Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  iv. The Indus

  East of Karachi, the road to the Indus River delta is lined with tents of refugees from floods that, three summers in a row, have scoured entire villages from the land. Stagnant lakes fill what were once fields.

  In the village of Haji Qasim, fifty kilometers north of the seacoast, people are leaving for the opposite reason: because the water has left them. Since the dawn of human civilization, the great serpentine Indus, one of the world’s biggest rivers, brought snowmelt from the Tibetan plateau down through the fertile Punjab of India and Pakistan, then ended its journey here in Sindh province, where it gushed freshwater and sediments a hundred miles into the Arabian Sea. That silt gave Sindh province some of the richest farmlands in Pakistan, famous for the rice and tea they supplied to all Asia. Now the flow of water is reversing: first India, then Pakistan built dams and barrages across the Indus, trapping the water in the Punjab, stranding the blind Indus River dolphins that had evolved to be sightless in the river’s nutrient-rich silt load. Since powerful Punjabi farmers no longer send enough water to allow the Indus to reach the sea, the sea is creeping up its delta.

  In Haji Qasim, a mud-and-thatch village now devoid of foliage, men still make their living from the irrigation canal, but by fishing, not farming. At noon, they come out of the sun to drink tea steeped in buffalo milk in a communal room alongside the wide canal. A wall is lined with yellow jerry cans filled with drinking water they bring in by donkey cart. The only fresh water that reaches here now is during floods, which, strangely, are caused in part by drought: as dry riverbeds fill with windblown sand, they flatten and can’t control the flow during the monsoon. When the floods subside, seawater intrudes, and mangroves at the river’s mouth die.

  “Without the mangroves, the wind has changed,” says Shafit Mohammad, a cotton farmer who now fishes for mullet. “Long before this happened, our elders had a premonition that the sea was coming, from the wind. People below had to cut the trees, because salt water killed them.”

  He wipes buffalo milk from his moustache. “It was beautiful here. There were so many trees that children couldn’t go in alone, because of boars and wolves. As the sea approached, first our crops were ruined. Then our date palms and forest.”

  Now the sea is rising in the canal. “Every fifteen days, it comes up at night. It has taken boats and flooded our houses.” The floor of this room is a raised wooden platform. Shafit points out the doorway at the yellow hardpan, where rice and wheat once grew. Now, only salt-scrub, and dead palm stumps. “The water is now like cancer to the land.”

  They have built mud berms to hold the rising waters back, but most of the thousand people who lived here have left. “When a man dies, we have to go to Thatta for sweet water to clean his body, it’s so scarce. Three more years, and there will be no more village.” They will have to move to where water is still fresh. Again.

  The elders who read the wind predicted that the Arabian Sea would one day reach Thatta, a town fifty kilometers to the north. No one believed them. But in Ahmed Jat, ten kilometers farther upstream, they are beginning to believe. To the families left in Haji Qasim, visiting Ahmed Jat is like time-traveling to their own village just a decade earlier. Orchards of date palms, filled with mynah birds. Neem trees, figs, mangos, and almonds. A network of trickling irrigation channels bringing transparent water to cotton, sugarcane, rice, wheat, tomatoes, squash, and okra. Hand pumps and solar panels. Goats and water buffalo.

  “Everyone here is related by blood to a single couple who founded this village sixty years ago,”3 says Shafi Mohammad Jat, a wiry man in a long orange kameez with a thicket of black hair, his cheek full of betel leaves. Today, Ahmed Jat has 270 families, most with seven or eight children. God has blessed them with a good life, Jat says, even though the last drought killed sixty goats, and even though they are so remote that the Green Revolution never came here.

  “We never got those fancy fertilizers.” Plus, the nearest clinic is thirty kilometers away. Eight women have died in childbirth trying to reach it in the rains.

  “But we do well,” he says, showing off crops grown with buffalo manure, and a bamboo-shaded longhouse filled with poles of healthy betel vines. “Except—”

  Except another of their wells has just turned too brackish to drink. “We can still use it for most crops,” he says. So they’re digging more wells, this time a thousand feet from the village. “But we know what’s going to happen.” Seawater is moving north, a kilometer a year. “Maybe we have ten more years. Or less.”

