Splashes of red dot the evergreen canopy, like blood on green canvas. The canarium, stately white and tall, holds a red flush of new leaves above verdant, multi-hued forest.

Skimming spectacularly over the trees, a great hornbill brushes grandeur onto the canvas. In the company of hornbills, a new year dawns on an unsuspecting rainforest.

The red flush is the flag of an ancient rhythm: a rhythm of renewal, carrying the cadence of nature’s annual cycles. In the rainforest, the tree has endured months of sharp dry weather followed by lashing rains. It has stoically retained its space amidst a thousand species, its leaves buffeted by many winds, aloft in sun and in rain, for another year of its decades’ long existence. It has provided fruits for the hornbill, leaving seeds for hungry rodents or to germinate in a secure nook, and oozed resinous dammar from a cut. Drawing in the air with the breath of humanity, richer now in carbon dioxide, the tree has returned oxygen and thousands of litres of water to enrich the air and seed the clouds. As the second monsoon withdraws, leaving clear skies, spent clouds, and a winter chill, nature’s seamless cycle enters another human year. There is now a renewed challenge of life in the environment, with other lifeforms of the forest, and with people in the wider landscape.

From the perspective afforded by the forests where the canarium tree stands, here in the Anamalai hills, one can take a sidelong look at events of the recent past and prospects for the year ahead. Local, national, and global change all have their imprint in this microcosm within a planet impacted by human action like never before.

Bolstered by a legal framework centred on conserving tigers, the state governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu firmed-up existing wildlife sanctuaries, declaring the Parambikulam and Anamalai Tiger Reserves. Stretches of remarkable forest with threatened and endemic wildlife gain renewed recognition and, hopefully, better protection and improved management. In addition, valuable Reserved Forests, languishing in deliberate or benign neglect, are in the forefront as thousands of hectares are included within buffer zones. At the larger landscape level, these areas greatly add to the conservation potential of existing reserves and help reduce the threat of forest fragmentation. Stung by past failures that aimed to exclude local people from conservation, efforts are being made to involve communities in the plantations and agricultural lands in the buffer zone. Overcoming suspicion and doubts to constructively engage these communities is essential to gain support for conservation and address pressing issues such as human-wildlife conflicts. This is no easy task, but efforts are underway, here, as elsewhere.

The people who share these forests of the canarium, the tribal communities of the Anamalais, are also at a crucial juncture. Respected for their forest skills, the kadar, in particular, have been partners in conservation of species such as hornbills and provided crucial support for wildlife research and forest protection. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) and the tiger conservation plan, both yet to be implemented, bring them promise and peril. Over the year, detractors of the FRA have learned how it has been invaluable in fighting conservation battles against mining and forest diversion, where other environmental laws have failed. Can government, civil society, and tribal communities work together to deliver on the promise, while averting the perils of relocation, forest conversion and degradation?

The hills here are named for the Asian elephant, a species that better represents present conservation challenges. Elephant conservation implies thinking about swathes of land larger than our fragmented reserves, of corridors and agriculture, of people and property. The year gone by saw a laudable initiative, the Elephant Task Force, of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), culminating in a thoughtful report that promises to gently but firmly transform our view of the elephant and ultimately its conservation. The elephant has become, deservedly, our National Heritage Animal. A wider cross-section of society, good scientific understanding, and more transparent management shall be involved in elephant conservation. Movement routes and habitat fragments, including on private lands, shall gain additional attention, bringing benefits to myriad other species in the landscape including threatened hornbills and macaques, endemic amphibians, reptiles, and native plants. We shall no more be owners of captive elephants, only responsible guardians. Awareness of the need to phase out the demeaning existence and abuse of elephants in captivity is dawning. Now the elephant obtains a renewed place in our culture and consciousness. A position that recognises and respects elephants as social, sentient, intelligent, and sensitive individuals and families, with whom we are privileged to share spaces.

Growing environmental consciousness is also driving changes in tea and coffee plantations in the landscape. Informed consumers are creating market demand for produce from farms that adopt responsible social and land-use practices. Consequently, certification programmes, such as Rainforest Alliance, require farms to protect natural ecosystems, revive native shade tree species, avoid toxic agrochemicals, and safeguard waterways. These promise to bring benefits both to the industry and environment.

