Conservation caveats

T. R. SHANKAR RAMAN & DIVYA MUDAPPA | February 26, 2012

An endemic hornbill threatened by proposed developments on Narcondam Island and a swiftlet whose nests are a commodity in wildlife trade provide lessons for conservation.

Develop and perish?

MEERA ANNA OOMMEN, KARTIK SHANKER | February 19, 2012

How long can Great Nicobar Island, home to spectacular bio-diversity, resist development and security pressures?

Fading of an invisible map

VARDHAN PATANKAR & ROHAN ARTHUR | February 12, 2012

A reef management plan that’s an intricate system of prohibitions and permits, clothed in superstition, has worked for centuries. Now it is beginning to fall apart.

An intricate web

PANKAJ SEKHSARIA | February 5, 2012

Unlike the rest of India, tribal rights and conservation are not at the opposite ends of the spectrum in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Yet, there are challenges.

Imported Threat

RAUF ALI | January 29, 2012

They’re beautiful but within themselves they carry the seeds of destruction.

Targeting Tillanchong

MANISH CHANDI | January 22, 2012

Invaluable for the Nicobarese people and endemic wildlife, Tillanchong island in the Nicobars is threatened by a proposal to make it a missile-testing site.

See also the article on the Andaman Trunk Road posted here, which appeared on 1 January 2012.

The main highway cutting across the Tost and Tosunbumba mountains

I had lost the sunlight over an hour ago. Well, the sunlight barely made it into these narrow canyons during this time of the year. I was in the South Gobi region of Mongolia and this was the month of November. With no sun reaching the dept of these canyons, the temperature was well below freezing. The one thing I dreaded the most in this region was a bike crash. And just as the thought crossed my mind, the rear wheel of my bike wobbled in the loose gravel and I came down crashing. Lying on the ground I smelled petrol and so I immediately rushed to the bike and put it on the main stand. Only a little petrol had leaked. I had a minor bruise on my left thigh but otherwise I seemed alright.

I pulled out the map of the region and my GPS unit and pondered for a while. After a few minutes I admitted to myself that I was lost! With the sun going down my situation was worsening. My best bet was to head dead north, get out of the mountain and into the open steppe, and I should be able to see the road; simple! Find the highway in the steppe and get back to camp. If I could make it to the highway before total dark I should be fine.

An ibex in the late evening. Usually they prefer the rugged rocky cliffs

I was here in the Gobi desert to try and assess the conservation status and distribution of wild ungulates in the newly proposed Local Protected area around the Tost-Tosunbumba mountains. Alongside, I also hoped to estimate the availability of wild-ungulate-prey for the snow leopard which would complement my work in India. This is also the site of the Long Term Ecological Study, a joint venture of the Snow Leopard Trust and PANTHERA. The only place in the world where you can study the snow leopard using, almost exclusively, a motorbike to get around. Orjan, a colleague from Sweden, is also doing his PhD here. He is incredible when it comes to collaring snow leopards. He has already collared 15 snow leopards and 6 of them currently carry their collars. The study is aimed at understanding the home range, movement and predation pattern of snow leopards. I felt that our work complimented each other very well.

"Nartai", Sunlight, as we called him, was the last snow leopard that Orjan had collared before leaving for Sweden

The most abundant ungulate in this region was the Siberian ibex Capra sibirica and the argali Ovis amon. Though the latter is comparatively much rarer. Outside the mountains and into the steppe there is also the Black-tailed gazelle, khulan and the occasional wild Bactrian camel that stray from the neighboring Great Gobi Strictly Protected area.

Argali, the biggest wild-sheep in the world. They mainly preffer the rolling hills on the periphery of the Tost Mountains.

From my assessments so far, there is a healthy population of ibex. Large enough to support a viable population of the snow leopards. But the status of the other four ungulates is bleak. Interviews with the local herders suggested that the Khulan may even have gone locally extinct; sometime over the last decade. Nadia, an alumni of the M.Sc. Course at the Wildlife Institute of India, but a local Mongolian, helped with the interview surveys. She also found out that it was only a few male bactrian camels that made forays to this region , that too only during winters, probably in search of mates among the domestic free-ranging camel population. Over the last decade the Black-tailed gazelle has retreated further west and exists as a small population of less than 30 individuals. Even though the argali is distributed over a much larger area, their population seems small, as sighting an argali is a difficult task.

The gloden glow of the Gobi is deceptive. It masks the bitter cold!