  And then?

  He points north. “We move to Thatta.”

  In a room on the outskirts of Thatta, a man with a fan-shaped moustache named Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed quotes from Qur’anic verse 2:233, the Surah Al-Baqara:

  “Mothers shall suckle their children for two whole years.”

  His audience, four young bearded imams, quotes with him in unison. The surah has become Ahmed’s mantra. It is the key that opens a tightly shut door. He has debated many religious leaders who oppose family planning, but he always wins, because it is incontestably clear that the Prophet intended for women to nurse babies thoroughly, thus spacing their births.

  Ahmed directs HANDS, the Health and Nutrition Development Society, a Pakistani NGO that gently presses the government to deliver services it promises. He is under no illusion about what his country faces. During the 2010 floods, caused by ferocious monsoons, 175,000 people—70 percent of the district of Thatta’s population—fled one night when a levee broke. During the 2011 floods, one-fifth of the country was under water, and again in 2012. Now the sea is advancing, pushing millions of people into less and less space.

  Reducing population pressure is critical, he says. “But you can’t say ‘family planning.’ You must say ‘birth spacing.’ If it’s about health, they accept. Numbers, they resist.”

  In every district, they identify the four most important leaders, such as these white-clad mullahs. “We send them to Islamabad, to meet with high religious leaders who have been trained by the Population Council. They learn that to have healthy nursing mothers means dealing with the fact that half of Pakistani girls are malnourished. That means changing the custom of women getting what’s left over after men have their fill. They learn that this submissiveness can’t be overcome if there are ten times as many schools for boys as for girls.”

  “In the 1960s,” says Qari Abdul Basid, imam of Thatta’s Shah Gehan Mosque, “the government didn’t consult the imams. The proper way was ignored. So people refused family planning.” Now, in Friday prayers, they teach that Islam professes health and nutrition, and they repeat the directive in Surah Al-Baqara that a child has a right to two years of mother’s milk.

  They prefer nursing to avoid conception, but they accept pills and condoms. Much of the birth control comes from USAID, a delicate point with Pakistani mullahs; the pamphlets they share in meetings with extremist religious leaders omit the USAID logo and its accompanying motto, “From the American people.”

  “Acceptance is growing,” says Imam Basid. “People space births, and instead of seven or eight, they have four or five. That is important: without birth spacing, our resources will be finished.”

  A prayer chimes: it’s the ring-tone of his mobile phone. He begs his leave. The four imams file out, leaving Ahmed at a table surrounded by a new USAID shipment of midwifery instruments.

  In the village of Ahmed Khan Zour, fifty kilometers farther north, a HANDS theater troupe is giving its 640th performance. More than one hundred women in bright salwar kameez and sparkling nose rings, surrounded by daughters with henna-painted arms and even some fathers, crowd under a portico to watch. The performers begin with a song that equates happiness with health, and health with a two-year gap. A male actor explains that the drama will reveal what that means, and invites them to figure out what’s wrong with the picture they’re about to see.

  It begins with a marriage ceremony; the bride is very young. The scene shifts to a bedroom.
The wife lies against a pillow, trying to comfort an unhappy infant.

  “What’s wrong?” asks her husband.

  “He’s sick,” she says.

  “Fix him!”

  “What can I do? I’m sick myself. I’m pregnant again,” she sobs.

  The next day, a neighbor comes by and finds her sicker and weaker. “Why don’t you space your births?” she asks. “My husband and I do.”

  The whole family gathers. “You’re not sick, you lazy liar,” declares her mother-in-law. “You just don’t want to give my son children. You only worry about yourself!”

  By now, the audience is murmuring, and the action stops. “What’s wrong here? And why has it happened?” the actor playing the husband asks.

  Hands raise; opinions are voiced. The wife wasn’t even sixteen; she wasn’t ready to have children. Her parents should have taught her about waiting between children. Most comments, though, blame the mother-in-law: “They want us to have as many children as they had to have,” says a woman in a black hijab, to applause.

  The woman playing the mother-in-law turns out to be a doctor. Out come the pills, the injectables, the T-shaped copper IUDs, the foil-wrapped condoms. She explains each, and explains which ones require a visit to the clinic.

