Update: As of today we have moved to McLeodganj, where we are in a homestay situation, which is definitely an experience and a lot of fun. But our access to internet is spotty at best, so for now you all get a backup post (I stockpile them for situations where I don't have time to write).

So to get started today, I just want to mention the weather for a moment. I’ve been checking online every couple of days to see what it’s like and until recently the two most common listings have been “haze” and “smoke.” The pollution is literally strong enough here to cause its own weather phenomena, and the energy consumption per person is still is miniscule compared to in the U.S. (I know from experience. Cold showers). Just something to think about.

I don’t know a whole lot about environment issues, but I have definitely noticed some things here in India that I would like to share. I haven’t seen the industrial areas of India, but no matter where you are—even way up in the mountains like we are now—it is clear that they exist. When I came to India I had definitely crafter a certain image of a place that was natural and wild and pure and beautiful, and since getting here I have consistently encountered situations and sights and smells that have forced me to re-evaluate that understanding.

First of all, there’s the garbage. So far, all the pictures that I have shown you have been beautiful landscapes and maybe a cute animal or two. And there certainly are a lot of those here, because India is a vast place and the areas we are staying in are not nearly as densely populated as others. And there are other places that are even more vast an open than where we are now (more on that in a future post). But I’d like to have at least one post that challenges that image of India as a beautiful place, because in many ways, if you look closely enough, that’s not necessarily the case.

Plastic bags are banned in Dharamsala. The reason is that if they weren’t banned, they would end up along the sides of the roads, in ditches between houses, and on all the hillsides around the city. The reason for that is that there is no centralized garbage service in India, at least not in Delhi or here in Dharamsala. So far nobody I have talked to has been able to say where the garbage actually goes, except that the state does send people around to clean up certain areas when they get bad.

Which brings me to my first real world application: what happens when you buy stuff at the store here? Well, you are going to get it in a newspaper bag. This is not the same as wrapping it in newspaper—there are actually groups that collect old newspaper, fold it, and seal the bottom to create a kind of bag that store owners can use to package things. In the U.S. we generate a great deal of waste just by specifically creating things to transport our things home in—here, they take things that are already trash and reuse them.

What about keeping leftover food sanitary, you ask? Well, the restaurants use whatever they have on hand. For example, a few days ago we got some pizza at a restaurant and couldn’t finish. So they brought it back in a very distinctive bag. You know those little sauce packets that you get at taco bell, with the little sayings on them? Well imagine that prior to the sauce getting in, someone got their hands on a roll of the wrapper paper. Then they put your pizza in it and stapled the edges together. Just like that, take home container. Does it matter that we have yet to actually see a taco bell anywhere in India? Not at all.

We have no idea how that came to be the leftover food wrapper of choice for this restaurant. But it works, especially since without refrigeration there’s really no need to keep your food fresh for too long. Did I mention the fact that there is no refrigeration in most places? Let me just run through the things that aren’t a thing here, to show the ways in which this country is more and less efficient than you might think. Paper and plastic bags. Plastic cups, paper plates. Dishwashers, laundry machines, and vacuum cleaners. Coffee pots, toasters, and mixers. Any kind of store that is bigger than your living room. All things that don’t exist here, and all things that probably contribute more to wastefulness than they do to conservation.

So many of the things that we think of as helping to be more efficient in one sense (like fridges to store food in or disposable utensils that save time) actually use a lot more resources than the less technologically advanced ways of doing the same things. In a rapidly developing nation of over a billion people, there are lots of groups and individuals already generating unique ways to manage some of these issues—but even that is not enough to keep up with what is generated, and as standards of living rise things are likely to get worse. On this trip we have all learned how to get by with less than we normally would, but it’s worth thinking about the fact that there are so many seemingly insignificant interactions we have on a daily basis in the U.S. that are also opportunities to create less waste.

Once again, I would like to mention that I have written this as someone who is completely ignorant of environmental considerations in general, and I’m not trying to say that there is anything right or wrong about the way things work, here or in the States. I just wanted to make the observation, and to show a side of my trip that you haven’t necessarily seen yet. That’s all for now.