Origin in the Himalayas

Frozen, the terraced fields appeared as silver cascades descending the mountainsides and ice crept, crackling, up the trunk of the village’s lone tree. Although there was no snow (many habitable regions of the Himalayas are known as high-altitude deserts), everything was frozen including the feces in the village’s newly built latrines. This is what had brought us to the village.

The anger was palpable as we took our places in the village leader’s house alongside the council of elders. The villagers had decided to raise money to install the latrines because an NGO had told them that going to the bathroom outside was the cause of the recent increase in childhood diarrhea. The villager’s raised half the money and the NGO built the latrines. In the winter, however, the villagers were still forced to go to the bathroom outside because the latrine’s evacuation doors were too small to allow the removal of the frozen feces. The villagers wanted to know how to build their own latrines so that they didn’t need to rely on what they saw as foreign incompetence. They had heard that we could help.

^^^

I first visited this region in 2001, but it was the words of a young woman whom I met in 2007 that stuck in my mind and led me to co-found One Earth Designs along with Scot Frank.

“When I was little”, she said. “I asked my mother why she was so short. She told me that I too would be short because of the heavy burdens of fuel and water that we women carry.”

As the young woman showed me around her village, I realized that her words did not just describe the water jugs and dung baskets that women hauled up the mountain to their homes. Women also carried the burden of lung disease from their smoky stoves and the burden of caring for their children who frequently had diarrhea from contaminated water. In addition, long hours spent collecting these daily necessities prevented women from improving their social stature because they had no time to attend school.

In the barter economy, all members of the household had contributed to subsistence. With the arrival of the cash economy, however, women had been left with time consuming chores while men became the money makers. Life was difficult because families only had one primary income earner.

For agricultural villages, life was even more difficult in the seasons when the sleet came early, unexpectedly, and ruined all the crops. It had happened more and more in recent years and some of the villagers had begun to whisper that the earth would end soon. People had angered the elements and soon the great storms would come to break the earth apart.

For the nomadic clans, it was the little rabbit-like pika that diminished livelihoods. With the warming climate, pika had migrated to higher elevations, eating the grasslands and leaving little food for the yak herds and sheep flocks. The destruction of the grasslands also meant a decrease in the dung and wild brush that had served as the traditional fuels.

The specifics were different, but I had seen this before in the high-altitude communities of the Andes, the Townships of South Africa, and the lowlands of Brazil, India, and Vietnam. Global trade had changed the social structures of communities, global climate change had drastically altered the environments around them, and global industry had led local governments to try—often brutally—to rid their countries of ‘unsightly’ things such as the rural way of life and the slums on the outskirts of cities.

The controversial economist, Julian Simon, wrote that global population growth was a good thing because it meant more minds to innovate better solutions. But the communities that I am describing have largely been excluded from global solution making. Given the long history of innovation in the Himalayan region, I wanted to know why so many villages were seeking help from outside rather than innovating independently.

The answers I received came down to a matter of confidence. People were well aware of the hardships of their own lives. The images of foreign technologies and lifestyles, on the other hand, always looked so glamorous and happy. By comparison, rural Himalayan communities felt inferior. People no longer believed in their ability to build, fix, innovate, and understand the world around them because their culture and its knowledge had been so challenged and degraded by a rather one-sided dialogue with the outside.

Scot Frank and I co-founded One Earth Designs in order to complete this dialogue and inspire confidence in local innovation as a way forward in a rapidly changing world. We have also found ourselves gaining confidence through this work, confidence in the human ability to help each other in the way that we each wish to be helped, and confidence to believe in a better world no matter how many times our lives or egos are threatened along the way. As Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, wrote in her book, The Blue Sweater (2009), local “ownership of the dream” lies at the core of positive change.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank (OED website; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @catlinpowers.