The other side of the world.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: Bombay

Why does anyone care about sustainability?

The world is too small. It is also too big. I first came to this impossible conclusion in the crowded second-class compartment of a commuter train rattling toward the heart of Bombay, and the thought immobilized me. Of course, I probably wouldn't have been able to move anyway, given the mass of bodies pressing against me from all directions. Whatever size the world might have seemed during that first train ride I took in India, the train was way too small.

Just managing to stay upright as I boarded had seemed like a triumph. So, as soon as I felt myself gripping a metal handrail, I closed my eyes and focused on taking in oxygen. Unfortunately, breathing was no trivial task in that compartment, not only because there were elbows lodged in my ribs, but because the air reeked of sweat, spit, excrement, and garbage - tinged, of course, with the fragrances of flowers, spices, and incense.

In India, paradox doesn't arouse the same anxiety it might in, say, Germany: it is seen as quite natural for things not to make sense. When I mentioned to the family I was staying with that I could not understand why auto-rickshaw drivers often turned off their engines at red lights, since restarting the motor every few minutes surely used up valuable fuel, the father, Sunil Sampat, smiled and explained that this was simply the Way it was Done. "Aaron, please," he said, waggling his head in amusement. "You are in India now. Use logic at your own risk."

That warning echoed in my head for the rest of my trip. It was hardly logical, for instance, for so many people to be hanging out the door of the train. "Couldn't they have waited for the next one?" I asked my friend Payal, Sunil's daughter, once I could breathe again. Payal and I had met the summer before, while she was doing graduate work in the United States.

"All the other trains are just as packed as this one," she explained.

I turned to my other friend, Shamez Mohamed, an old roommate who grew up in Kenya but whose roots are in India, and gestured toward a couple of men serenely reading newspapers in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and English. "Doesn't all this get to them?" I asked. They had to dodge just as many elbows and just as much spit as we did, yet they seemed utterly calm, at peace, as though they were reading in silence on top of a hill, inhaling the pure, sweet air of the countryside. "They're used to it," he said. Then he laughed at the look on my face.

Used to it. How long does that take? And is it really such a good idea to get used to filth, bruised ribs, and oxygen deprivation? Surely, I thought, the world - like this train - is much too small. My background in ecology was flooding into my consciousness. We need more room to move, more oxygen to breathe, more space to grow our food. If we try to get used to this kind of crowding, I reasoned, we will overrun the planet. There is only so much land and water left, and there are too many of us trying to do too much - building highways and dams, making movies, mining for gold. I felt sure: Too Small.

Then I looked back at the men reading their newspapers, and suddenly ecology seemed almost irrelevant to the task of explaining humanity's place in the world. If I had learned anything from studying cultural history and comparative literature in college, it was that "humanity" organizes itself in profoundly different ways in different places, that it takes a great effort to see through other people's eyes. "One thing seems clear to everyone who returns from field work," writes Princeton historian Robert Darnton: "Other people are other They do not think the way we do." During Margaret Mead's first trip to Samoa, the young anthropologist quickly realized that she would never understand her adopted community until she had gained full acceptance, until she had learned all the conventions of formal discourse and could speak to the Samoan elders without offending them. It is now almost a cliche of cultural studies to note that one culture's gesture of politeness may be another's insult - that even seemingly universal concepts and practices can take on a vast range of meanings in the global context.

Those men reading their papers were within spitting distance of me (which worried me considerably), yet we were worlds apart. From my perspective, for instance, the train compartment was as full as it could ever possibly get, but perhaps to them it was half-empty. I was sure we had completely different notions of what the terms "over-population" and "pollution" meant. How could I ever understand their view? How could I ever write about international environmental issues with insight and empathy?

Moreover, even if I did eventually feel connected to Indian culture, how could I share my understanding with people back home? Many Americans are already experiencing "information overload."

How could I make...