in both mosquito organs. As a final step, the Rensselaer team proved that the heparan sulfate in the mosquito bound to the same malaria parasite that heparan sulfate found in the human liver did. It was an unfortunate perfect match.
Worldwide
Reuters. 2 September, 2007. Greek forest fires could be CO2 threat. Robin Pomeroy. Athens.
Greece's huge forest fires have been blamed by some on global warming, but satellite images of smoke plumes drifting as far as Africa prompt the question: are forests a major source of greenhouse gas? Usually it is cars, factories and power stations that are most often mentioned as sources of carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas which traps heat in the atmosphere. Trees, considered the "lungs of the planet", soak the gas up. But what if they burn? "Global emissions from deforestation and the degradation of forests are the second single source after coal," said Stefan Singer of WWF (the World Wildlife Fund).
Every year 13 million hectares of the world's forests disappear -- an area the size of Greece -- according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization which says deforestation accounts for 18 percent of CO2 emissions. Although paling in significance next to deforestation in the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia, forest fires in the Mediterranean might also be a net source of emissions, experts said. Trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and climatologists see forests as carbon "sinks" -- places where large amounts of that element are stored. When they burn, whether in forest fires or as logs in a stove, it is released.
In the atmosphere, CO2 is the main gas which contributes to the greenhouse effect -- trapping the earth's heat which would otherwise be radiated into space. The latest U.N. report on global warming says temperatures will rise by a best estimate of 1.8 to 4.0 Celsius (3 to 7 Fahrenheit) this century and sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimeters.
Cause and effect
The resulting hotter, drier summers in countries like Greece could mean forests are more frequently brought to the tinder-box conditions which allowed fires to spread so devastatingly. Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyanni said the summer's devastating floods in Britain and the worst fires in Greek memory demonstrated climate change was already happening. "From that moment everyone understood that the phenomena caused by climatic change need to be confronted with much more coordination and speed from the EU," she told a news conference.
Scientists said it was too early to judge how much C02 was released by the Greek fires which are the most intense in Europe in at least a decade and have killed 63 people. If the trees grow back, they will eventually reabsorb the CO2. "If not, the fires will have contributed to greenhouse gas emissions," said Earl Saxon of the Geneva-based World Conservation Union (IUCN). Bakoyanni tried to allay fears that the scorched land would be used for building. "We are determined that not the smallest piece of land will not be reforested. Nobody will build on burnt land," she said. Any net loss of CO2 would not count against Greece's legal obligation to control greenhouse gas emissions. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Greece, was allowed to increase its emissions by 25 percent over 1990 levels. Non man-made sources, such as wildfires do not count.
The IUCN's Saxon said forests have a natural cycle of fires and regrowth but that global warming could upset the balance. If hotter and drier summers mean more frequent forest fires, that could well mean a net emission of CO2. "If they become more frequent, then vegetation doesn't have time to grow back and the net effect is that you lose more carbon from the eco-system than the eco-system can recapture before the next fire."
The Independent. 2 Septemeber, 2007. More 'megafires' to come, say scientists. Geoffrey Lean.
Fires of unprecedented ferocity are sweeping around the world, fuelled by global warming and misguided environmentalism. Dubbed "megafires", they rage over thousands of miles at 1,000C and create their own weather, even triggering tornadoes. Rapidly increasing in number, they are often unquenchable by any human efforts, burning unchecked until they reach coasts or are put out by heavy rainfall. The devastating fires that have ravaged Greece killed at least 63 people and charred 482,000 acres of land. This summer, as record heatwaves hit much of southern Europe, more than 1.9 million acres have gone up in smoke .
Matters are even worse in the United States, where 20 years ago, fires burning over 5,000 acres were relatively rare. In the past 10 years, however, there have more than 200 conflagrations 10 times the size. Last year, 9.6 million acres of the country were devastated, beating an all-time record set 2005. This is the sixth time in the past decade that a record year has immediately been surpassed in the following 12 months. A year ago the Australian state of Victoria suffered 200 fires in a single day. There have also been megafires in France, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Russia, Mongolia, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil.
Experts agree that they are caused partly by droughts and higher temperatures brought by global warming, but they also point to conservation practices which have discouraged controlled burning of forests and caused a huge build-up of up to 30 of 40 tons of tinder dry kindling on each acre of ground. Once lit – by lightning, arson or human error – they produce 20ft flames and generate temperatures of up to 1,200C. At this intensity they generate their own winds. One such fire caused tornados near Canberra in 2003.
Professor Stephen J Pyne, an expert at Arizona State University called the fires "climatic tsunamis", and Kevin O'Loughlin, the head of Melbourne's Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre added: "They cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world."
Los Angeles Times. 3 September, 2007. Hindus urged to adopt 'green' cremation. Most Hindus prefer open funeral pyres, which enable them to perform key rituals. One Indian group offers a method that uses less wood to burn bodies. Some are wary. Bruce Wallace. Varanasi, India.
Cremation fires crackle all day long on the chipped concrete steps of this riverside holy city, the blazes spewing ash and flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers. Sweating, bare-chested men stoke the funeral pyres, squinting against the sting of smoke as they lug and stack the bundles of logs needed to burn the procession of Hindu dead. And when the bodies are incinerated and the families have taken away the ashes of their loved ones, the men sweep the residue into the Ganges River.
