An Afternoon with Dr. Rashneh Pardiwala, Zoroastrian Ecologist

Investigating India #3!

Dr. Rashneh Pardiwala and friend. Image courtesy of Dr. Pardiwala & Martin Ranger.

Dr. Rashneh Pardiwala is the founder and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education (CERE), a Mumbai-based environmental organization highly active in the fields of urban afforestation, solar electrification, rainwater harvesting, environmental education, carbon management systems and more. Dr. Pardiwala is also a member of the Zoroastrian Parsi community, an ancient religious minority who are the custodians of the Doongerwadi Forest of Mumbai, home to the sacred Tower of Silence.

The Weekly Anthropocene interviewed Dr. Pardiwala in person on May 6, 2024, at a cafe in South Mumbai. After the interview, we were able to visit the open-to-the-public edge of the Doongerwadi Forest.

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Dr. Pardiwala’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

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So, Dr. Pardiwala, how did you start getting interested in ecology?

I’ve always been an outdoor person even as a child, who loved going for long walks in the forest with my father, fascinated by nature.

I did my bachelor's in life sciences, which gave me a broad foundation in biological sciences. Followed it up with a master's in biotechnology. Then I did a master's in ecology from the University of Edinburgh which I converted into a PhD program, looking at the effects of climate change on heathland ecosystems.

I’m from Mumbai, and essentially, after completing my PhD, I did realize that this is where home is. This is where the environmental problems and challenges are greater. I decided to return to India.

And at that point, when I returned to India, way back in 2002, the environmental movement seemed bifurcated between two main areas. The large environmental organizations like WWF and BNHS, focused on wildlife conservation, while on the other hand, there were many grassroots level socio-environmental movements opposing developmental projects like the Dahanu or Narmada movement. No one was really talking about sustainable development; it was a case of either/or.

And that's when I realized that if I wanted to work in the space of sustainability, then I'd have to start my own organization. So within six months of graduating from Edinburgh, I started the organization CERE, the Center for Environmental Research and Education. We work to promote environmental sustainability through research and innovation, formal education, government and corporate partnerships and publications … every means possible.

Our team has always been looking at solving urban environmental issues. Our focus has always been that everything is fine with nature, it is the way human beings are interacting with nature that is the problem.

Source.

We work in all the environmental verticals. One of our major projects is the Urban Afforestation Project. The aim is really to green our concrete jungle. That has been a project that has been very successful. We have been planting 300,000 trees across major cities in India, 26 cities including Delhi, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and many others. We've planted 300,000 large native trees, and we continue planting. If you go to our website, you get all the statistics. For us, the whole thinking has been, we need to create these little islands of biodiversity in our cities. So we never just plant a tree, we create a habitat and an ecosystem. We need to learn to coexist with other species.

Absolutely.

So afforestation has been a major project. The second major project that we work in is renewable energy. That program is called SOS. We know the impact electricity has on global warming; in India, which is blessed with so much sunlight, solar needs to be here.

We initially started off with the concept of SOS as Schools on Solar. Because schools will utilize active electricity in real time, so you don't need a battery backup system. Most schools are active during the day. You put the panels on the terraces and they will utilize it in real time.

I see.

We started off with schools themselves. But during the pandemic, we didn't know how Covid was going to pan out, when we realized that the need was for solar on hospitals. Because they were overrun with a lot of patients and suddenly their operational costs were sky-high They were struggling with ventilators and a much higher electricity demand.

So that's when our Schools on Solar became Switch on Solar. Because then we started solar electrifying, it could be a school, hospital, old age home, rescue center. We have electrified the Tata Memorial Hospital, which is one of the largest cancer care hospitals. We solar electrified Sanjeevani Children's Hospital. Those hospitals are running on solar.

Source

And I think the aim is distribution of electricity. Much of Mumbai’s electricity comes from a thermal coal-based power plant in Dahanu. But surprisingly, the thermal power plant is in this zone, but sadly, they still have power cuts of almost five or six hours every single day in Dahanu.

So the coal plant is located there. The local rural community get all the pollution. Their land is taken away. But they don't get even one part of that electricity generated. It's in their backyard. And they will be in darkness with regular power cuts. All the electricity goes straight to light up Mumbai. Where is the equity in that?

If our cities start consuming less from the grid, there'll be more to go around. Because even today there is an energy deficit in the country. There are still villages that do not receive 24-hours electricity. Solar is a solution which can redress not only environmental concerns but social concerns as well.

