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Excerpts from the book ‘Disaster Prevention in Tourism’ –
perspectives on climate justice.
“In May 2007, BBC world was making a programme called Climate Watch
where they were collecting information on the impact of global warming on
local population and destinations in different parts of the world, including
India. They got in touch with us and told us they wanted to document the
impact of global warming on the river Nila (Bharatapuzha) in central
Kerala. The river had by then started gaining international attention
following our campaign to highlight this unique river valley civilization
being destroyed through human greed.
Bharatapuzha,
otherwise poetically called Nila, is the longest river in the Indian State
of Kerala. Kerala has a unique network of 44 rivers in a land that is just
580km long where the average width comes to about 50kms. The river Nila is
dammed in many locations; rivulets and streams flowing into the river have
dried up because of various construction activities and lifestyle changes.
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published by ECOT and EED and released at the side event at Copenhagen
conference on Climate Change.
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These excerpts are from the book ‘Disaster Prevention in Tourism’ –
perspectives on climate justice. ECOT (The Ecumenical coalition on tourism)
in cooperation with EED tourism watch published this book during the
Copenhagen Climate Change conference. The chapter based on The Blue Yonder
experience is exploring ‘local solutions for global warming”. ISBN
9789742356446
contact
office@ecotonline.org for copies.
The book is edited by
Edited by Caesar
D'Mello, Jonathan McKeown and Sabine Minninger
dried up river bed in
Tiruvilwamala
Your comments here:
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sketches by students of
Desamangalam school on hillock demolition
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Traditional water harvesting systems have disappeared, farming traditions
have changed or farming has almost disappeared. The dense, evergreen
cover along the catchment regions is degraded or highly disturbed in most
parts of Kerala, leading to degradation and drying up of rivers, including
the Nila.
We showed them a river now almost like a desert, a vulnerable coastline
where rising sea levels have increased salinity in what were once fresh
water sources. The BBC spoke to villagers near the estuary, where there was
so little fresh water that the sea was by then flowing up into the river,
resulting in the groundwater becoming contaminated.
Despite the somewhat ritualistic construction of a sea wall, the sea had
been taking a little more land each year, destroying or burying houses in
its path. People living on the shore live in a state of constant retreat
from the ocean; few of them have the money to move to safer places inland.
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The two days spent with the BBC world cameraman Justin Mills
were thought provoking and at the same time disturbing. Whereas Justin Mills
had travelled across the world to learn about the impacts of climate change
and global warming in a rather abstract sense, we found ourselves in the
middle of an ecological disaster created by 'local' human interventions.
For us, there was a clear choice; while accepting the reality of global
climate change, we had concrete local issues to address. We were witnessing
causes of global warming and not only its effects. Rather than studying the
effects we needed to address the causes – and these were local.In
this globalised world, we believed that this would have an impact (though
painfully small). This was the beginning of the small eco-restoration work
with which we became engaged in partnership with the local community and to
some extend with the travel industry.”
celebrating local events by planting saplings in the travellers forest
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