Nature's Treasures

Bhoomi and Surya are spending their school vacation with Ajji, their grandmother, who lives in a village on the edge of a forest in the Western Ghats. The air there is fresh and cooler than in the city, and hills, streams, plants, animals and birds surround the house on every side. One afternoon Ajji asks them a question that sounds almost too simple: can you name the treasures nature has given this place? The pure air is refreshing, she says, the soil is fertile enough to support countless living things, sunlight arrives in abundance every single day, and the trees provide food and shelter to animals, birds and insects alike. Bhoomi answers first, water, we use it for drinking and for growing vegetables, and Ajji agrees: without these treasures of nature, no form of life on Earth would be possible at all, and every one of us is part of that same nature, not separate from it.

Ajji begins the day with a breathing exercise, taking slow deep breaths in and letting them out, to get more fresh air into her lungs. Try holding your own breath after a deep breath in: you will find it surprisingly difficult to hold for long, and the reason is that the air you breathe contains oxygen, which your body needs constantly to carry out its basic functions. A human being can survive without food or water for a few days, but not without oxygen for more than a few minutes. Air itself is not one single gas but a mixture: out of every 100 parts of air, 78 parts are nitrogen, 21 parts are oxygen, and the remaining 1 part is argon, carbon dioxide and other gases in small quantities. You notice air only indirectly, when it moves: leaves rustling, clothes swaying on a line, pages fluttering as a fan switches on. Moving air is called wind, and it can blow gently as a breeze or fiercely during a storm. A firki, a simple paper pinwheel, spins the moment wind catches it, and a windmill works on exactly the same principle at a much larger scale, its wings turning to run flour mills, pull water up from a well, or generate electricity. India has several large windmill farms built specifically to harness this wind energy, among them Muppandal in Tamil Nadu, Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, and Brahmanvel in Maharashtra.

Bhoomi and Surya help Ajji fill water troughs for the cows and water the vegetables and medicinal herbs in her garden, learning to make sure every drop is actually used and none goes to waste. Water is needed for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing, growing crops and countless industrial purposes, yet water covers only about two-thirds of Earth's surface, and most of that is found in oceans and seas as salty, saline water, unfit for drinking, farming or industry. What we actually need for those purposes is freshwater, found in ice sheets, snow, rivers, lakes and underground, and a very large share of that freshwater is difficult to access, locked away in ice or deep underground; only a small, precious fraction sits in easily reachable ponds, rivers, lakes and wells. This scarcity is exactly why water must be used carefully rather than wasted, in hand-washing, laundry, dishwashing, showers, cooking and gardening alike, and why polluting freshwater sources by dumping trash or industrial waste into them is such a serious problem, since polluted water becomes unfit for any living being to use. One of the oldest solutions to water scarcity in India is rainwater harvesting: collecting and storing rainwater for later use, sometimes in modern buildings, but also through centuries-old stepwells, called Bawadi in Rajasthan and Vav in Gujarat, dug as deep trenches lined with stone blocks that let water seep in from nearby lakes, ponds and rivers as well as from rain. Toorji ka Jhalra in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, is one well-known surviving example. World Water Day is observed every year on 22 March, a reminder of exactly how precious and limited this particular treasure really is.

On a sunny afternoon, Bhoomi and Surya help Ajji dry chillies outdoors, using nothing but the Sun's own heat, the same way her own mother and grandmother once dried mangoes for days at a time. The Sun, Ajji tells them, is the main source of energy on Earth, and every plant and animal ultimately depends on it. Its heat and light are used for drying clothes, cooking, and, for plants, making their own food. Ajji later poses a small puzzle: watching a cow graze in a field, one child insists the cow is getting its energy straight from standing in the sunshine, while the other insists the real source is the grass it eats. Who is right? The second child is, and the reasoning matters: standing in sunlight does not itself give an animal energy, but the grass the cow eats needed sunlight to grow in the first place, so the cow's energy still traces back to the Sun, just by a longer, indirect route through the grass. Plants capture sunlight directly to make their food; animals that eat those plants get the Sun's energy secondhand; animals that eat those plant-eating animals get it thirdhand, and this entire chain, plants making food, animals eating plants, other animals eating them, and all of it eventually reaching your own plate, only exists because the Sun keeps shining. Solar panels on rooftops, street lights and traffic signals capture that same sunlight directly and turn it into electricity, and the Sun's energy can also be used directly, without any panel at all, to cook food in a solar cooker or heat water in a solar water heater.

One morning Ajji takes Bhoomi and Surya walking through the forest itself, pointing out herbs, shrubs and trees of every kind, large areas of dense plant growth is exactly what a forest is. Along the way they collect nellikai, Indian gooseberries, that have already fallen to the ground, and Ajji explains a village tradition: fruit is never plucked straight off the tree, it is left for animals and birds to eat, and only what has already fallen is collected by people. Forests are a natural home for countless wild animals, birds and insects, providing them food and shelter, and every animal in that web depends on other living things for its own survival, which is exactly why a wide diversity of life matters: it keeps enough food available for every living being in the system. Over the years forest cover has been shrinking, mainly because of large-scale tree-cutting by humans, and a lost or damaged forest takes many years to regrow, which is why using forests responsibly, giving them time to regenerate, matters so much. India marks this importance with Van Mahotsav, a week-long forest festival held every July, during which new trees are planted and awareness about protecting forests is spread. This respect for forests runs deep and old in India: one of the most famous examples is the Chipko movement, which began in the early 1970s in Uttarakhand, where local women actively encircled and hugged trees with their own bodies to stop them being felled. Back on the forest floor, Bhoomi and Surya notice the ground is thick with fallen leaves and feels distinctly damp underfoot. Ajji explains that plant roots hold the soil in place and stop it washing away, while the fallen leaves themselves slowly decay and enrich that same soil with nutrients, nutrients that new plants and trees then use to grow, a small, constant example of recycling built directly into nature itself.

