National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek talks about his walk through northern India, where modern farming with high-yield seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, tractors and motorized well pumps have made India self-sufficient in food. But as he tells host Carolyn Beeler, it has come at a cost to the environment, water supply and some traditional ways of life.
While crossing northern India on foot, National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek slogged down a muddy path in the state of Rajasthan, accompanied by his walking partner and a donkey named Raju.
Traveling this way allowed Salopek a window into the stories others don’t typically hear from the world’s most populous country. It’s all being documented in a project called Out of Eden Walk.
Donkey paradise: Raju at rest in the Chambal region.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
The World’s Carolyn Beeler caught up with Salopek to hear more about what he learned along the way.
Carolyn Beeler: So we are, of course, talking with you about your walk along the path of human migration, where we’re a bit behind, I suppose. So, you walked through India in 2018? Tell us a bit about that.
Paul Salopek: I had never been to India before. I’ve been all over the world as a foreign correspondent, but India was a huge place I’d never set foot in. So it was brand new and it was dizzying. In India, the route I took across the north was almost 2,000 miles long, almost 4,000 km. And it took me more than a year. And it was a cosmos of villages. It was just village after village after village, through a mostly rural landscape. It was extraordinary.
You say mostly rural. So, you’re walking through a lot of farmland in northwestern India, in Punjab, and you wrote about the Green Revolution there, which transformed farming. You say, though, that it is a double-edged sword. Tell me about that.
Yeah, the Green Revolution, you know, if people know anything about it, it’s a positive connotation. And as it should be. I mean, it’s basically kept billions of human beings alive in our lifespan. In India alone, when this technology was pioneered, you know, decades ago, the output, the cultural output of India, was quadrupled, and they became self-sufficient in food production. They’re even exporting food products. But it’s double-edged in the sense that it comes at a very steep environmental cost that was never really truly calculated back then.
So the Green Revolution used fertilizers and other inputs plus irrigation. Are those two of the main things?
Massive, massive numbers of water pumps that are motorized, just sucking the water up out of these fossil reservoirs. This is water coming down out of the Himalayan mountains, which is sometimes, you know, ancient.
A commuter zips by a kos minar — a 500-year-old stone distance marker jutting from the lush fields of Punjab in northern India. Join the journey at outofedenwalk.org.Arati Kumar Rao/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
So those aquifers are being drained, you say. Is that impacting drinking water supplies for people?
In an extraordinary way. I had a walking partner, Arati Kumar-Rao, who’s an environmental photographer in India, and she knows these issues inside and out. And she told me, “Paul, this issue of the water crisis in India, which affects 600 million Indians — that’s almost half the population — is so huge that nobody can kind of look at it squarely.” Nobody can get their arms around it. It’s just gigantic, it’s colossal.
And so what’s happening to villages? Do people have to walk farther to get water? What is the bottom line?
I mean, it’s both rural and urban because, you know, aquifers don’t distinguish between urban and rural populations. They flow under everybody. And if you start pumping those down, in some cases more than 30 meters, more than 100 feet in one generation, not just the water is going away, but it’s changing its chemical nature. Some of the wells become toxic as they’re exposed to new oxygenated minerals. And we’re talking cyanides, fluorides making the drinking water poison for people.
Your route took you through an area dominated by a group known as the Bishnoi. Who are the Bishnoi?
Yeah. So, as I’m walking through this kind of industrial, agricultural landscape, imagine big flat panes of grains that are water-thirsty crops that probably should not be grown there to begin with, heavily industrialized tractor traffic like crazy. My walking partners and I came upon this oasis of nature, a kind of natural landscape, the way Punjab used to look before it was turned under a mechanical plow. And it was a nature reserve set up by the Bishnoi people, who were basically Hinduism’s druids. It’s a sect that kind of took its cue from a Hindu saint who walked around in the 15th century saying that we need to stop harming nature. So, he advocated the building of water ponds for wild animals and the complete prohibition of hunting. And this group of people is still in India. There are about, I think, half a million or so still living in Punjab.
You also write about something called cow dumping. What is that?
When I visited this reserve of Bishnoi, just imagine kind of rural farmers… You can’t tell that they’re Bishnoi, right? They look like any other rural farmer in the Punjab. Except their nature is natural. It’s not transformed by mechanization. Now, there are at least 300 million cows in India. And Hinduism, you know, deems the cow sacred. And if you’re a good Hindu, you never kill the cow. You can get milk from it, but as it gets old and stops giving milk, your duty as a good Hindu is to take care of the cow until death. You feed it, nurture it and take care of it. And this is expensive if you’re a poor farmer. And especially with the rise of Hindu nationalism lately in India and cow protection societies, the Bishnoi are facing a huge cow-dumping epidemic because the local farmers see their little patch of nature as the best place to dump their cows, their hungry old cows. So there’s kind of a cow war going on in this part of the Punjab.
Interesting. So, about 3,000 miles earlier in your walk around the path of human migration, you were in the Palestinian West Bank looking at olive groves. Olives are native to that part of the world in these arid regions. But suddenly, when you were walking through India, you came across olive trees on these experimental farms, trying to grow them in a place that they don’t usually. Tell me about that experiment.
Government officials in India had gone on a tour of Israel and been impressed by olive groves and said, “Let’s try to grow these back in India.” And so they brought back thousands of trees. They brought back Israeli agronomists to kind of help them grow. They found soils that were identical. So, it all looked like a promising experiment to introduce olives to India as a cash crop, the problem being the weather; they forgot about the weather patterns. Olives need two to 300 hours of cold weather to bud, flower and produce fruit. And India doesn’t have that kind of cold weather. So the administrators of this little forgotten, kind of almost invisible olive grove experiment in India decided, “We don’t have fruit, let’s try leaves.” So they started trying to make the leaves into something that Indians do love and is familiar. And that’s tea. You know, Indians are mad tea drinkers. So, they started experimenting. They set up a lab and were making olive leaf tea.
“I didn’t know what olives were before working here,” says Lali Mina (right), an olive leaf harvester at the experimental farm near Bassi. The leaves are used to make tea.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
And how did it taste?
It was delicious.
Did it taste like olives?
Yes. It was like chopped-up dried olive leaves from the tree mixed with herbs like mint. And it had, like, a smoky undertone. It was fabulous. It makes me wonder. This is one of these cases like when I walk away from a story and, years later, look over my shoulder [and then] I wonder how they’re doing, I hope they’re doing great, selling olive tea like gangbusters.
Subhankar Moulick offers a sampling of newly tested olive leaf teas.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
We started our conversation about the negative side effects of more muscular intervention in nature, so, irrigation, fertilizers. And then we have this story of trying to grow olives where olives don’t grow. Did you take those at the moment as two parts of the same story?
Yeah. It’s the globalization of agriculture, right? Look, there’s so many more of us than there used to be in my parents’ and our grandparents’ time that we have to try everything. There are all these experiments going on across the world. It’s amazing, really, that of how do we feed ourselves? How do we create crash crops to pull people out of poverty? But thousands of these experiments are going on around the world. 99.99% of us don’t know about them because we just consume the products, right? If they’re successful. So, that’s what walking does. Slowing down, this is a story that I would never probably have stumbled across had I been based in India as a conventional foreign correspondent. It’s too small. But as you note, this small example talks about global things. Big things, big ideas.
Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
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