Out of Eden Walk: On foot across northern India

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was delicious.

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.

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.