Further downstream from where the canarium stands, the ill-advised Athirapilly project, opposed for years on many good environmental and social grounds, finally comes close to being scrapped. Partly, this stems from a welcome turn of events, with the Indian government finally appointing an environment minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh, who seems keen to uphold the environmental laws of the land. In a short span, Mr Ramesh has transformed the rubber-stamp position of his Ministry to one that his detractors, even in more powerful ministries, are forced to take notice of. From aspects such as making the MoEF website one of the best government repositories of information, to taking clear executive decisions on dams, roads, airports, ports, forest diversion and exploitative industries, Mr Ramesh’s efforts have revitalised India’s conservation movement and the dignity of his ministry. His approach, mostly well-informed by ecology, is balanced by political pragmatism. The stance and strictures on preventing the proliferation of dams on the Ganga, on Bt Brinjal, Vedanta, POSCO, and coal mining, are battles that, if not won outright, are at least well fought. Like the stoic canarium tree, he has many troubles to weather yet, to hold his present position.

Forces even further afield also impinge on the canarium. Climate change is a decisive factor already affecting species, landscapes, and people’s lives. The year 2010, poised to be the hottest year on record, was also marked by more heat than light in the aftermath of international climate conferences at Copenhagen and Cancún. Responses such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), and voluntary, national, and international carbon markets are developing. Efforts are being made to recognise economic and other values of our natural capital and ecosystem services to move from an exploitative development trajectory riding on flawed and uni-dimensional measures such as GDP to sustainable development valuing social and environmental goals. One can argue that these are too little too late or that forests are better REDD than dead, but time will tell if these are adequate responses to humanity’s greatest global challenge.

Out in the Anamalai hills, as the flag of the canarium flutters red over the hill slopes, there is a sense of timelessness to the upheavals of life. And there are both storms and sunshine ahead.

An edited version of this article, titled Rhythms of Renewal, which appeared today in The Hindu Magazine is available here.

Take a parallel from human life―when a friend passes away, when a close relationship is no more. What do we irrevocably lose and how much? It is a kind of loss that defies quantification or commodification but, although difficult, it is not a loss that defies description or sentient perception. I realise that I am comparing the loss of species (non-human) with the loss of individuals (people). The loss of species presented this way conflates the loss of individuals within the species. Individuals that, in many animal species, have distinct identities and personalities and have to come to occupy the imagination and affections of the people who have studied or got to know them. In any case, one presumes that the appreciation of individuals lost when a species goes extinct can, if anything, only heighten the magnitude of loss. And it is this loss of a species including individuals of that species, with a sense of loss encompassing the connections we make, which should not be overlooked when a species is no more. This may not be easy, as others have said, in the timeless words that also inspired the title of this piece.

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

―Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

And this we know, too, that the most enchanting of landscapes, to the discerning eye, may become bereaved and desolate with the passage of species. Expressions of this emerge from the best natural history writing and from poetry more often than from science or conservation writing. George Schaller conveys that deeper sense of loss with these words about the Himalaya.

For epochs to come the peaks will still pierce the lonely vistas, but when the last snow leopard has stalked among the crags and the last markhor has stood on a promontory, his ruff waving in the breeze, a spark of life will have gone, turning the mountains into stones of silence.

―George B. Schaller, Stones of Silence

as does Aldo Leopold writing about the grouse in the American woods …

Everyone knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost.

―Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

In the poem, evocatively titled Longing, the poet Andrew Slattery conveys this, too.

The mammoth and the dodo never saw it coming—
in the end, there is only the idea of species, like a chair
left swinging when the kids go in for lunch.

The extinction of species, when it happens, may happen virtually unobserved. A species is there, or is declining, and, after a while, no trace is found of it in the wild. Often we see the causes, such as hunting or habitat loss or the crippling effects of an invasive species, that bring on the decline to the end. Only in exceptional cases do we know how the final blow was struck. This is probably true of the Great Auk Pinguinus impennis, a flightless penguin-like alcid bird of the North Atlantic, where the last two known individuals, on the lonely island of Eldey in Iceland, were strangled to death and their egg smashed under a human boot.