Even if this area was declared a Local Protected Area, it was threatened by the mining companies that had already procured licenses to explore for minerals in this region. I had already seen some of the mining activity within the borders of the PA. Then there was also the illegal, open-cast mining for gold; aptly called Ninja mining. You hardly ever saw people doing it, just the scares left on the land! The border with China, the sink for all the minerals of Mongolia,  is barely 40 km away from here. The nightmare of straying into china that haunted me at my field site in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, India, still haunts me here!

The Golden Gobi!

As these thoughts were running in my head, I rode over a gentle rolling hill and the vast steppe opened in front of me. The warm glow of the setting sun reflected from the dry grass covering the landscape in shades of gold! I wondered why anyone would want to dig up a place as beautiful as this.

I guess, the glitter of gold outshines the Gobi!

My first reaction to these two astounding books, as a practicing wildlife scientist with a claim to be involved in animal research and conservation over the last two decades was: “Why were these profoundly important issues never a formal and thorough part of my academic training or practice?”. Is it because issues of human values, morals and ethics are considered outside the pale of training to be a wildlife scientist or ecologist? Is it because they are considered wishy-washy or vague, or, devil-take-you, too subjective? Or is it simply because most present-day wildlife scientists actually do not have a deep understanding or appreciation of the central issues, or if they do, they prefer to keep it to themselves? But why not? We use animals in research. We make claim to efforts to understand them. We make conservation appeals, ostensibly, on their behalf. We probe, we peer, we collect, we tag, we trap, we handle, we follow, we even sometimes kill animals for scientific study. Do we really do all this on the basis of a comprehensive ethical and moral foundation? Or do we shy away from these issues because of being tagged an animal-rights activist even if we are not really speaking of rights? In the context of conservation, can we achieve our goals if we lack a foundational conservation ethic? These books give plenty of food for thought.

The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant work by a Nobel laureate in literature and a wonderful book to start the year with. A superb form of academic novel (a novel genre, I could say, if the pun may be forgiven), this is top-notch writing on a theme of profound and enduring significance for anyone concerned with human values and connections with other animals.

J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton to deliver the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values, presents the lectures as a fictional story with debate and dialogue crafted into the form of this book. Within it is the story of Elizabeth Costello, herself an academic, invited to deliver lectures at a University, and the lectures she delivers and the ensuing responses. Reading it as a sort of literary dialectic, one is swept by Coetzee’s tight and engaging prose into central moral, philosophical and ethical issues related to the lives of animals. The four commentaries that accompany the central work by Coetzee are excellent, too. The book’s introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann, and accompanying essay commentaries by Wendy Doniger (religion scholar), Barbara Smuts (primatologist), Marjorie Garber (literary theorist ), and Peter Singer (moral philosopher and author of Animal Liberation reviewed below) are worth reading and add great value to this book.

Coetzee touches on vital issues that relate to whether we perceive other animals as beings with interests or as objects for our manipulation. Cruelty, sentience, sympathy, empathy, and the morality of our actions towards other sentient beings is the undercurrent of Coetzee’s words, of Costello’s debate. Vegetarianism, animal intelligence and how we perceive it even as trained scientists, pain and suffering, animal slaughter or ‘sacrifice’, these are all themes seamlessly woven into a gripping narrative thread. Coetzee brings sudden and scathing clarity and depth to the work of a litany of earlier writers, scientists, and philosophers: of Thomas Aquinas and Jeremy Bentham, Franz Kafka and Tom Regan, Wolfgang Köhler and Mary Midgely, and many others.

And yet, the implications are not thrust on you as absolutes, as dogma. It comes in measured words, prompting a dawning awareness. To do this Coetzee draws brilliantly on Kafka’s Red Peter, the ape presenting A Report to An Academy, and Costello’s words only seem to echo his own hidden voice:

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

A phenomenal work, worth reading and re-reading, even if only to be touched by Coetzee’s prose, or perhaps for introspective and outwardly illumination.

Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement by Peter Singer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Compelling and well-written, Peter Singer’s book is a classic that should be required reading for anyone concerned with the interests of animals. Without taking recourse to the issue of the rights of animals, Singer explains how moral and ethical positions we can take and understand become inadequate if restricted only to humans. Trying to separate humans as a species as somehow distinct and above beings of all other species (speciesism), if pursued logically and through all its implications, only leads to moral, ethical, and philosophical positions that are untenable.

