From Udaipur to Okinawa riding on orange peel

The story of twenty-five -year-old Narayan Lal Gurjar might not be out of place in Bollywood.

The playful experiments he conducted in his father’s small farm as a teenager in Kerdi, a village of 300 with 40 homes in Rajsamand district in southern Rajasthan, is the foundation for his patents and the agriscience startup incubated by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology that has attracted investments from well-known Japanese venture capital firms such as Beyond Next Ventures and MTG.

And all this before he turned 23.

Gurjar’s firm EF Polymer (EF stands for eco-friendly) headquartered in Okinawa with manufacturing plants in Udaipur makes super absorbent polymers (SAP) from orange and banana peel that has the potential to help millions of small farmers in arid and water scarce regions across the world harvest better yields.

Read the full story here 

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Predictable, enormously surprising

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — read these in sequence, and tremble ]
.

Here:

  • New Yorker, Citing climate change, BlackRock will start moving away from fossil fuels
  • New Yorker, Will Big Business Finally reckon with the Climate Crisis?
  • World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2020
  • BlackRock, A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance
  • Guardian, European Investment Bank to phase out fossil fuel financing
  • IEEFA, The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for oil and gas
    .
    **

    Climate scientists caught on first, then the US military, and now financial risk analysts. Things are shifting: if BlackRock ‘s C-suite officers (they control a dime out of every dollar in the world) were the jurors, the current US administration might not like their verdict.

    And money doesn’t just talk, it votes.

  • Poems: climate, impeachment, climate

    Scorched earth

    Scorched earth used to be a military tactic —
    Samson caught three hundred foxes,
    and took firebrands,
    and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails,
    sending them through enemy fields —
    but what if nature out-flames the foxes?
    What if floods engulf
    those waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

    Hosing down used to be a police tactic —
    against dissenting crowds,
    with dissent almost a badge of honor,
    police visor and shield
    almost an admission of guilt —
    ah, earth, water, air, mind — all ablaze!

    **

    For sure

    No sense in wasting a poem on impeachment,
    those things pass
    like leaves in the wind,
    Nixon, Clinton,Trump, and
    by the time you read this
    another fistful, maybe no doubt —
    on second thought, poems too
    are leaves in a high wind, sacred altitude at best.

    Han Shan sent his poems floating downstream,
    scribbled them on the walls of caves
    and hermitages,
    wrote them on beech-bark
    on the off-chance someone would find them —
    Pulitzer-winner Gary Snyder for sure found them!

    **

    Forecast

    Floods and firestorms:
    the planet is not so much burning as oscillating,
    floods, the element of water,
    fire would evaporate them,
    but only after bringing them to boiling point,
    firestorms, wrathful,
    water would quench them,
    but boiling point is hardly the issue.

    We are deep into future problems,
    the courage of our blind denial
    blithely fire-walking
    with water-walking ability
    granted us solely in scriptures —
    prediction succeeds, prophecy fails, what next?

    Brown Pundits