So, we've solar electrified over 55 institutions in the past four years. This very cafe that you're sitting in, this building has solar panels that we have installed.

One of many CERE school solar projects.

Again, if you go to our website, you have all the information and the financial savings that the institutions have had. When we work with the school and they save on their electricity charges, they can utilize the savings for other educational programs, for school infrastructure. I remember the first school that we solar electrified. The principal was so excited to find that, wow, my monthly savings have been almost 12,000 rupees. She immediately calculated, “In one year, I can actually do up the science lab!”

Wow.

“In the next year, I can take my children on a field trip, and I've never taken my students out on a field trip just because we never had the funds.”

Solar really helps in building civic infrastructure.

That is wonderful. This is such an honorable thing that you're doing.

I think when you look at any environmental project, it isn't unidimensional. Any environmental project will have a social core, and a financial aspect.

So, Schools on Solar became Switch on Solar. And then there’s water. Water is a natural resource that is rapidly diminishing. If you look at India, in the west, the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are fighting over the Narmada River waters. It's been one of India's iconic environmental movements. In the south, the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are fighting over the waters of Cavery River.

That reminds me how in the US, the Western states have like California and Arizona have been fighting about the Colorado River. They struck a new deal recently.

It's very similar.

Source

And it's not only between states in India. China has been creating large dams upstream, so India isn't getting enough water down the Brahmaputra. Then, of course, you know, it goes into the Bay of Bengal. So if you look at the estuarine ecosystems, they are suffering as well.

Like the Sundarbans in Bangladesh.

Yeah. It's that entire area that gets fed by the mighty Brahmaputra river.

And if you look at the groundwater…surface water is really depleted, and of course, it'll continue depleting with higher evaporation rates with global warming. But the water security of any nation is really not in its surface water reserves, but in its groundwater.

And if you look at the groundwater table in India, it has fallen drastically since independence. In any village, you'll see all the olden open wells would have been dug 50 to 80 feet deep. And they'd possibly be completely dry right now, but the fact is that if they were at 50 to 80 feet, that means there was once water at that level at some point.

Today, in places like Rajasthan, they have bore wells going up to 300, 400, 500 feet. The last one was 600 feet and still no water. And at that depth, Sam, even when they are hitting water, what do you think they're also getting?

Minerals. Pollution. I’ve read about arsenic being a problem in Indian wells because of this.

Heavy metals, yeah.

So we've been promoting rainwater harvest. We have now created Mumbai, Pune and Nashik cities’ largest rainwater harvesting systems.

Wow.

The smallest system harvests about 28.8 million litres of water every monsoon season and the larger systems harvest over 200 million litres of water every monsoon season. We just re-charge the rainfall into the ground, because that's your biggest aquifer, instead of surface run-off into stormwater and sewage drains that empty into the sea. We just want to recharge our groundwater table because that is your water security.

In Mumbai, you see a lot of water tankers running around. We are down to, I think, our lakes have reached the lowest levels in the last 10 years, at less than 20% water level. It’s going to go down until the monsoons arrive in mid-June, which is still over a month away.

Fascinating.

All of this, solar and rainwater and reforestation, the fields intertwine with one another.

We have a project with the state police force of Maharashtra, for their campus where the constabulary will be trained. They’re manning election booths right now, and if there are riots, they are the reserve police that will be brought out. That is your state reserve police force. They have 19 campuses across the entire state of Maharashtra.

And suddenly all these campuses are facing a severe water shortage. These campuses are large, anywhere from 100 acres going up to 400 acres to meet the training requirements of a police force. These are huge campuses. But sadly with little vegetation and severe water scarcity.

So I was invited by one of the campuses, they said, why don't you come and plant trees? We've got so many acres and acres, come plant trees. I did a survey, and I realized that I could plant them, but they’d just die. There wasn’t enough water.

A CERE rainwater retention system under construction at a police campus. Source

So we thought, first we improve the water scenario, and then I will go back to plant trees. So water and afforestation are very closely connected. But to have a good watering regime for such a large plantation, I'm going to have to harvest the water and pump the water. Why don't I bring in solar energy as well? And now we have solar-powered pumps.

CERE solar panels at a police campus. Source

Everything is connected. And that's how we've always seen it. We've never compartmentalized the environment.

So these are the key major verticals that we looked at. Another area that we looked at is reporting standards. Previously, companies would just talk about their bottom line, “I need to only worry about my shareholders.” Now we need to worry about our stakeholders. And our stakeholder may or may not be a shareholder.