One imagines with misgiving the last scene on desolate Eldey. Offshore, the longboat wallows in a surge of seas, then slides forward in the lull, its stern grinding hard on the rock ledge. The hunters hurl the two dead birds aboard and, cursing, tumble after, as the boat falls away into the wash. …The shell remnants lie at the edge of the tideline, and the last sea of the flood, perhaps, or a rain days later, washes the last piece into the water. Slowly it drifts down … down at last to the deeps of the sea out of which, across slow eons of the Cenozoic era, the species first evolved.

―Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America

We know, too, similarly of the extinction of the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus in India. After a long and sorry history of appropriation of habitat for agriculture, of hunting and capture, the long history of the cheetah roaming freely in Indian wilds ended as the country gained its freedom in 1947.

Three cheetahs at Masai Mara, Kenya (Photo courtesy: Kalyan Varma)

Although a handful of sight records are reported from a few scattered locations till the 1960s, the last definitive evidence is of three male cheetahs seen in Surguja district of Madhya Pradesh in Central India in 1947, by the gun-toting Maharajah Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo who summarily shot them dead. The Private Secretary to the ruler wrote:

All these three cheetahs were shot by the Durbar in our State (Korea―E. S. A). He was driving at night and they were all seen sitting close to each other. They were all males… The first bullet killed one and … the second bullet after having gone through one struck the other, which was behind it, and killed it also. It is not known whether they were born in the State or had migrated from somewhere else. They were all of the same size, as you would see from the measurements and it is believed they were all from the same litter. There is no trace of their parents. They were in perfect condition.

The last cheetahs shot in India (Photograph courtesy: Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, Vol 47, 1948)

The editors of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society published this record in 1948, highlighting with an editorial comment that the cheetah was a timid and harmless creature, whose numbers had already declined precipitously. They also added scathingly:

The editors were so nauseated by the account of this slaughter that their first impulse was to consign it to the waste-paper basket. Its publication here is intended in the nature of an impeachment rather than any desire on their part to condone or extol the deed. That anybody with the slightest claim to sportsmanship―and the general run of Indian princes justly prided themselves on that―should be so grossly ignorant of the present status of the Cheetah in India, or knowingly so wanton as to destroy such a rare and harmless animal when he has the phenomenal good fortune to run into not one but three together―probably the very last remnants of a dying race―is too depressing to contemplate. Further comment is needless.

What adds to the heinousness of the episode is that the slaughter was done while motoring through the forest at night, presumably with the aid of powerful headlights or a spotlight. This, it will be recognised, is not only against all ethics of sport but it is a statutory offence deserving of drastic action by those whose business it should be to enforce the law.―Eds.

That we have ultimately lost so magnificent a species to so pathetic a demise leaves me distraught. Decades have passed since, with little effort to sustain the cheetah’s memory in India or understand the effects of its absence on our landscapes, on our sentience, and on our lost connections. Like the Yangtze River dolphin or baiji Lipotes vexillifer, whose recent extinction has already relegated it a fading memory as people slip-slide away in their ever-shifting baseline of awareness, the cheetah, too, vanished from India in more ways than one. An entire generation has grown up in a cheetah-less nation, in landscapes bereft of its presence and its spirit. Now, an effort is proposed to bring back the cheetah to India, and a debate has ensued about the hows and whys of it. It strikes me that if one truly fathoms the sense of loss, what exactly we need to bring back will become clear. That one aspect confers an utility, if utility be desired, to this process of appreciation of a species that has gone from an area, but not yet from everywhere.

On a wider canvas, many reasons to save species that are still extant have been articulated: there’s economics (the money), there’s utility (the products), there’s ethics (the right to existence), there’s aesthetics (the beauty), and there’s ecosystem function (the web of life). In the market-driven, utilitarian world of today, ecologists and conservation biologists are going full tilt at the first couple of these reasons, and entire fields of work in environmental and ecological economics has been spawned speaking of valuation of and payments for biodiversity and ecosystem services and there is talk of ecosystem marketplaces, of cap-and-trade systems, and sustainable use. This may be applauded as prudent or timely, as innovative or inevitable, and one can, with a little effort and a temporary suspension of a more fundamental awareness, even conjure a degree of acquiescence to its immediate conservation value. Yet, if we do not take the right lessons from the extinction of species, if we forget the connections we have lost, the palpable, irreplaceable voids that have been created, we risk making a deep error. An error that only dulls the mind and hardens the heart to reconcile ourselves to a more impoverished existence in a more inconsiderate, inhuman world.