Back at the house, Bhoomi and Surya help Ajji prepare the garden soil for planting vegetables, digging gently and breaking up lumps, and along the way they spot small pebbles, plant roots, and a few earthworms moving through the earth. Those earthworms are natural agents that turn and loosen soil as they move through it, which is exactly why the spaces between soil particles matter so much: they hold air and give plant roots room to grow. Soil itself is formed by the slow disintegration of rock, broken apart bit by bit by the Sun, water and living organisms, over a genuinely long stretch of time, thousands of years. Different soils suit different purposes, some are best for growing particular crops, others for making bricks, and forests in particular tend to have a wide variety of soil types, which is part of why they support such rich biodiversity. Rocks themselves show up everywhere once you start looking: in the construction of houses, temples, roads and dams, as slate roofing, as laterite bricks, and in well-known named rocks like granite, sandstone and marble. Humans have shaped rock into tools, hand axes and arrowheads among them, for thousands of years. Underneath all of this lies one more layer: rocks are themselves made of minerals, and it is from minerals that important metals like aluminium, gold, copper and iron are actually extracted. Minerals go into aeroplanes, cars, jewellery, cosmetics and every piece of electrical and electronic equipment you own; an ordinary mobile phone alone contains around a dozen different minerals, including gold, silver, copper and cobalt. Rocks take thousands to millions of years to form, which is exactly why they, too, need to be used responsibly rather than carelessly.

Back in the city, Surya notices something at the petrol station: different vehicles queue at different pumps. The reason, as Ajji explains, is that different vehicles run on different fuels, commonly petrol or diesel, both of which, along with kerosene, come from petroleum. Petroleum, together with natural gas and coal, are together known as fossil fuels, and the name is literal: they formed from the buried remains of microorganisms and plants that were pressed deep underground and slowly transformed, over millions of years, into the fuels used today. Natural gas is burned for cooking and for generating electricity, and increasingly it also fuels vehicles directly as Compressed Natural Gas, CNG, a notably cleaner-burning option than petrol or diesel. Coal is used mainly to generate electricity and is mined in several parts of India. Earlier generations cooked with coal, firewood and dung cakes; today, cleaner options like natural gas and Liquefied Petroleum Gas, LPG, have largely replaced them in most homes. All fossil fuels share one serious limitation: they exist in fixed, limited quantities, and once used up they are gone, since nothing is replacing them on any timescale that matters to a human life. Burning them also releases smoke and carbon dioxide, contributing directly to air pollution, which is exactly why walking, cycling or using public transport for short trips, wherever that's realistic, genuinely helps conserve them.

Line up everything this chapter has covered, air, water, sunlight, forests, soil, rocks, minerals, fossil fuels, and a pattern emerges: every one of them is something we get directly from nature, which is exactly what makes something a natural resource. Compare that against an electric bulb, a bicycle, or a solar panel: none of these exist in nature on their own, they are built by human beings, using natural resources as raw material, which makes them human-made resources instead. Among natural resources themselves, one distinction matters more than any other: how quickly does nature replace what gets used? Remember Ajji's rule about nellikai, only collect fruit that has already fallen, leaving the rest for animals and birds; the seeds in their droppings eventually grow into new trees, replenishing the very thing that was used, even though it takes years. Resources that get renewed, replenished or restored within a reasonable stretch of time this way, air, water and forests among them, are called renewable resources, and nature keeps them going as long as they are used sensibly. Fossil fuels sit at the opposite extreme: they take millions of years to form, exist in fixed and limited quantities, and once burned, they are simply gone, with no realistic prospect of replacement on any human timescale. Resources like this, minerals, soil, rocks, coal, petroleum and natural gas among them, are called non-renewable resources, and they demand a very different kind of care: not just responsible use, but active conservation, since using them up is, for all practical purposes, permanent.

When it's time to go home, Bhoomi and Surya's mother arrives to collect them, and they proudly show her the vegetable plants already sprouting in Ajji's garden and the dried chillies she has sent along. But something else is obvious the moment they reach the city: the sky looks different, there are far fewer trees, and the air itself smells faintly of vehicle smoke instead of the freshness they had grown used to at Ajji's. Their mother explains plainly: burning fossil fuels in vehicles generates exactly that smoke, though electric vehicles, which release none at all, are becoming a real, growing alternative precisely because of this problem. Every daily activity, it turns out, draws on some natural resource, water for washing clothes, clay for making toys, firewood for cooking, and simply noticing that connection is the first step toward using resources more carefully. Mahatma Gandhi put the underlying idea about as plainly as it can be put: the Earth provides enough to satisfy every person's need, but not enough for every person's greed. Nature's treasures, air, water, sunlight, forests, soil and everything drawn from them, are not unlimited, and they are not separate from us either; using them wisely is simply how we keep them available for the people who come after us.