  “We have to go all the way to Thatta,” a woman says.

  “Not today,” says the doctor. Walking to stage left, she pulls back a sheet, revealing the ambulatory clinic they’ve brought along. She steps inside. “I’m here all day,” she says. And the line forms.

  When Pakistan developed a nuclear bomb, USAID cut off funding family planning here for six years. Funds for the roving theater performances run out in 2013. “We tell USAID,” says HANDS director Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed, “that without continued support, Pakistan will probably produce more of the kind of people that the USA fears.”

  Only about 13 million of Pakistan’s 90 million females have access to contraceptives, he reminds them. “They understand. But sometimes politics in Washington make them reluctant.”

  Even if they do continue providing, he knows that a two-year gap resulting in four or five children per family will not add up to population stability.

  “No. We’re really afraid we can’t cope with the growing population. We are a crowded, underdeveloped nation—more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more illiterates, more youths without productive jobs, and more chaos.”

  He makes some marks on a pad. “If we can’t keep providing contraceptives or encourage their use, by 2050 we’ll be approaching three times the number we’re at today.”

  He tosses his pad down. “We’re praying that Pakistan only doubles.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Ayatollah Giveth and Taketh Away

  i. Horses

  When Hourieh Shamshiri Milani entered medical school in 1974, just thirteen of seventy students in her class at the National University of Iran were women. “And of those thirteen, only two of us wore the scarf.”

  During the reign of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī, the final Shah of Iran, head covering was rare among educated women. In 1936, seeking to modernize the country, his father, Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, had decreed that all Iranian women be unveiled. When Rezā Shāh was forced to abdicate in 1941 by the invading British because of his cordial ties with Germany,1 the rule was relaxed, and hijab became a matter of personal choice. In Shamshiri’s family, they chose to wear it. She would choose to do so still, although now there is no choice.

  In the alcohol-free piano bar of the Espinas Hotel in central Tehran, her hair concealed under flowered silk, Dr. Shamshiri is a handsome woman with striking eyebrows. She was born in Tabriz in northwest Iran, near the border with what was then the Soviet Union. In that region known as Iranian Azerbaijan, a woman felt naked in public with her head uncovered. Her family was devout, but her father was also a high school teacher who gave his blessing to her desire for education. “Although,” she remembers, “he did not want people to know that his daughter was attending university.”

  During her fourth year of studies in Tehran, the utterly unexpected happened. Like his father before him, the Shah of Iran had grown more despised over time. His loss of public trust began with a 1953 coup that deposed a popular prime minister who had dared to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, because 80 percent of profits went to the drilling company known today as BP, née British Petroleum. With Shah Pahlavī’s cooperation, the coup was engineered by Britain’s M16 and the CIA (the United States having assumed, erroneously, that the prime minister was a communist).

  In the mid-1970s, the Shah, ostensibly a constitutional monarch, abolished every political party except his own, which incited spontaneous strikes. A high-ranking Shi’a cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled for denouncing the Shah’s lavish rule from the Peacock Throne and his coziness with the West, became a symbol of defiance in absentia. The strikes intensified and organized, until millions filled the streets. Suddenly to everyone’s shock, in January 1979 the Shah fled to Egypt. A year later he died from lymphoma.

  The bloodless revolution that toppled him had been joined across the country’s political spectrum, from orthodox mullahs to intellectuals. When the triumphant Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France, even soldiers in the Shah’s army celebrated. A referendum on whether the monarchy should be abolished in favor of Islamic government won 98 percent approval.

  The victorious citizenry widely believed that in newly liberated Iran, both secular and religious would live and worship as they liked, with Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s guiding spirit. Soon, however, Iranians learned that Khomeini’s idea of spiritual leadership was not mere guidance, but theocracy. Although the revolutionary constitution had established a democracy, Khomeini anointed himself Supreme Leader, with a Guardian Council of religious clerics holding veto power over parliament, president, and prime minister. Among his first edicts was reinstatement of the compulsory hijab. Women’s heads must be covered, and their bodies cloaked in chadors or long, loose-fitting garments.

