thatguy2016
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/wo...well/?tid=pm_world_pop&utm_term=.b95403a6d436
Drought’s dire impact
Last November, in the middle of a crippling drought, a rumor began to spread in Rosario’s tiny town of Soledad and in other Quechua-speaking villages whose residents grow potatoes and corn on the flanks of mountains here.
The rainy season was late, the fields were parched and livestock were dying. The government said global warming was making matters worse.
The villagers, not unlike climate-change skeptics in the United States, did not believe it.
Their suspicions fell instead on the strange machines that foreign scientists and aid workers from the Swiss-Peruvian group Project +Glaciers had installed with great fanfare at Lago 513, another swollen glacial lake not far from Lake Palcacocha.
But in the middle of a drought, no one was especially worried about flooding. Years of disappointing rainfall were sowing anxieties up and down the valley.
Then the rumors picked up. “Everyone was saying that the gringos’ machines were scaring away the rain,” said Feliciana Quito, who farms a small plot downstream from the lake.
Jesús Caballero, the Carhuaz mayor, said he wanted to set the villagers straight, so he offered to hike up to the lake one morning in November to show them the “gringo machines” were harmless.
But when Caballero arrived at the lake that day, he said, it was clear the villagers were not interested in a climate lecture. Some of the young men were carrying sticks. This was a lynch mob.
“I told them the equipment had nothing to do with the rain,” Caballero said. “But I was rowing against the current.”
The villagers attacked the monitoring station, tearing out the antennas and solar panels. They bludgeoned some of the instruments and carried the rest back down the mountain, triumphant, as if they had slayed a dragon.
The rains came three days later, ending the drought. The villagers were jubilant. Their climate science was vindicated.
But now the lake has no emergency warning system in case the dam bursts. The farmers say they will not allow the foreigners to put the equipment back in, let alone drive through their village. When Project +Glaciers sent a team to inspect the damage, they were stopped on the road by women carrying rocks, threatening to stone them.
“We’re not going to let anyone put anything up there that interferes with the rain,” said Rosario, who was one of the expeditionaries who went to the lake that day.
Caballero said the episode has demonstrated the need for greater sensitivity to the fears of rural villagers whose lives and traditions are upended by water shortages and extreme weather.
What is left of the old monitoring system is now locked in a storage room opposite the Carhuaz city hall. Caballero said he thinks he can get the villagers’ approval to put the equipment back in if there is another drought this fall, because it would prove his point that the machines have nothing to do with the rain.
Then again, he said, the villagers may direct their anger at the emergency monitoring systems installed at other nearby lakes, such as Lake Palcacocha. “If the rains don’t come, I worry they’ll march up there and tear the other equipment out, too,” he said.
Drought’s dire impact
Last November, in the middle of a crippling drought, a rumor began to spread in Rosario’s tiny town of Soledad and in other Quechua-speaking villages whose residents grow potatoes and corn on the flanks of mountains here.
The rainy season was late, the fields were parched and livestock were dying. The government said global warming was making matters worse.
The villagers, not unlike climate-change skeptics in the United States, did not believe it.
Their suspicions fell instead on the strange machines that foreign scientists and aid workers from the Swiss-Peruvian group Project +Glaciers had installed with great fanfare at Lago 513, another swollen glacial lake not far from Lake Palcacocha.
But in the middle of a drought, no one was especially worried about flooding. Years of disappointing rainfall were sowing anxieties up and down the valley.
Then the rumors picked up. “Everyone was saying that the gringos’ machines were scaring away the rain,” said Feliciana Quito, who farms a small plot downstream from the lake.
Jesús Caballero, the Carhuaz mayor, said he wanted to set the villagers straight, so he offered to hike up to the lake one morning in November to show them the “gringo machines” were harmless.
But when Caballero arrived at the lake that day, he said, it was clear the villagers were not interested in a climate lecture. Some of the young men were carrying sticks. This was a lynch mob.
“I told them the equipment had nothing to do with the rain,” Caballero said. “But I was rowing against the current.”
The villagers attacked the monitoring station, tearing out the antennas and solar panels. They bludgeoned some of the instruments and carried the rest back down the mountain, triumphant, as if they had slayed a dragon.
The rains came three days later, ending the drought. The villagers were jubilant. Their climate science was vindicated.
But now the lake has no emergency warning system in case the dam bursts. The farmers say they will not allow the foreigners to put the equipment back in, let alone drive through their village. When Project +Glaciers sent a team to inspect the damage, they were stopped on the road by women carrying rocks, threatening to stone them.
“We’re not going to let anyone put anything up there that interferes with the rain,” said Rosario, who was one of the expeditionaries who went to the lake that day.
Caballero said the episode has demonstrated the need for greater sensitivity to the fears of rural villagers whose lives and traditions are upended by water shortages and extreme weather.
What is left of the old monitoring system is now locked in a storage room opposite the Carhuaz city hall. Caballero said he thinks he can get the villagers’ approval to put the equipment back in if there is another drought this fall, because it would prove his point that the machines have nothing to do with the rain.
Then again, he said, the villagers may direct their anger at the emergency monitoring systems installed at other nearby lakes, such as Lake Palcacocha. “If the rains don’t come, I worry they’ll march up there and tear the other equipment out, too,” he said.