The detritus of death, mingling with life.
Devout Hindus regard cremation as an essential rite that frees the soul from the body, enabling its journey to the next level. But with India's Hindu population of about 800 million ensuring a massive number of open-air cremations, there is a growing awareness that this adherence to religious orthodoxy carries a toll for the temporal world. It takes a lot of wood to burn a body: The demand for funeral pyres strips the country of more than 50 million trees annually, according to some estimates. Cremations also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the body parts sometimes dumped into rivers and streams add further toxicity to water that is already badly polluted.
"We have come to a stage where if we don't come up with a solution for dealing with the dead, we are going to affect the survival of the living," said Anshul Garg, director of Mokshda, a nonprofit group in New Delhi that is campaigning for an environmentally friendly approach to cremation. In traditional Hindu cremations, the body is placed atop a pile of wood. The corpse is then covered with more wood and burned in the open air. Mokshda says this method requires as much as 880 pounds of wood to burn a single corpse (though the wood porters in Varanasi say the amount is closer to 600 pounds), a process that can take as long as six hours.
Mokshda's alternative is the "Green Cremation System," a cremation bier it developed 15 years ago and has been tinkering with since. The organization believes it has perfected its design, saying it can burn a body using a mere 220 pounds of wood in a third of the time. Wood is integral to Hindu cremation rites, a symbolic connection between the body and the earth, which is why the first layer of wood is laid on the ground. The Mokshda system's innovation is to place that first layer of wood on a raised metal grate, allowing for better air circulation. A chimney is placed over the pyre to cut heat loss.
"We have improved the flow of air and where there is a proper flow of air, your combustion efficiency increases," Garg said. "This is not a new technological gizmo. It's a simplicity, like improving the efficiency of a wood stove." Mokshda's system has made only tiny inroads so far. It has 12 units of its latest model, which on average costs about $30,000, in operation, with orders for 80 more in the pipeline. But the potential demand is enormous. Mokshda says it has identified 800 crematoriums across India as possible users. The Delhi metropolitan area alone has about 350 crematoriums, their flaky residue occasionally drifting over nearby neighborhoods.
But the Mokshda system faces two big obstacles to acceptance. For one thing, improving cremation methods is a low priority for cash-strapped municipalities facing a host of public health issues. An even greater obstacle is the resistance of traditionalists who don't want to mess with a matter as sensitive as the fate of a loved one's soul. "We have changed other rituals -- marriage, eating habits, clothing -- but rituals around death are the hardest to change," Garg said. "People are hesitant to talk about death; there is a fear. So they say they'll stick with what they've been following through the ages."
The government also has largely failed to get Hindus to sign on to environmentally friendly cremations. Beginning in the 1960s, municipal governments began installing electric or gas-fueled crematoriums, offering to dispose of bodies at a fraction of the cost of traditional cremations, which can be $50 to $75, depending on the quality and amount of wood used. But most Hindus have balked at this option, saying that oven-like crematoriums prevent them from carrying out important rituals such as the mukhagni, in which a fire is lighted in the body's mouth, and the kapal kriya, in which the corpse's skull is shattered by a blow from a bamboo stick to release the soul.
It is mostly unclaimed corpses that are burned in electric and gas crematoriums, stigmatizing them as being for the poorest of the poor. "It's a good method -- there's less pollution because you are not dumping lumps of flesh into the river -- but we don't get many bodies," said Panchdev Singh, 47, the operator of Varanasi's electric crematorium. There are no bodies awaiting Singh's attention. One of his two machines is out of order, and business has fallen off since 2000, when the municipality raised the price to about $12. "Now the only people who come here are the very poor or the ones brought in by the police," Singh said.
Mokshda says its system can succeed where the electric one failed because it allows Hindus to perform traditional rituals. The challenge is to convince devout Hindus that using less wood does not break with orthodoxy. Even Garg acknowledges that it will be a while before Mokshda's cremation bier is welcome in a place such as Varanasi. "I doubt it would be a hit here," said Dinesh Yadav, 21, who has taken over the family wood business, running a gang of 10 porters for cremations on Varanasi's ghats, or riverside steps. "People want to do it the Hindu way. Older people, especially, will never settle for being burned with less than the required quantity of wood."
Yet the realities of the outside world intrude even on this holiest of Hindu cities. Yadav recalled the wood shortage of 2005, when scarcity meant the bodies backed up on the ghats while they waited for supplies. The price of wood is 50% higher than it was five years ago. "A time will come when we'll probably have to move to a new way," he said. And in his office on Varanasi's back streets, Kameshwar Upadhyay, a Hindu scholar known for his strict views, looked thoughtfully at photographs of the Mokshda system and didn't dismiss it as heretical. He acknowledged that India is groaning under the stress of an expanding population. And if he was not about to welcome the Mokshda system in the spiritual center of Varanasi, he thought it might not be a bad idea in big cities.
"There is a provision that after death, a person needs to be completely de-linked from this Earth, and fire helps in that goal," Upadhyay said. "But there are changing situations that come to us on Earth and we have to work out compromises for that. As long as mukhagni and kapal kriya can be followed, there should be no problem.
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