Like the people of Dahanu are definitely stakeholders, but they're probably not shareholders.

Yes. Exactly. And that's what we talk about with ESG.

Environmental, social, and governance.

Yeah. So a lot of companies, we work with them for ESG reporting.

You know, in the U.S. there's been kind of a political backlash to the whole concept of ESG reporting from the Republican Party. Is there any of that kind of anti-sustainability political backlash happening in India? Because from an outsider perspective, I know the BJP has a lot of similarities to the American Republican party in terms of religious nationalism. But I have been pleasantly surprised by how much, at least from my outsider perspective, how much the BJP seems to advocate for sustainability, from Swachh Bharat to the giant solar buildout.

So do you feel an anti-ESG backlash developing on the Indian political right, or is that a pretty strong consensus across all the parties in India right now?

I think companies see a difference. They see a value in the issue. I think companies in India now realize that, and they’re still grappling with, “Okay, how do I meet these reporting standards, what is Scope One, Two, and Three Emissions?” It's not so much that they don't want to report, but they don't have the expertise in house. It’s not political.

I read that in 2022, 92% of the new electricity generation capacity in India was renewable! That’s pretty impressive.

But even today, you look at the majority of India's electricity, it's still mostly from coal. There's a lot of politics. [Background: one controversial aspect of India’s energy market is the degree to which many projects are built by a few very large and politically influential companies, notably the Adani Group].

Isn't the Adani Group also building a lot of solar farms as well, though? Like, they're building the Khavda solar park, which will be the largest in the world at 30 gigawatts (30,000 MW).

Yes, but they're also building thermal power plants. They're also in a lot of trouble.

Yeah, they are, yeah. The Hindenburg report and everything.

So, I just think, politically, more can be done. The environment really is not on the agenda. We are undergoing our general political elections right now. If you look at every debate, if you look at every political rally, they don't talk about environment, they talk about jobs, development and the economy. I think a lot more needs to be done.

So on the reporting, just crunching the numbers is not going to improve the environment. It's only if you start taking action and start improving your systems, will there be a positive impact.

We’ve also done a lot of work with environmental education. We have published 29 titles. Books used as prescribed curriculum textbooks used by schools across India, which can convey important environmental messages. There are three parts to literacy, correct? Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the three R's of literacy. CERE believes that there is a fourth R, and the fourth one is Resource literacy.

Being in the field of environmental education, we do not believe we can teach environmental concepts in the confines of a concrete classroom. So for us, it is key to promote experiential learning. We create a lot of outdoor learning resource centres, for example, we have created native biodiversity gardens that help our biology books come alive. For example, studying parts of a plant, children need to be able to see an actual plant. Unless you build up that bond of a child with nature, the child is not going to grow up wanting to look after its own biological heritage.

Also with our SOS solar project, we do an educational workshop. The children will go up to the terrace and see solar panels. And they’ll appreciate that the lights, the fans are being powered by electricity. They'll then join the dots, how is energy connected to climate change?

So these are various environmental programs that we love. That's the work we've been doing for the past 20 years.

It was through the Urban Afforestation Program that I then started working on the Forest of Doongerwadi. I was thinking, I've been planting trees across India, why is it that I haven't really looked inward and started working with my own community, the Zoroastrians and the Parsis.

I’ve read about the Zoroastrians and the Parsis, but I think a lot of people in the West won't know what either of those names mean.

Zoroastrianism is the oldest known monotheistic religion.

[Zoroastrianism follows the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster aka Zarathustra, concerning the struggle between good, represented by the supreme god Ahura Mazda or Ormuzd, versus evil, represented by the devil-like Angra Mainyu or Ahriman. Zoroastrianism has had a profound impact on many world philosophies and religions: as the state religion of the vast and diverse Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, it may have substantially influenced the theology of Judaism (and thus, eventually Christianity and Islam as well) when Cyrus famously allowed the Jews to return from Babylon to Judah. Later on, the term “Magi” for Zoroastrian priests gave European languages the word “magic.”]

The religion of the first Persian Empire, right? The last time I saw that symbol you’re wearing around your neck right now, it was in an archaeological exhibit on the Achaemenids.

Source

This is the Asho Farohar symbol [aka Foruhar or Faravahar], the winged solar disc. It's like the wings are, you know, your soul, and you'll see these two [curlicues], these are supposed to be your rudders, for balance. These are the wings to soar, but you will not soar unless there is a balance. And you will see a head, there is a head emerging over here.

