What We're Up To

The three of us -- Karan Chhabra, Katie Swails, and Sandeep Prasanna -- are Duke students spending eight weeks in the south Indian rainforest working on a series of short documentary films about environmental issues in order to aid the outreach programs of SAI Sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary in the Western Ghats region. In the process, we'll also be organically farming, aiding in the construction of biogas plants, and chasing rare plants and animals.

Follow us as we navigate through the jungle and much more!

You can learn more about the DukeEngage program at dukeengage.duke.edu. You can also find out what the SAI Sanctuary, our hosts, are working on at saisanctuary.com.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Project Update






Trekking with the Forestry College experts, as Sandeep mentioned, was absolutely eye-opening. Next, Sanjay and Payal Molur, from the Zoo Outreach Organisation---founded in India by Sally Walker, a Duke alum!---took us through other parts of the Sanctuary. Working with them was a blast, because together they could identify and tell us about almost any animal we found out there. That also means that if they can't identify something, it's probably a big deal. Sanjay found one unidentifiable frog on our first trek through the jungle, and on one walk from Pam and Anil's house back to the cottage, Katie found two more strange frogs. (Sandeep and I were only a little bit jealous.) The benefit of having scientists like Sanjay and Payal in areas like this is that when they see an interesting species, they're aware of whether the scientific community knows about it, and if not, they have the knowledge and credibility to report it. And we got to see all that happen!

This week, we've been trying to tie together the footage of our films while the sun's still out. We've also started documenting and helping with the construction of a biogas plant for the people who work here. The beauty of these plants is their simplicity: they don't require any fancy machinery or equipment at all. So far all the builders have really used as material is metal mesh, metal rods, cement, sand, and water. The way they work is similarly elegant: people who would have otherwise have used plain cow dung as fertilizer, cooking fuel, or building material can instead put it into the biogas plant, essentially a large cement bubble. Pure methane is then released through pipes and into kitchens as cooking fuel, and what's left of the dung is a clean, nitrogen-enriched slurry that makes a much better fertilizer than raw dung. Methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so burning it for cooking is a great way to limit the harm caused by letting cow dung sit around. Also, currently, many use timber---which is obviously terrible for the forest---or kerosene, which is extremely expensive, for cooking. So this plant should relieve a lot of pressure on the already threatened forests here, and save the laborers a great deal of money as well---in fact, Anil said the biogas plant would pay for itself in just three years!