Sonam Wangchuk who was in Bengaluru to receive the TN Khoshoo Memorial Award (instituted by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment) for his pioneering work in the field of sustainability, spoke to The Hindu about the inspiration for and the science behind his ice stupas, as well as his visions for the future.
It all began with the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh you initiated which encompasses an alternative school where students receive hands-on learning to solve local problems sustainably. How do students react to such a system of learning?
The students go on campaigns to villages to make meaningful education a priority for people, to apply what they learnt, in the villages, on topics related to health and hygiene and environmental sustainability. So whenever we do a module or course or camp, our philosophy is that you forget if you just understand it. But when you have experienced it, it becomes unforgettable. So they take different gardening techniques like mulching or greenhouses to their homes and villages. So they are very inspired by what they learn. When they go on such a trip, they come back refreshed and happier. Otherwise what is done in classrooms is incomprehensible — in a language you don’t understand, administered by teachers who are not sympathetic.
What stirred your interest in nature, science and problem solving?
I was always an inquisitive child, asking many questions, why, how etc. Which is what science is and I had a natural interest in it. I was born in a small village where people work with animals, in fields and farms. Then as a teenager and young adult in the 1970s, I had access to several people from across the world who visited Ladakh as tourists. They spoke about the West being disillusioned with their progress because of the problems their society was facing now — homes and families were breaking down and their environmental problems were starting to become visible. They discussed acid rain, even global warming. I quickly saw that the answer was not in industrial mechanisation but in living in harmony with nature. We encourage our students to interact with people from other places and big cities so that they get different perspectives of what is happening.
You received the Terra award in 2014, for tapping into the sun’s power for your SECMOL campus. Did traditional Ladakhi homes use such earthen construction and did that provide the inspiration?
So sustainable buildings have two major aspects: natural material and natural energy sources to operate. The building material was always there from our ancestors except that it was overlooked and ridiculed, considered backward, primitive and so on. And I have a habit of not going by what people say and feel and actually analysing if it is true. I saw nothing wrong with earth — in fact everything was right, with mud. For a dry cold desert, it was just the right material, and it was so affordable and thus socially so inclusive. It was falling from the favour of people and I felt it needed to be resurrected.
The energy part was all new for Ladakh because we did not have glass till then and most solar-energy capturing systems need glass. So it was a beautiful marriage of traditional material and skills with modern science in the best way possible — which heals people and nature.
Your next famous innovation, the ice stupas: where did you draw inspiration from?
In a desert like Ladakh, water is a problem. I grew up listening to stories about how our ancestors grew some kind of glaciers, traditionally — but this was steeped in myth. Later in my life I came across the work of Mr. Norphel from Ladakh, who was working on another kind of making ice in winters, which was more scientific than the ancestral one. He shared with me the difficulties he was facing — like premature melting of ice, and having to do this in high altitudes. I wanted to find a way out: by March, the ice is gone and does not serve the purpose for farmers.
One day I saw a block of ice under a bridge near our school in, surprisingly, May. So the question was how to block the sun’s rays to prevent ice from melting. Then I realised it was more about area than material. The sun needs a large area for melting — and farmers don’t need area, they need volume of water. So we thought of making shapes which have a low surface area for the given volume — like spheres and cones. In effect, it is like being under a bridge, but shaded by itself.
We put a pipe upstream; the pressure it builds makes the water rise and come out through a fountain. Combined with -20 degrees Celsius air, the ice stupa is made when it loses its latent heat and freezes.
In high school science, students learn about latent heat but only for exams, but this was a chance to use it in real life. We made a small prototype in January 2014 and while many predicted it would melt by April, it lasted till mid-May.
What is the average size of a stupa? And how much water can it hold?
We are trying to go bigger; while the prototype was 20 feet high, we also made 65-foot and last year, 84-foot-high stupas. We are now convinced after trials that the bigger the size, the easier it is to make it. Our aim is to create stupas of 150 feet which would each hold 10 million litres of water and 50 of such stupas would be a sizeable amount of water. Almost every village has a water problem and is a potential location for these stupas.
How do you see the transformation taking place? What is your vision with these stupas?
You can green a lot of deserts using these stupas. Greening includes solving problems of farmers in places where rains are infrequent due to climate change. We set out to do this, but we now see that we can even green deserts near villages. With ice stupas, there will be more water available in spring when the water scarcity is high.
When you green an area especially in a place like Ladakh, you are converting a natural landscape that has formed after millions of years of evolution.
Yes, many people ask if this will disturb the ecology of the area. But the desert is so huge: in Ladakh, there is as much as 45,000 sq.km of desert. Greening around 100 sq.km of this would be negligible. It would be so small a scale that no plant or organism would be affected.
In your new university that is coming soon – the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh – you plan to have dedicated courses to study climate change and sustainable tourism.
Education systems should cater to the needs of the time. Three hundred years ago, it was made to conquer nature, making the mess we can see now. We need to undo this and universities should respond to that — a university that heals rather than harms.
Tourism is a big part of the livelihood of most mountain regions but it is managed so badly that it is unsustainable. So our programmes will be introduced and conducted in a practical hands-on way: students will get to run hotels or resorts. They need not pay fees — but will be paid — for their work. The university would be sustained by their work — both nature-friendly and socially inclusive. There is no rich or poor for sweat equity and imagination. We will also be looking at eco-restoration of valleys damaged by climate change — many valleys now face flash floods and erratic water availability. Each of these schools will have a live lab — for tourism, the farm-stays and hotels; for ecology, it will be these valleys. By working on these, they will truly learn — and take the knowledge back to their villages to innovate and improve more areas.