Species like elephants seldom obey the administrative boundaries of wildlife reserves (Photo Credit: M. Ananda Kumar)

This vignette, from the Anamalai Hills of southern India, is not all that unusual. Across large parts of our country, a wide range of species still occur outside the confines of wildlife reserves, and even in the middle of busy, human-dominated landscapes. This is possible because a variety of natural and human-modified habitats—forest fragments, coffee plantations, orchards, paddy fields, marshes and lakes—still exist outside our reserves. These habitats may offer permanent residence for smaller creatures, whereas larger species may use them as passageways to move between wildlife reserves.

But the size, location and status of these habitats that lie outside reserves often belie their importance to the survival of endangered animals. This is so for many reasons.

Firstly, our wildlife reserves, crafted more by circumstance than by design, look like islands when seen on a map. But not long ago, wild animals occupied vast unbroken stretches of habitat—the Western Ghats that run across five states is a good example—and have evolved to move and migrate across such large landscapes. Today, some of the bigger species such as elephants, marooned in small, insular reserves, still seek ways of moving between them. Smaller species like jackals and mongooses, once forest dwellers, now live rather successfully near agriculture and on the edges of villages and towns.

Without this scraggly patchwork of habitats outside reserves, the movement of large animals, as well as the persistence of smaller species would be seriously hampered. Our wildlife would be restricted to the isolated reserves that occupy less than 4% of our country. Unable to move between these islands, they would be greatly affected by seasonal scarcities of food and water. Worse still, if a disease were to wipe out a species from one of these wildlife reserves, we might lose it forever.

How have these slivers of habitat and the animals in them managed to persist? One of the key factors that allows our wildlife to roam fearlessly outside reserves is that Indian law protects the species, rather than just the places they live in. Thus, unlike elsewhere in the world, they cannot be hunted or killed even when they leave wildlife reserves. Beyond the law is the cultural willingness among many communities to coexist with wildlife. The survival of wildlife outside reserves often has more to do with the tolerance of local people than the exertions of our conservation agencies. Thirdly, our agriculture, often even for commercial crops, is practised without the creation of vast, sterile monocultures. A diverse matrix of crop species interspersed with forest remnants and fallow lands have ensured that many of our cultivated landscapes still remain wildlife-friendly.

Conservation today continues to focus its efforts on wildlife reserves, but clearly, it is high time we embraced the ecological landscapes that animals recognise rather than imposing our administrative landscapes on them. And to secure a little more space for wildlife outside our reserves is but a beginning.

- Pavithra Sankaran and M D Madhusudan

An edited version of this article appeared in the Times of India dated 30 July 2010

While coffee is grown by the relatively well-off, farmers in the plains rarely have the capital to invest into seeds and fertilisers each sowing season. They borrow from local moneylenders, who charge annual interest rates between 40 and 300 percent. Few farmers are able to repay these debts, which turn into crippling inheritances passing from father to son.

For decades, this was the saga of farming here. But since the 1990s, a massive but quiet economic revolution has unfolded, driven by trade in a rather unusual commodity.

Cattle dung. Nearly all the 30,000 farmers in these dry-lands keep cattle, mainly as draught animals and also for dung, traditionally an important input into farming. Farmers began selling this humble cow-dung because it fetched a far higher price than chemical fertilisers: for the price of one kilo of cow-dung you could buy 10 times its subsidised chemical equivalent.

But who was buying such expensive manure? It was coffee growers from the adjoining hills. They had had a major windfall in the early 1990s from soaring global coffee prices. The market leaders, Brazil and Colombia, suffered a series of frosts and droughts to which they lost half their produce. This seriously dented the global supply and pushed prices to heights never seen before. Smaller players like India made a killing, bringing massive profits to coffee growers in this region.

Flush with cash, they sought organic manure because it improved the yield and quality of coffee. And of course, conscientious and discerning consumers like you and I were willing to pay higher prices for coffee grown on organic inputs. Does this not sound like a fantastic example of consumer choice benefitting the last link in the value chain—the impoverished farmer of our story who supplied cow-dung to the coffee grower?

But, let’s not stop with the farmer. Let us take this story a step further. Lying just beyond the fields of these farmers is a large and spectacular tract of forest, stretching from Nagarahole and Wayanad, to Bandipur and Mudumalai. Together, these jungles hold nearly a fifth of the world’s remaining tigers and Asian elephants.