  Secular Iranians felt betrayed. But as Hourieh Shamshiri entered her specialized studies in gynecology, her divided country suddenly united behind the Ayatollah, because Iran was attacked. Shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension, across Iran’s western border Saddam Hussein had assumed the presidency of Iraq. For thirteen years, Khomeini had lived there in exile, stirring revolutionary fervor among Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims until Hussein, a nominal Sunni and Iraq’s military strongman, finally pushed him out of the country. A year later, as Iran was still reorganizing after centuries of dynastic rule, Hussein seized the chance to invade his weakened, distracted neighbor, whose oil-rich Khuzestan province he coveted.

  A decade later Saddam would try the same thing in Kuwait, and the United States would respond by invading to protect international petroleum interests. But no such help was forthcoming to Iran. During the chaotic infancy of Iran’s Islamic Republic, a group of students, incensed that the Shah was receiving treatment for his declining health in Texas, stormed the U.S. Embassy. For 444 days, they held fifty-two embassy staffers hostage. Among the upshots of that crisis was American backing for Saddam’s Iraq, in what became the twentieth-century’s longest war between conventional armies.

  Iraq struck with ground forces, missiles, and mustard gas. It had the support of both the USSR and NATO, which supplied its armaments, including feedstock for nerve gas. Iran, with more than three times the population, responded with repeated waves of soldiers. Within two years, it suffered tremendous human casualties but regained the ground lost to Saddam’s initial incursions. The two countries then dug in for six more years of entrenched warfare, during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died.

  Before its Islamic Revolution, Iran had begun a family-planning program, following a 1966 census that showed a startling increase over the previous decade. In 1956, Iran had 18.9 million people, but Iranian women were averaging 7.7 children apiece. In only ten years, they added 6 million more. The health
ministry began distributing birth control, but with only modest success: the 1976 census still showed fertility rates of 6.3 children per woman. The top-down program was training medical personnel, but failing to explain to parents why they might want to limit the size of their families.

  By the time of the 1979 revolution, there were 37 million Iranians. Although many mullahs extolled traditional virtues of early marriage and large families, the Ministry of Health was able to keep its family-planning program. The Supreme Leader himself clarified religious questions about artificial birth control with a fatwa stating that it was permitted. But war with Iraq changed everything. The Population and Family Planning office closed. In its place was a campaign for every fertile Iranian woman to help build Iran a “Twenty Million Man Army.”

  The legal marrying age for girls dropped from eighteen to thirteen. To encourage women to bear many children, ration cards were issued on a per capita basis, including newborns. According to Iranian demographer-historian Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, rationing covered not only foodstuffs, but “consumer goods like television sets, refrigerators, carpets and even cars.” Because nursing children used little of their allotment, a black market in extra food and appliances became a key source of family income.

  As war with Iraq dragged on, the birth rate surpassed Khomeini’s demographic dreams. Although a million Iranian fighters, including mere boys, were martyred by inhaling poison gas, clearing land mines, or charging in human waves into artillery barrages, the 1986 census counted nearly 50 million Iranians: a doubling in two decades. By some estimates, the growth rate peaked at 4.2 percent, near the biological limits for fertile women and the highest rate of population increase the world had ever seen.

  Tehran, an inland city, grew prosperous and populous because of plentiful springs in the Alborz Mountains, which form its snowy backdrop to the north—a vista that, smog permitting, includes 18,000-foot Mt. Damavand, the highest volcano in Asia. From north Tehran’s posh foothills, the city descends two thousand feet through a broad middle-class swathe, dropping into an arid plain filled with working-class neighborhoods that end in south Tehran’s fringe of hovels. Down there, females are invariably enveloped in black fabric, but through much of Tehran, women perform daily fashion miracles, defying the intent of modesty laws by making what is barely hidden all the more alluring. Obligatory long manteaus tighten at the hips and bodices of shoppers in tailored jeans and spiky heels. By sheer numbers, women contriving to conceal the least amount of hair under gauzy hijabs overwhelm morality police trying to enforce shariah dress code. They are further undermined by hundreds of stores selling hair extensions, makeup, wigs, hair clasps, and lingerie—the latter is even sold in the gift shop at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb. Smuggling networks widely assumed to be run by the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards help keep stores stocked with European and New York haute couture—sluiced, like the BMWs and Lamborghinis of north Tehran, through portals like Dubai.