Every little facet is very symbolic. You see these symbols inside the fire temples, you see it in Persia, you see it in Iran. It’s about good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. You need to have good intentions, and then you'll come down to words, and then finally it's the deeds. I mean, words mean nothing if you don't follow up with the deeds. Those are the three tenets of the religion.

So I’ve been planting large trees across India, and now I’m planting right here, in my own backyard. It's not that we only work with the Zoroastrian community. We work with churches that have cemeteries, any place where I can plant a tree. I'm agnostic when it comes to planting a tree. Allow me to plant a tree, and I'm happy to plant it anywhere. And today, who has larger tracts of land? The religious groups, temple lands that are large open tracts of land.

So [in the Zoroastrian Parsis’ Forest of Doongerwadi] we can plant around the periphery. The rest of it is the Tower of Silence.

And the Tower of Silence has been negatively affected by the reduction in vulture populations.

Yeah, that's true. I was recently on a podcast, 99% Invisible, where we talked a lot about it.

So in south and central Mumbai, you've got our forest at the very tip of South Mumbai, and then you've got Sanjay Gandhi National Park, near the north-central end. And these are the last two forests. I think the larger community needs to realize the environmental services that these forests provide. They provide huge environmental services, like watershed management, flora and fauna, resilience to soil erosion, pollinators, absorbing excess stormwater like a sponge. We need to really protect and stand up for forests.

So, all the work I've been doing for the past 20 years has built this organization. I have approximately 19 full-time researchers, and then there are my field workers and partners, anywhere from 50 to 70, looking at all the different field sites. It's a fairly large organization, and we've got multiple sites where we're doing reforestation, solar, electricity, gas, and radio. So that's it.

Fascinating. A lot of what I write about is the things that can give people the positives of consumerism, the benefits of modern technological civilization, the abundant electricity and manufactured goods and healthcare, but based in more sustainable sources and resources, like electricity from solar power instead of coal plants.

In India, I am just honestly really inspired by how, you know, 15 years ago, most Indians didn't have running water or flush toilets or electricity, and now most Indians do.

I’m still an optimist. We’re going to breach 1.5°C of global warming, but I think we can eventually stabilize. At CERE, all our content, our project worksheets, our plans, are available on our website, to help others who want to do the same kind of work with solar, with afforestation. Good ideas spread; we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The U.S. has very clearly chosen to prioritize its domestic solar industry, with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies leading to an emerging boom in American solar manufacturing plus more and more tariffs on Chinese solar panels. India so far is still mostly buying from China, but like the United States, India would like to use lots of solar panels to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, but also would like to develop its own solar manufacturing industry to not just buy everything from China, which currently makes the cheapest solar panels. What do you think of that solar imports geopolitical/emissions tradeoff?

India has a Make in India policy, but doesn’t have silicon reserves, so it really becomes Assemble in India. We are dependent, a lot, on China, that delivers solar cells that you can create a solar panel from. It’s important to get good quality solar panels. And after that, you can recycle the silicon in the wafer.

Source.

In America, there’s now a growing range of solar panel recycling facilities, just waiting for solar panels to age out of usefulness.

There are processes being developed that can recycle 99% of the solar cell. We need R&D transfer to recycle solar panels like that in India. It will truly close the loop. Not cradle-to-grave, but cradle-to-cradle. Soon, humanity will be using solar panels made in entirely solar-run factories, from recycled materials from old solar panels. The loop will close, when a solar panel has absolutely no carbon footprint.

Thank you so much. This is just incredible.

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Doongerwadi and After

The entrance to Doongerwadi Forest, in south Mumbai. My photo.

Regular text above represented Dr. Pardiwala’s words; regular text now switches to The Weekly Anthropocene first-person reporting.

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After the interview, Dr. Pardiwala led me on a brief visit to the publicly accessible edge of the Doongerwadi Forest. The use of cameras was forbidden beyond the entrance arch, and non-Zoroastrian visitors could only enter a sort of “antechamber” area on the fringe of the forest, with the deeper woods around the Tower of Silence reserved for funeral processions.

