JJ Nitro

2007-08-09, 12:40:46 

Picking up where I left off last time with my notes from Pakistan (see below)... Sarah and I tried for three days to get on a plane from Islamabad to the Northern Areas, to a town called Skardu. But they only have only one flight per day, and each day it got canceled, so eventually we gave up. (If you can't get Mason to the mountain, pick another mountain.) We arranged a driver and tour guide to take us into some mountains that were much closer, a few hours' drive from Islamabad.

This area, called Murree and the Galis, was where the British used to move their government offices for this region each summer. These misty mountains are much cooler than the humid plains of Islamabad—so humid that despite boiling temperatures, there's often a thick fog, like what I'm used to from cool mornings on the California coast.

Driving up to the mountains, we had the chance to see a lot more of the trucks painted with gaudy designs, like this dump truck tailgate (click on the images to see bigger versions):

Here are a couple of typical scenes of the mountainside along the windy mountain road:

2007-08-02, 19:16:22

Here's the view from the balcony of the house where we're staying in a posh area of Karachi. The brightly flowered tree at the bottom attracts a lot of birds who hop and chirp around. The lone tower is part of the nearby mosque, where they broadcast the call to prayer, or azzan, five times a day, competing for our ears with two other nearby mosques. And this is in a not-so-dense area of town. (You can click on any of the images to see a larger view.)

Here's a shot of one of the neighbors' plots, to give you a sense of the neighborhood.



Sarah said, "That's cheeky" when she saw me taking the photos. Not surprisingly, most of the city is not like this. I'll show some more representative shots of the city later on.

As with the rest of the world, Pottermania swept over Pakistan.

2007-07-20, 11:48:24 

There's water under Darfur, the war-torn region in central Africa, which could help solve the region's underlying problems, says an expert on spying underground water using ground-penetrating radar.

National Geographic News has a story on this, with nicely balanced reporting. They talked to a researcher who argues there's actually little or no water under there, and quote an expert on the region who doubts that finding water would solve the people's problems. But let's leave those issues aside for a second.

Even if there is water under there, and even if it could help solve the region's problems, how long would this solution last?

It seems not long, from the stuff I'm reading in Fred Pearce's book When the Rivers Run Dry (which is an excellent book, by the way). I just read in there about Indians who are pumping up groundwater for farming or for selling to textile dying companies and to people for drinking water. And I read about the Great Manmade River in Libya, a vast system of pipes and pumps that brings water from below the Sahara Desert across 600 miles to the farms and cities of Libya's coast.

All this pumping draws on water that's been stored underground for hundreds or thousands of years, and any major project to tap the water would likely drain the reserves much faster than they get replenished. In some regions of India, at least, the level of the water is sinking fast, and it doesn't seem the pumping can persist for too much longer.

But it's a classic "tragedy of the commons," where people can profit in the short run by exploiting these waters, but in the long run they're undercutting their own, or their kids', livelihoods. Or, at best, it's a stopgap measure that solves a problem now—but without some other solution, it is just delaying a real solution.

So, back to Darfur. If pumping up water from underground really would solve the region's current problems, it seems like it would be a good thing. How could you argue that people focus on the long run, and not do that?

And yet, if water scarcity really is a major underlying problem that's fueling the conflict there, then it seems that if the underwater aquifiers there were to go dry after, say, a few decades of pumping, then what would happen?

2007-07-08, 23:14:09