By Reilly Capps

CUSCO, Peru — They stop trucks, these women, with their knitting needles.

For two weeks, they’ve been knitting sweaters by the side of one of Peru’s main highways, the one that connects this city with much of the rest of the country — protesting the Peruvian government’s plans to dam a nearby river and build a hydroelectric plant, which they say would divert water away from their farms.

The road is barricaded by a pile of rocks, and the women urge the trucks and cars piling up behind them to flip a U-ey. They won’t throw rocks at your car, the women say sweetly. They would never do that. But, they ask: notice how you don’t see any men around here? Well, the men are down the road a bit. And Peru has plenty of rocks.

The protest here — which also concerns mining revenues — is like similar protests that rock the world from Thailand to Brazil, in that they’re all about the question of who owns land and water, and what they should be used for. It often comes down to a nasty decision between water and juice.

Water and life, of course, are virtually the same thing. (The Mars probes don’t have a loudspeaker yelling “Hey, any little green men round here?” They sniff around for water.) But as developing economies advance — powered by electricity — dams seem more and more necessary as a reliable power source for a world that’s got to wean itself off oil and coal.

But hydroelectric plants don’t seem necessary to these little women, dressed in native skirts and bowler hats, who are losing money every day they aren’t working their farms. “It’s worth it,” one woman tells me. If they don’t have water, they’ll never work their farms again. They’re scared that the government is coming to rejigger the whole natural system, to divert the ancient hydrological cycle of snows that fall on the peaks then melt into streams then trickle down the valleys to their farms. To shove a dam in the middle could be like clamping down an artery.

How serious are these people about their water? Peruvians have battled over water for centuries. But recently, groups of protesters shut down the main square of Cusco, and they burned the small town of Tacna, and they promise to spread the protests throughout Peru. Already, three protesters have been killed, dozens of demonstrators and police have been sent to the hospital, civil liberties have been suspended, and the army may be coming to shut it all down.

Protesters in Cusco called for socialism — “Years of capitalism,” one sign read, “brings centuries of misery” — and of course socialism isn’t the answer, but when you squat near the wheel well of a huge truck, hearing these weather-beaten, world-weary women list their complaints about dams that divert their water, mines that snatch the gold from under their feet, and politicians in the capital who don’t give a flip, it’s impossible not to think a socialist thought or two:

People own land and water — not the government, not the power companies, not the politicians, and you can’t suck the life out of one community to send juice to another, and in any event there’s no excuse for treating people this badly.

The protesters are almost certainly doomed to some level of failure, if only because their demands are so sweeping: they want the president removed and the constitution rewritten. But at least these remote villages are angry enough to stand up, and the other day the government said it was willing to rethink the dam project in light of this disturbance.

Will that change things? Not sure. Protests continue. And after we turned our van around and traveled the next day, on a Peruvian bus that took the back roads around the protest, a small boy picked up a rock and hurled it at the side of our bus, and not just because he’s not a great knitter.

– Reilly Capps recently wrote more about his travels at the Washington Post Web site.

by Reilly Capps

Debate is good. Presidential debates, debate societies, even Wii vs. PSP.

But one debate is not.

The “debate” over climate change is still dragging on, in every corner of the country, and every corner of your life: your dad, your co-worker, your friend. “Debaters” have dropped the argument that it isn’t happening — since it’s obvious that the world’s getting warmer, hurricanes are super-sizing, and glaciers are receding faster than my hairline. “Debaters” have retreated to the argument that it’s part of a natural cycle: we were once in an ice age and now we are not. We were once in a hot spell and now we are not. I once had a hairline and now I do not. Nature.

There is an iron-clad comeback, course: “of the scientists who study these things, roughly 100 percent — perhaps more — attribute climate change to human activity, at least in part.”

To which my friend gave his iron-clad response: “Yeah, but what do scientists know?”

Which made me rub my face very hard. Until I devised a plan:

I would follow my friend to the Jiffy Lube, and I’d argue against oil change: mechanics are wrong as often as they’re right! At the airport, I’d argue against Bernoulli and his principles: if wings make you fly, how come penguins can’t? At his dentist appointment, when the doc advised against sugar, I’d shine the overhead lamp in his eyes: wait wait wait, I’d say, aren’t cavities natural? Didn’t the Anasazi have rotten teeth — without Mars bars? Sure, 4 out of 5 dentists agree: but what about the fifth?

These are trained professionals, true. But what do they know?

I would be insufferable, boorish and smug, and I would be insufferable until the “debate” ended, either because I would convince my buddy that scientists know things or else because he would stop being friends with me, and I’d do this not only because climate change is too important to let drop but because this is one of the few debates where I’m pretty sure I’m right.

It has to sink in. If people don’t believe that climate change is driven by humans, they won’t drive smaller cars, ride their bikes, back renewable energy, slow sprawl or vote for politicians who will. And the climate will keep sizzling, the glaciers melting, until all the “debates”— and the “debaters” — are eventually drowned out. Or else simply drowned, all the way up to our receding hairlines.

As a grants reviewer for a national mountaineering association, I see multiple proposals dealing with climate change in polar and alpine regions. Over the past decade a large percentage of the research projects we’ve reviewed and awarded have dealt with glacial ice status of one sort or another. From the Himalayas, to the Rocky Mountains, across the islands of the Arctic and Greenland, the rapid thawing of glaciers is being recorded and is of particular concern in reference to global warming and its mechanisms. One serious issue could become the depletion of water supplies for agricultural and human uses in developing countries where glacial run-off is a primary source for drinking and irrigation water.

Photography and video can play a central role in capturing the status of glaciers and their movement or decline. “re-photography”, which compares a past or historical image with one taken more recently at the exact mountain location, has proved of particular value in detailing vegetation and glacial ice changes. If a photo had been captured only five years earlier of this Montana mountain range, this image of wholesale forest die-off shot in June would have clearly shown how fast landscape changes can happen under conditions of environmental stress.

Re-captured images of mountain glaciers like those shown by a recent wall poster clearly illustrate the retreat of glaciers. Such mountain re-photography will be presented in more detail by the in a forthcoming book, “Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World” to be published by University of California Press. Likewise, stationery time lapse video of glaciers can show the process of retreat in virtually “real time”. The Extreme Ice Survey now underway in eastern Greenland, Rocky Mountain National Park, Alaska, Bolivia, and elsewhere will release documentary footage in the coming years from 18 locations where video cameras have been mounted to observe glaciers. The first images from this pioneering research effort appeared in the June 2007 issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Besides remote mountain and polar landscapes, the impacts of snow and ice decline are even touching tourist towns where one town in France is living out the nightmare of many a ski resort as climates continue to warm. The city council of Abondance, France voted in June to shut down their ski slopes (and economic base) because of lack of snow for skiing. For the people of Abondance, the impacts climate change are not in their future but are their present day experience.