Is our demand for organic coffee driving elephants in southern India to the brink?

Which brings us to the twist. The cow-dung that goes into organic coffee, comes straight out of the cattle that graze—illegally—inside the last strongholds of the tiger and the elephant. Farmers have nowhere but these fragile forests to graze their cattle, which number in lakhs. And since the dung trade began, their populations have risen sharply. These cattle convert the forests, with ruthless efficiency, into first class manure. As they have marched in, the forests have retreated and the numbers of wild herbivores—deer, wild cattle and elephants—have declined.

Thus, in a strange juxtaposition only globalisation can bring, the frosts in faraway Brazil and, not to forget, conscientious consumers of organic coffee worldwide, have helped convert some of the best and last remaining elephant and tiger forests in the world first into cow-dung and then into coffee.

So, as you take your next sip of coffee, perhaps you want to check if it tastes… just a little bit strange.

- M D Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran

This article appeared in the Times of India dated 25 June 2010.

Our being here is a violation surely, another sacred space invaded in the increasing commodification of voyeuristic experience, and if I am not entirely uncomfortable with being part of this grave-diving party, it is because we are not the first ones here. The giant sweetlips, motionless above the drop-off gives us a patient, tired look as we disturb his hunting ground. There is a quiet disdain in his assessment: with lycra skins, plastic fins, silicone eyes and artificial respirators, we are more synthetic than organic, and rather inelegant aliens in his silent universe. I guess he knows from experience that if he tolerates our presence another hour, either our weak physiologies or our primitive technologies will force us to surface leaving the busy shipwreck to get on with the long, elaborate business of decay.

And as you surface, you look back once more at the wreck below.  From out in the blue the ship is a laceration on the face of the reef, a deep gash that starts at 17 meters and continues until it meets the breakers at the surface. The island of Minicoy has several such wounds on her reef face – steam ships that ran aground on trans-Indic voyages, carrying grain and cotton and spices and travellers between Europe and the Indies.  After 1885 the wrecks are less frequent after a lighthouse was erected on the southern tip of the island.  The lighthouse is manned still; the lighthouse keeper is a gentleman in the old manner – a self-styled naturalist, a collector of flotsam, keenly aware of the historical symbolism of his post, a proud custodian of his craft.  He accompanies us up the winding iron staircase of the lighthouse, and from this height you can just about make out where the wrecks of old wounded the reef before this tower was built.

Wounds heal.  After the grinding crush of iron keel on aragonite coral, after the life rafts are deployed and the passengers rescued, after the cargo holds are salvaged and the ship stripped of every useable part, the reef calls on its resources to try, as best it can, to repair the tear in its ecological skin.  The fish are the first to venture back, and for species that thrive on structure, a fresh wreck can be choice real estate.  The benthos takes a little longer.  Coralline algae will eventually cover the metal remains, and where there is coralline algae, coral is not far behind.  Slowly, the aragonite will grow back again, and although the scars will always show, the reef does its best to embrace the alien structure and make it part of its own complex framework.  Given enough time, the wreck is little more than a cicatrix on the bark of the reef, a mild blemish of rusting metal and flourishing coral.

The reef is good at mending bruises.  From its pre-Cambrian origins, it has spent most of its existence on a turbulent earth, shifting and gurgling with earthquakes and tsunamis, storms and high waves, extreme tides and shifts in temperature.  And by now the threats of ocean warming and El Niño events on coral reefs are familiar tropes to a media-suffused populace.  We have all seen, and  are perhaps even a little weary of those dramatic images of bleaching coral and dying reefs.

When a small disturbance scales up to catastrophe like this, the self-healing capacities of the reef are put seriously to test.  Yet even here, a healthy reef can recover.  Much is dependent on having good neighbours close at hand. If a few of these reefs escaped the big catastrophe, they can seed the bare spaces with coral. Like white blood cells to the site of a lesion, a flood of coral spat will descend on the spot made dead and vacant by the disturbance, and occupy every free space.  And if the reefs still have a fair complement of grazing herbivores – surgeonfish, parrotfish and the like – those opportunistic algae that can quickly bully out the coral will be kept under check. Given a period of relative calm, and this spat will quickly grow, engaging in a serious-as-death struggle with its compatriots for a space in the sun. Within a decade or so, the wound is mended.

