Wednesday, August 12, 2015

A citizen talks about conservation, forests and dams

Copyright © 2015 Ramaswami Ashok Kumar
Re: 
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-bird-a-dam-and-a-belief/article7527069.ece?homepage=true
Human beings have equal rights along with other beings to live and be
nurtured and preserved. There is true knowledge, learn thou it is this:
To see one changeless life in all the lives, in the separate, the one
inseparable. Normal civilization recognises this truth and accordingly
lives in harmony with nature. Modern civilization,man-made, does not
recognise this truth and builds a parallel man-centred way
based on falsehood: To see the separate existences apart and holding that
to be true. This society of specialists is generically destructive of
its various artificial parts and of the whole: Gandhiji who immediately
saw the glaring lacuna of modern civilization gave the warning at the
begin of the last century(1908): Given enough time modern civilization
will destroy itself. But it causes in the process of its own suicide, the
loss of life, infrastructure and habitats and extinction, whose
consequences are irreversible. Thats why the Indian and Chinese sages
and seers held modern civilization in utter contempt and always strove
to steer the people to be convinced and contented with being normal:
in harmony with nature. Actually nature's production, consumption and
return is wasteless and uses everything and thus of infinite efficiency
and zero cost.
Dams merely store and do not distribute the waters. It is a
slave of gravity and an idiot when it comes to the state outside of it.
A forest on the other hand is infinitely superior to dams as they are
endowed with the power of osmosis and transpiration and with the help of
the sun possess an atmospheric distribution network which enables
equitable distribution of waters in accord with the density of
vegetation and hence participates in the repeated recycling of water
-transpiration, precipitation. Thus they recharge the groundwater
table and sustain themselves by using 1 to 2 percent of the waters
passing through them.
Taking the example of India, say on the 26th July 2015, the IMD reported
14 mm of All India rainfall. On 3.288 million square kilometers
area of India, this translates to 46 billion cubic meters(BCM). From
fundamental physiological principles of plants, a tree transpires
more than its own weight of water in a day. With a dry biomass density of
50 kg per square meter, the amount of water transpired on a third of
India's area of 1 million square kilometers is 50 BCM, more than the rainfall
on 26th July 2015! This is the way trees and grasslands prevent extreme
floods and droughts, in tune with nature. Birds come and bees make honey!

But the dams have a more sinister extinction process inherent in  their
design based on the tenets of disconnection characteristic of modern
civilization: The dams act cumulatively destructively on components of
modern civilization and nature. As the monsoon progresses the dams increase
their contents and exert surge waves of forces at their centre of gravity
which in turn exert huge bending moments and forces all round the centre of
gravity. This results in direct heating up of the earth and melting of
rocks to result in dam related disasters like hurricanes, extremes of rain,
cloud bursts, flash floods, landslides earthquakes and displacements which
are vertically up during the monsoon and down during the dry season in tune
with the TOTAL changes in all the dam contents from time to time, synchronous
with water demands on the dams. These are suicidal forces caused by man centered
modern civilization, in utter contrast to mutually helpful reinforcing
effects of the automatic atmospheric distribution network of forests as shown above.
The extremes of rain increasing with increasing dam capacities cause the
reservoirs to exceed their design basis envelopes, monsoon after monsoon.
In panic the dam operators release the flood waters precisely at the the peak
rainfall periods as to save the dams from over-topping and failing! Suicide!

Thus harmony with nature must be the bottom line of normal living.
The biggest development projects for the next millennia are reforesting mother
earth according to ecological principles with correct proportions of grasslands
and trees so that evolution is allowed to carry on instead of stopping it
in its tracks by modern civilization. This must be carried out by people's cooperatives, with the action and fruits being enjoyed by the people, assuring happiness.
See http://earthquakescausedbydams.blogspot.in
and
Reforest Mother Earth to Live! at
http://practicethevedas.blogspot.in/2008/05/reforest-mother-earth-to-live.html
Modern and Normal Civilizations at:
http://modernandnormal.blogspot.in/2006/09/modern-and-normal-civilizations.html
 
 

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