False Positives

India has 5% less sun than 20 years ago due to smog.
However, we will face fewer problems
with global warming than other
nations because of the smog.
-- Times of India, 16 Nov 2007

So many contrasts, so many ironies, so many odd things side by side. We were stopped in the city street yesterday to wait for a herd of cows and few goats to make their way through the rickshaws and motorcycles, when a car pulled up next to us full of sheep. Because the steering wheel is on the right side, for a minute I thought the sheep was driving. What's really odd is that here in India I didn't even consider it unusual to see a sheep driving.

This is all very eye-opening. The streets overflow with litter. The smell from the use of the sidewalks as urinals is overwhelming. The incredible smog that blankets this country is shrouding it's natural beauty. And killing it's inhabitants. In that same article quoted above, they also stated that India now has a higher rate of respiratory problems. Then, like above, they immediately countered that statement with "However, we will face fewer problems with other health issues due to the protection from global warming."

The smog here is protecting them from the dangers of global warming? A false positive.

But just as they counter their own truths with comfortable fabrications, I've realized already how easily I've fallen into the habit as well. I think of the United States as so advanced. And we are certainly in terms of industry, commerce, and (thank God) sanitation systems. We assume our ways are best, but our success has made us complacent and wasteful. I know I'm not the first person to state this.

In the United States, we would never so casually drop our trash by the side of the road, but we don't hesitate to designate more and more area to landfills. We have the cleanest drinking water in the world, yet we insist on buying single-use bottles of water for simple convenience. We tear down good housing just to build something that suits our fancy in the same place.

The people here are ingenious in their frugal use of everything around them. To them, every item has a purpose. And usually the purpose is bare subsistence. They collect seeds from flowers in the public gardens and sell them. They create houses out of found materials that I would never have dreamed of. They make fuel from dung, curtains from straw, and bowls from the clay dirt found by the roadside. Their broad resourcefulness is staggering.

Through my lens of preconceptions, this resourcefulness has created an environment generous with expansive disparity and wild contrast. Some of the more notable images are women in beautiful gauzy sarees carrying bowls of cow manure on their heads; the longevity of ancient marble structures to commemorate the dead surrounded by temporary shanties to house the living; a cow standing in front of McDonalds in Delhi. (It begs the question: What are they serving in those burgers if cows are sacred?)

The thing I'm learning so far is that nothing is what it first appears to be. My expectation that these are poor people simply because they live on the streets is not true. I've seen some of the happiest faces here and they're not in the palaces. They're on the crowded streets. They're in the small villages crammed full of as many people as Chicago. They're in the circles of families squatting around fires by the roadside, eating their evening meals with their fingers, laughing as they enjoy each other's company. These are a very handsome people who surround themselves with many things of color and beauty.

False positives? No. There are many things here that are truly very positive. I think I packed the wrong expectations when I prepared for this trip. I think I'll drop my false negatives on the side of the road as I leave Jaipur today.

Tiger Bait

How does game theory
apply to game drives?

When they heard that I was going on game drives in India in search of Bengal tigers in the wild, some of my friends asked me if I'm an aspiring wildlife photographer. I told them no, I'm just interested in sticking myself out there to see what it's all about. They shook their heads and said "Don't you get it: you're just tiger bait for those two photographers." When I told Joan this, she laughed and suggested that perhaps I could practice dragging one of my legs behind me a little bit as if I were wounded.

None of us ever know what will draw us to things or events or places or people. What invisible strings exist, lying silently dormant until a connection is made; a chord is struck and then resonates for the rest of our lives. Some harmonics are strong and thrum through you with a force that rules. Others are small undercurrents playing the supporting riffs and trills that make life so very interesting. How can you possibly predict how the melody will play out?

I recently read about a man who makes a living by forecasting the outcome of events through game theory, a mathematical process that analyzes interactions. This man, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, describes it as a math for how people behave strategically. You can read about him in the current issue of Good magazine.

A political scientist in the truest sense of the title, he forecasts political events, election campaigns, and even terms of treaties by observing human interactions through a scientific lens. His accuracy rate is an astounding 90%.

He starts with a set of assumptions about each actor's motives. He states, "If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don't do good things." Apparently, if left to our own devices, we seem to be herd animals who act as predators when we have nothing to govern us.

I want to not believe this. I want to go all Anne Frank on you and write that no matter how much evil I might possibly see in the world, I will still believe in the deep-down, basic goodness of human beings. But 90%?

When I look at us through the tiger's eye, I see a species that has wantonly destroyed habitats, killed for sport and superstition, and unconscionably spread beyond the ability of the local environment to support us. Actions that support Mr. Bueno de Mesquita's presumptions. At the top of the food chain in quality of power, we would be somewhere in the middle at best if ranked by quantity. There are simply too many of us to warrant the pinnacle of the ecosystem. An imbalance that I'll bet nature abhors.

Perhaps this trip is about feeling a different tilt of the scales -- an adjustment that swings back closer to the way that nature intended it to be. Joan told me that it's an amazing sensation to be out in the jungle. She said that your senses blaze alive as you've never experienced them when you sit waiting in anticipation of the big animals -- that you feel as though you've been numb until now.

This is the chord that is struck. This is the thing that I want to experience. To feel the shocking electricity of my senses all jolting alive more than they've ever been. To feel the vibration of a harmonic not yet known.


Hmmm. Tiger bait, indeed. I believe the tiger is baiting me.

Godspeed, Joan and Jan

Godspeed: n. - a wish for
a prosperous journey,
success, and good fortune

Joan and Jan are in the air between Chicago and Delhi right now. I've been thinking about how fantastic it is that in the span of just one day, we can be halfway around the world. Just two generations ago, this sort of speed would have been only a dream. But technology advances, jets get faster, people get on and wake up on a different continent, all in a space measured in hours. Our ancestors would have considered this to be time travel.

While I'm not quite as startled by it as my forebears might have been, I still consider crossing such tremendous distance in such a short time a miracle. Just think, in our lifetimes, we've come to not only measure the distance to a far space in mere hours, but have also measured a few hours in far space. Technology advances, rockets get bigger, processes get safer and suddenly a man is hurtling in orbit 200 miles above us. A journey beginning with the quietly spoken prayer of one daredevil to another: 'Godspeed, John Glenn'.

This week, I logged some digital time travel trying to find historical records of the tiger census in India to understand the dwindling population of Bengal tigers. What I've discovered is that there is little concrete information out there -- mainly because of the disparate and rather unreliable methods of counting tigers in the jungle. It can be difficult and dangerous work. Seems that some tigers have contributed to the dwindling population of census takers a little too often.

Best I can find is that there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 tigers in India in 1900 but their current numbers are estimated to be around 4,000. A 90% reduction in population in the span of one century. Much of this reduction is attributed to the results of human use of the tigers' habitat -- deforestation and over-hunting of tiger prey-- as well as hunting of the tigers themselves.

Our ancestors would have considered this to be a tragedy.

And this is why Joan and Jan are hurtling through space about seven miles above the earth right now. To photograph, record, and preserve something that they believe is precious, something our descendents may never have a chance to see: the royal Bengal tiger while he still rules his own wild kingdom.

We can change continents in one day. Maybe through the passions of people like my friends Joan and Jan, we can change the fate of the graceful big cats within our lifetimes.

Godspeed, Joan and Jan.