Even in a healthy reef, scars remain long after the healing.  Some species of fish and coral may never recolonize a reef if their populations fail.  These absences often go completely unrecorded, because we often have no baselines to help us determine the loss.  The species that remain have strange demographies, dominated by young individuals, or with some ages completely missing from the population.  These populations, like some post-war generation of lost young soldiers, will carry the signature of this loss for a long time after the disturbance has gone.

Back down in the reefs of the Minicoy you can read this signature everywhere. Minicoy bears the burden of its isolation heavily when hit by large disturbances.  The once effulgent abundances of branching Acropora are there no longer, and you suspect (although you have no way of knowing) that many of the genus are probably locally extinct.  The coral that remain are either very large – survivors of the last mass bleaching – or very small – individuals that managed to recruit to the reef after the event.

As you descend to the wreck for one last time, you realise, that viewed in one way, the scornful dismal of the sweetlips on your previous visit, was actually a fair metaphor for the wreck itself.  Much like you, the wreck is a bionic entity – and after all these years, the identities blur between human and natural forging.  This is not new of course. The ability of coral to take human structures and make them its own is well known.  And it does not take long for us to wonder if this ability can be used to help reefs in the process of wound healing – hurry along a repair that would otherwise take decades.  It is a neat idea surely, and it appeals to the engineers in us.  We are a meddling lot, and it is difficult to leave well-enough alone. Already, on experimental and larger scales, there are efforts afoot to restore reefs through artificial means, using many of the same techniques the reef uses when dealing with a shipwreck.  Concrete blocks of different configurations are being cemented to the reef, waiting for recruits of coral to descend.  Complex electrified contraptions are being established, with the purported aim of encouraging calcium deposition.  For many, even these relatively passive means are not fast enough.  Nurseries of coral are being constructed, where coral from the reef is broken into bits and coaxed to grow into individual heads.  These will later be taken and cemented to the reef, to produce, in the reasoning of the coral nurserymen, instant reefs.

If I come across as a tad sceptical, it is not because I do not believe that these techniques of engineering reefs are a solution.  What I am not entirely sure about is what problem they are a solution for.  The dilemmas the reef face today from local and global pressures are complex ecological dilemmas, and trying to solve them with simple – dare I say, simplistic – engineering solutions is appealing surely, but almost certainly blinkered.  If it is our meddling that has brought reefs to the current brink of disaster, it is a vain presumption to believe that all it will take is a little more meddling to right those wrongs.  More seriously for me, it appears to absolve us of deeper responsibilities – to understand the underlying processes that drive the reef’s immune system in the face of disturbance and catastrophe, and to ensure that these processes are protected.  This takes more imagination of course.   It requires a certain humility to recognise the boundaries of our own accomplishments. And it requires an intellectual investment beyond cement and epoxy. In the absence of this knowledge, the future for reefs is uncertain. We are traveling without a lighthouse here, and shallow strands are everywhere.

A version of this post first appeared on the NDTV blog site.

Biologists and philosophers have many lofty answers to the deeply fundamental questions of human existence. Ask Richard Dawkins and he will, delving into the firmaments of the science of evolutionary biology, essay answers to the question he posed in the opening of his famous book The Selfish Gene: why are people? The answers provide one view of our existence. Ask the philosophers and they will thread you through the arguments as to what sets apart us from them, and how we know we are who we are. The religions and the prophets have their own answers, too, some deep, many dubious. For me, as yet, the glimmerings of an understanding hover at the periphery of my vision, but is clouded by an intellectual cataract that needs to be lifted.

We are a species named Homo sapiens, meaning the man that knows or the man who is wise. Sometimes it seems strange that sapiens, a Latin word meaning wise, is applied to our species. Behind and beyond our intellectual and cultural achievements is a litany of apparently senseless acts—war and plunder, environmental destruction and pillage, racism and genocide, crimes and violence—which questions the assumption that we are the wise ones. Are we truly sapient? I, for one, am not so sure.

We are also called human beings. I am not a trained philosopher, yet it seems to me this is a term of firmer substance. It suggests a species that has something above a mere functional existence, it hints at the possession of a mind of non-trivial cognitive capacity, and of certain existential qualities of perception and self-awareness. To me, it suggests and in some ways is inseparable from, a refined quality of sentience.