As we got out of the car, I heard mynah birds calling from the surrounding trees, and Dr. Pardiwala pointed out a peacock strutting on the edge of the parking lot. Within the visitors’ hall (recently restored by a donation from Dr. Pardiwala’s family), I saw a beautiful triptych of stained-glass windows depicting Zoroastrian themes. Dr. Pardiwala told me that they had been commissioned from a modern stained-glass artist based in Singapore. Reading from right to left, the first window displayed two Zoroastrian priests conducting rites at a sacred flame, flanked by two sacred animals, a dog and a bull, and two sacred plants, a pomegranate tree and a palm tree. (Dogs are viewed positively in Zoroastrianism, and several possible-strays reclined in the shade beneath the pews in the visitors’ hall as I regarded the windows).

The second window showed a depiction of the Bridge of the Requiter, the upward bridge to paradise which a dying human soul must cross. According to legend, the bridge is wider or narrower (and thus easier or harder to cross) depending on the soul’s righteousness or wickedness in life. At the far end of the bridge, the entrance to paradise was guarded by two magnificent bearded man-headed winged bulls, which I recognized as resembling Assyrian lamassu, common in ancient Mesopotamian art and architecture. I later learned that in Zoroastrianism, these figures weren’t called lamassu but gopatha or gopatshah. The third and final window showed a depiction of paradise itself, a more abstract scene dominated by a rainbow.

I felt a profound yet stirring chill through my body at the sight of such ancient symbolism, a bone-deep reminder of the depth of the past. These rites were old old. A time-traveler from the Middle East of 500 BCE would find all of Christianity and Islam completely unfamiliar but would recognize Zoroastrian iconography in a heartbeat. The legacy of millennia-old faiths and empires was being preserved in this Mumbai woodland.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire.

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After we left Doongerwadi, Dr. Pardiwala’s friend and CERE co-founder Kitayun Rustom, or “Katy,” kindly invited us to tea at her nearby apartment. Both were Zoroastrians, but they were from two different ethnic minority groups, the Parsis and the Iranis, descendants of two historic Zoroastrian exoduses from Persia to India. Dr. Pardiwala was from the Parsi community, and Ms. Rustom was from the more recently arrived Irani community.

The history absolutely fascinated me. When the armies of Islam conquered Persia in the 600s CE, it kicked off centuries-long waves of religious persecution in the historically Zoroastrian region, spurring several major immigration events. The Parsi community in Mumbai originates from one group of Zoroastrians who sailed to the region of Indian that is now the state of Gujarat. According to legend, one king in Gujarat at the time (dates are unclear, but this was first described in an epic poem written in the 1500s) showed the Parsi leader a bowl of milk filled to the brim, representing that his kingdom was full and he did not wish to accept the Zoroastrian refugees. The Zoroastrian leader then sprinkled sugar into the milk, symbolizing that the new arrivals would simply dissolve into the kingdom, adding only sweetness. Eventually, they negotiated conditions for the Zoroastrian community to stay in Gujarat, including a ban on bearing arms or proselytizing to convert the local people in exchange for permission to set up their own fire temples. Centuries later, the modern Parsi community, now centered in Mumbai, remains primarily Gujarati-speaking, and holds to the no-proselytizing oath even though the king it was negotiated with has long passed into history.

The Irani community of Mumbai, also Zoroastrian, are the descendants of a much later wave of refugees fleeing the hardliner Islamist “rule of the imams” imposed in Iran after the Revolution of 1979. Ms. Rustom’s grandfather had come to India as a ship-born stowaway. The Iranis hadn’t had a centuries-long stay in Gujarat, so they still spoke the Dari language, aka Farsi or Persian, and they didn’t consider themselves bound by the promises made to the Gujarati king.

In America, growing Zoroastrian communities have started to accept new converts again, and new fire temples have been built from New York to Houston. In some ways, Zoroastrianism seems well-suited for the sociocultural milieu of the globalized 21st century: dog-friendly, long associated with large multiethnic political unions, with a rich history but a notable lack of ongoing feuds with other faiths. Katy Rustom passionately spoke of how she saw Zoroastrianism as “planet-centric,” an ecological religion.

And that religion may even be on the cusp of a new revival in its ancient homeland; there are rumors and hard-to-verify reports circulating on the Internet that Zoroastrian is spreading underground across Iran as many young people of the country, increasingly disgusted by militaristic and reactionary Islamist rule, turn against Shi’ite Islam altogether in favor of a historically “Iranian” faith. History is a long and winding road; the world’s oldest monotheistic religion seems to have neared a nadir of obscurity in the late 20th century, but may yet rise again in ages to come.