I am leaving for India in a few days.
Everyone I know there has sent some version of the same message: it’s extreme, be careful. Not the usual seasonal warning. Something more urgent. More tired.
Yesterday a longtime friend wrote from Banda, Uttar Pradesh — a district I know, with people I love. A record temperature. And they linked it, without hesitation, to what has been happening in the surrounding region for years: mining, construction, deforestation. Not as a theory. As an observation. These people live there. They watch it happen.
The price of progress, paid in degrees.
India built at a breathtaking pace over the last decade. Roads, highways, railway lines, entire urban landscapes reshaped. I have watched it. Some of it is genuinely remarkable. Some of it is the kind of momentum that becomes very hard to question once it is moving.
All of it needed energy. All of it needed water — vast quantities of it, consumed by mining operations, construction sites, cooling plants. Less and less left for the people. And what remains is increasingly too polluted to use safely.
More heat. Less clean water. A feedback loop with no obvious exit.
And at the end of that loop: ordinary people, in their homes, in fields, in the street, enduring temperatures the human body was not built to endure. Thirsty on top of it.
What I keep sitting with is this: none of this is unknown.
The consequences of large-scale extraction and construction on local climate, water tables, and air quality are well documented. Have been for decades. The science is not in dispute. So why are mining and construction operations not required — by law, as a condition of their permits — to plant trees while they work? To actively restore groundwater. To compensate, in real time, for what they take?
The knowledge exists. In many places, the laws exist too — on paper.
What undermines them is what undermines so much else. Money moving quietly, on all sides. Permits signed without scrutiny. Inspections that don’t happen. A system that works exactly as intended — just not for the people who live downstream from the decisions.
The bill always goes to those who had no seat at the table.
I will plant trees in Janwaar during the monsoons. I have planted quite a few there over the years. It is not enough. It was never going to be enough.
But roots hold water in the soil. Shade lowers the temperature around it. A tree planted in the right place does quiet, unglamorous, reliable work for decades. It doesn’t ask for a permit. It doesn’t require an inspection. It just grows.
I believe in small things done with full awareness of why they matter. Not as a substitute for the larger accountability — but as a refusal to wait for it.
So I go. I plant. I pay attention. And I will tell the Janwaar kids.
And I write it down.