The dictionaries define sentience as the state of having or feeling sensation, or our faculty or readiness to perceive sensations. We may perceive our own sentience and those of others in many ways. A neurologist may see it in the firing of neurons in the brain as clearly as a behaviourist may see it in the turn of a head. It may be in the dilation of the pupils in the eye, in a lump in the throat, or, during the aftermath of an emotive moment, in an averted glance or in the words said or left unsaid. We feel it; it affects us.

Are we a sentient species? Sure, we are.

If we take sentience to refer to the form of perception or awareness of sensations emanating from our sense organs, we are clearly not alone, as a species on this planet, in being sentient. Yet, sentience has also been defined as “an example of harmonious action between the intelligence and the sentiency of the mind”. Applied to us, this view of sentience suggests the need to strike a harmony between our intelligent understanding of the world and our mind influenced by sentient perception. It suggests a marriage between reason and affect. A marriage that, if performed, may justify our claim, as a species and as individuals, to uniqueness.

I think of human sentience often, in the context of conservation. I think of it when a burst oil well a mile under the sea spews, not spills, millions of litres of oil into the open ocean. When equatorial rainforest of exhilarating diversity is cut and burned to make way for a vast plantation of one species. When the furrows of old roads and mines are still raw on the hills and the metal claws of heavy vehicles gouge for more. And when the rail track sings to the passing of an express train—sings a ringing requiem for the four elephants left behind, their life ebbing away in stunned and bloody repose. I think of it, even, when the man, by the side of the road, raises his crowbar to bring it down on the head of a small, harmless, and nearly-blind burrowing snake, just because it is a snake.

Image courtesy: Kalyan Varma (www.kalyanvarma.net)

Aren’t these, and many other human-nature interactions, matters that not only concern us, but affect us? Should we then approach solutions for a reconciliation purely through reason and science, as is a common refrain (including of this blog), or include in our ambit human emotion and feeling? Can we build a popular movement, patriotic to a cause as to a nation, if we were to use only logic and dry fact, ignoring sentiment and disposition, music and arts, poetry and passion? Should we always seek answers in our intellect rather than in our humanity? In today’s world, where credible science is called for to inform debate and decisions, human emotion and feeling is treated as an errant child to be kept in rein—side-lined, side-stepped—or as an unwanted churl who would confuse rather than clarify. In the process, a great and material part of human existence is brusquely overlooked.

I think an approach built on science, alone, cannot help conservation. We must include human sentience. Both reason and affect must be brought to bear on conservation problems.

The idea is not new, yet it is seems worth articulating, reiterating. Fortunately, threads of support for this approach are emerging from diverse sources.

First, an over-reliance on science alone may turn out to be counter-productive (or at least insufficient) as seen in climate change campaigns. George Monbiot, writing about “The Unpersuadables” says:

The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away.

He sounds lost “that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science”. I cannot help wondering if an approach that did not rely only on science would help more.

Understanding human emotions and incorporating that into how we deal with human-wildlife interactions, conflicts, and conservation issues is now being suggested as an important direction to take. The discipline of conservation psychology is also taking shape, hoping to link the understanding of human behaviour with conservation. Writing in the book Who cares about wildlife? Michael Manfredo presents developing ideas and results of research on the effects of emotions on memory, decision processes, norms, values, attitudinal changes, and health. His tentative conclusion:

Emotions act with cognition to direct human behaviour. They play an important role in memory, decision making, and attitude change; they clarify roles and social structure… Wildlife professionals should re-examine the widely held view that emotional response issues are trivial, unimportant, or non-informative. Emotions merit careful consideration and thoughtful response.

He also quotes Jon Elster, who says, more pithily:

Emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter.

Another line of argument comes from the work and ideas of the renowned primatologist Frans de Waal in his recent book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s lessons for a Kinder Society. de Waal opens his book with the questions:

Are we our brothers’ keepers? Should we be? Or would this role only interfere with why we are on earth, which according to economists is to consume and produce and according to biologists is to survive and reproduce?

Linking both ideas of competition-is-good-for-you to their origins around the time of the Industrial Revolution, de Waal presents a survey of modern research in animal behaviour, primatology, and anthropology, where there is compelling evidence for the importance of empathy in moulding social relationships. He examines social animals from dogs to dolphins, monkeys and apes, wolves and elephants.

