Alexander Stille, "The Ganges' Next Life"

How will the environmental problems of the twenty-first century be solved? And who will do this work? Will it be scientists? Members of the business community? Religious leaders? In "The Ganges' Next Life," Alexander Stille (ShtE-la) shows how these questions are being answered by those who are working to clean up the Ganges river, the center of India's spiritual and commercial life. By focusing on the collaboration between Veer Bhadra Mishra, a Hindu religious leader and environmental engineer, and William Oswald, an American scientist specializing in renewable energy sources, to design a sustainable system for purifying the water that flows through the Ganges, Stille documents just how fluid the relationships between science and religion, environmentalism and capitalism, tradition and modernity can be. In so doing, Stille bids his readers to consider the essential role that cross-cultural collaboration has to play in making change possible.

Stille, who writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker, specializes in Italian political culture and has covered subjects as diverse as Primo Levi's suicide, the resurgence of interest in the 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and recent efforts by sociologists to quantify happiness. He is the author of two books: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (1993), a documentary that captures the life of Italy's Jews during the Holocaust, and Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995), a study of two prosecutors who sought to put an end to the Mafia's control of Sicily in the mid-1980s. Excellent Cadavers, which has been praised as "A work of history, complex and far-ranging, meticulously researched, that has at the same time the riveting power of a first rate fictional narrative," was made into a feature-length film by HBO in 1999.

Stille, Alexander. "The Ganges' Next Life." The New Yorker, 1999.
Digital image of Alexander Stille drawn from the PBS News Hour web site.
Quotation from "Barry Unsworth's Favorite Books."
Digital image of Veer Bhadra Mishra, below, drawn from the Environmental News Network.

Links to Explore:

The Italian Election: a discussion of right-wing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi election as prime minister of Italy, featuring commentary by Alexander Stille.

The Sankat Mochan Foundation: home page for "the non-profit, non-political, secular, non-governmental organization" dedicated to cleaning up the Ganges, providing information about the river, Varanasi, and the causes of water pollution.

Veer Bhadra Mishra: Hero of the Planet: Time magazine's "heroes gallery" honoring people "doing extraordinary things to preserve and protect the environment," includes a link to a discussion of the United Nation's Preliminary Assessment of Global Ecosystems.

Alternative Wastewater Treatment: Advanced Integrated Pond Systems: from the archives of HopeDance, a magazine devoted to sustainable and renewable energy sources, a description of William Oswald's system for using a system of ponds to treat wastewater.

Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund Locater Site: includes links to Environmapper, a geographic representation of all currently designated Superfund sites, "which are uncontrolled or abandoned places where hazardous waste is located."

Questions for Learning:

• In "The Ganges' Next Life," Stille is drawn to the fact that Mishra "sees no necessary contradiction between the mythological and the scientific." In his assessment of The Italian Election, however, Stille is quite troubled by the contradictions he sees between Silvio Berlusconi's monopoly of the Italian media and his role as the nation's highest public officer. Why is the one contradiction acceptable to Stille and the other not? What makes one contradiction productive and the other dangerous?

• If The Sankat Mochan Foundation really is a "nonprofit, nonpolitical, secular, non-governmental organization," why are they committed to cleaning up the Ganges? If they are motivated by politics, profit, or religion, why are they driven to pursue this project?
  
  
• What makes Mishra a "hero of the planet"? What is the significance of such an honor? Having reflected on the problems described in the essays about the United Nation's Preliminary Assessment of Global Ecosystems, do you think "heroes" like Mishra will be able to resolve the global environmental crisis?
  
  
• From Stille's essay, it is clear that cleaning the Ganges has a deep spiritual significance for Mishra. What argument does the Department of Education's document, Alternative Wastewater Treatment: Advanced Integrated Pond Systems, make for using Professor Oswald's system for treating wastewater? Are the virtues of this approach exclusively economic?
  
  
• It's possible to read Stille's essay and feel that it is about problems that are more than a world away. Are you've visited the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund Locater Site, what have you learned about the location of hazardous materials in your neighborhoods? What are the methods for cleaning up these hazardous wastes? With Stille's article in mind, how would you describe the EPA's approach to containing these environmental threats?
  

Question for Connecting:

• Mishra and Professor Oswald are seeking to clean the Ganges using a low cost system that can be maintained locally. Monsanto and other companies involved in the biogenetic engineering of food are seeking to find ways to improve the durability, quality, and appearance of the food humans eat. Are all of these scientists--those discussed by Stille and those discussed by Michael Pollan in "Playing God in the Garden"--committed to the same ideals? Are they striving for the same goals? What unites the work of biogenetic engineering and wastewater management? What divides this work?

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