About AlterEarth
Hey there! Hope you are doing well! My name is Kalyan.
During my day job, I try to understand how rocks that are kilometers under our feet behave when we inject fluids into them (mainly for extracting geothermal energy). But, for the past few years, something else was gnawing at my mind... The idea of something more fundamental, something holistic.
What is the idea?
Anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change and all the problems associated with it have long been impacting every life form on our planet. There is a dire need for people in different walks of life like scientists, engineers, architects, politicians, to name a few, to work together and complement each other to stand a chance against this overwhelming, multifaceted problem. AlterEarth is a project that lays out the fundamentals and evolution of various Earth systems and hopes to brings together like-minded people and organizations working towards realizing our goal of equitable, sustainable development.
Inspired by excerpts from ancient Indic texts, the Earth systems are dissociated into several elements- air, fire (or heat), water, Earth (land), plants and humans. AlterEarth dives deep into how each of these elements shaped our planet, and how we humans have been tampering with these processes. People and organizations around the world working tirelessly to tackle these problems are also highlighted through highly-researched posts and podcasts.
The intent of this endeavor is to create a utilitarian sustainable knowledge base for people working in this field, while making it easy for beginners to better understand our Earth. Another goal is to enable both intra and inter-disciplinary collaborations between people and companies, all through one simple platform, which, hopefully, would be sustainable in itself.
Why should I subscribe?
Did you know that despite all the hype about recycling, only around 9% of all plastics ever produced have been recycled? The rest of them are being burned or still lying around somewhere. Plastics have found their way from our hands to the tallest of mountain peaks and the deepest of ocean trenches, while also creeping into our bloodstream and the placentas of unborn babies!
Air pollution is now the second among the list of death risk factors, overtaking tobacco (8.8 million deaths and 7.2 million estimated deaths in 2015). While smoking reduces your lifespan by an average of 2.2 years, consistently breathing polluted air reduces it by 2.3 years. Did we reach from ‘Smoking kills’ warnings to a stage where cities like Delhi need disclaimers showing ‘Living here kills you faster’?
For us to think of potential solutions and courses of action, it is important to truly understand the core of the problems. The succinct posts delve into understanding the fundamentals of various processes on the Earth and how we reached this point of development by trotting over the remains of trillions of life forms, just to realize all that karma is blowing up in our faces now.
In the age of social media algorithms and doomscrolling, by spending 5-10 minutes reading an AlterEarth post, you will have something to takeaway and think about, along with an increased reverence towards the planet hosting us.
Subscribe to read the posts as soon as they are out!
A little bit about me
My name is Kalyan. I am a PhD student working on Geothermal energy systems and a writer. My eight-year writing journey includes articles related to climate change and various other topics to documenting experiences, poetry and a book under the pseudonym, Bhārgava.
As I started studying Geophysics in college, I embarked upon my journey in the renewable energy space. Despite being a full-time student of the Earth, I learnt a lot of mind-boggling information about it through self-reading or the internet.
During my brief teaching stint, looking at the curiosity of a few high schoolers in learning some out-of-textbook details of the Earth and the potential solutions to a few real world problems we are facing, I realized the importance of breaking down the complexity of essential concepts to reach a wider audience.
Educating the upcoming generations and increasing awareness amongst our contemporaries helps in creating an environmentally responsible society and also improves our chances of arriving at the next big breakthrough in solving this socio-scientific problem sooner than later. This line of thought, followed by a few years of research, fueled by my excitement to share the lesser-known important details of the Earth to bring about change, led to the genesis of AlterEarth.
Some housekeeping…
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