If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one.

He also does not shy away from talking about emotions and moods, greed and gratitude, attachments and morality. I have not read the complete book yet but the previews seem tantalisingly pertinent. “What is it that makes us care about the behaviour of others, or about others, period?” Can we probe the hidden wells of human empathy for a more benign and graceful citizenry on this planet?

The foundations of a conservation ethic must be built on human sentience. And for this to work it may need to sincerely garner the support, not only of conservation scientists, but of painters and musicians, poets and songwriters, playwrights and psychologists, humourists and social workers. It needs, as is often said, to rebuild burnt bridges across the arts, humanities, and the sciences. It needs to bring back into serious discourse our motivations, emotions, passions, sensitivity, and humanism. Then, perhaps, in the years ahead, we will tread our path on planet Earth as Homo sentiens.

The paper in Nature, an accompanying editorial, the seven commentaries from leading experts, available here, are worth a read for anyone who wants an overview of what the major human impacts on the planet are and where they are headed. Specifically, the authors deal with the following nine issues:

1. climate change
2. ocean acidification
3. stratospheric ozone depletion
4. freshwater use
5. biodiversity
6. the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus
7. land-use change
8. atmospheric aerosol loading (to be quantified)
9. chemical pollution (to be quantified)

The paper suggests that three boundaries related to climate change, biological diversity, nitrogen and phosphorous dumping into the biosphere, may already have been exceeded. A brief summary of the findings with relevant links is also available here at the website of the Stockholm Resilience Centre where the lead author Johan Rockström is based. The seven commentaries along with some other recent research highlights are also available here. The real meat of the paper is actually in a parallel publication in the journal Ecology and Society. Although this paper is in press, it is available here and this contains the details of the issues at stake, the underlying rationales, and references to the scientific literature based on which the conclusions are drawn.

In our context, given India’s demographic profile and dependence on agriculture, the aspects related to freshwater use and nitrogen-phosphorous cycles are really worthy of note. Water shortages in the country and the severe depletion of groundwater were recently again in the news following a paper in Nature. Anthropogenic nitrogen loading is already affecting our terrestrial ecosystems, coastal and marine areas, and rivers. Reporting high values of dissolved and sediment-bound nitrogen in Indian rivers, partly due to excessive fertiliser use and associated run-off, the authors of the last study grimly conclude: “Hence, our freshwater aquatic systems can no longer be considered natural, at least with respect to nitrogen transport.”

A quick survey of the debate emerging from the papers by Rockström and colleagues indicates two main questions are being asked (among others spurred by the publications). First, is it sensible to set a tipping-point benchmark, however scientifically tenuous it may be given the current state of knowledge? There is concern that this might cause complacence among policy makers and administrators, who may avoid responding to the situation until the benchmark is reached or exceeded. The second is the issue of  benchmark itself: for instance, in the case of biodiversity loss. The authors of the study use extinction rate as a measure of biodiversity loss. In Table 1, they indicate a pre-industrial value of rate of extinction at 0.1 to 1 species per million species per year. The current rate of extinction is >100 species per million per year and the proposed boundary is 10 species per million per year. What makes this an acceptable boundary or rate of loss of species?

The overall picture that emerges is alarming, to say the least. The climate crisis is familiar; our newspapers are full of it now. Other concerns appear less commonly in the media. For instance, that our oceans, which absorb some 25% of human CO2 emissions, are undergoing acidification at a rate 100 times higher than at any time in the past 20 million years. This makes a whole range of marine organisms, such as corals and molluscs, susceptible to corrosion of their shells (made of calcium carbonate in the form of aragonite). The decline of aragonite-forming organisms and coral reefs could substantially alter marine ecosystems. Another global concern is that of human tampering of the planetary nitrogen cycles. Human activities now input more reactive nitrogen into the planet than all natural processes combined. As a large part of this enters the biosphere, it alters terrestrial ecosystems, as well as freshwater and marine ecosystems.

The paper will doubtless spur more discussions and research into the various benchmarks and their utility in tracking the human footprint. Despite the debates and shortcomings, one real value of the paper as it appears to me is that it brings into one page—onto one figure even, superimposed ominously on the globe—an assessment and visualisation of the nine-fold stranglehold that humans as a species have on Earth. Looking at it we have to keep asking: is the human journey reaching the edges of the Earth?