A considerable portion of the book is devoted to detailed and balanced consideration of two major issues affecting the interests and welfare of animals: (a) the millions upon millions of animals used in research and vivisection, and (b) the billions and billions of animals ‘reared’ (=imprisoned) in factory farms and other facilities in cruel conditions and inefficiently (from social and ecological perspectives) only to be ultimately slaughtered, often painfully, for use as food for humans. This is not to overlook the (ab)use of animals for other reasons, such as for fur or other animal products such as leather, but just that the number of animals cruelly treated for vivisectional research/animal testing and for food is enormous. According to Singer, the greatest impact on the largest number of animals will result from immediate changes in these two areas: by avoiding and finding alternatives to animal testing and vivisection, and by going vegetarian, vegan, or being far more circumspect and choosy about where the animal flesh or produce you eat comes from and how the animals were raised and treated.

Besides bringing these issues forward and in-your-face for serious consideration, Singer’s major contributions in this book are a lucid articulation of some central issues. First, the issue of what equality involves (not assuming that everyone is equal as there is undeniable variation, but the ethical imperative of equal treatment). Second, bringing consideration of the interests of animals to the forefront (without need to draw on or call for animal ‘rights’). Separating issues related to preventing pain and suffering, from issues related to the actual killing of animals is another distinction that leads to nuances in treatment of animals and animal welfare in various contexts.

The book is perhaps titled Animal Liberation to raise analogies with other liberation movements, for instance against slavery, racism, and sexism. In fact, many ethical and moral issues raised are consistent across these various movements. The way these are highlighted by the author and the analogies that he draws are very useful both to understand issues and to strengthen reasoned debate. One can ponder on the ideas Singer presents. One can grasp practical suggestions he gives for more ethical personal choices. And one can act.

Worth reading, absolutely.

This joint project will focus on empowering local communities in each country to adopt a series of conservation measures, including environmental education, community‐based wildlife monitoring, anti‐poaching programmes, and cross‐collaboration between regional and national government offices. The project will be implemented together with leading national conservationists based at NCF, Shan Shui and Peking University in China, and the Snow Leopard Conservation Fund in Mongolia. The Snow Leopard Trust (SLT), recognized as the global leader in snow leopard conservation, will also participate in the project. The BBC Wildlife Fund is providing nearly £60,000 ($90,000 US) over the next two years in this program for conservation in regions critical to the survival of the snow leopard.

“This is the first large, multi‐country project of its kind for snow leopards,” says Dr. Charudutt Mishra, Trustee of NCF and Science and Conservation Director of the SLT, “and it’s a huge leap forward for the species.” Snow leopards are still relatively new to the conservation scene. The first photograph of a wild snow leopard wasn’t captured until the 1970s, and targeted efforts to protect the cats didn’t begin until the 1980s. Snow leopard conservation has lagged behind big campaigns like those set up for tigers, but Dr. Mishra hopes this project will change all that and says “with WFN, BBC and our other partners, we can finally produce the kind of in‐depth, multifaceted conservation systems necessary to save these cats.”

Georgina Domberger, Director of WFN, believes the project has global impact, one of the factors that gained WFN’s support: “It’s great to say you’re going to protect an endangered species—but what does that mean? We can’t save all of them at once, but we are coming up with a way to protect some of the most important population centres we can, and then we hope to build outwards from there.” WFN is also excited because they, like NCF, view snow leopards as a flagship species able to streamline and lead larger efforts in critical habitats. Domberger says “we all love snow leopards for their beauty and charisma, and since they are at the top of the wildlife pyramid, we know helping them will help the entire ecosystem.”

A press release about the program is available here [PDF].

The painful truth is that the first two deaths of Osama referred, not to the terrorist mastermind and leader of al-Qaeda, but to two separate individual Asian elephants Elephas maximus, Asia’s largest land mammal, with the contrasting reputation of being the gentle giants of its forests. These individuals were named after a feared human, on the most-wanted list of a distant superpower. They were labeled serial killers and raging bulls, as rogues and as terrorisers. And yet, when people came to see the prostrate corpse of the killed elephant, they placed flowers on its body, even as many asked whether the right animal was killed or it was just another innocent elephant victim.

Maligning the elephant

Now, as before, it is open season on the Asian elephant. The character of the elephant is on public display in the media, interpreted to us by all manner of people. There are journalists and filmmakers, naturalists and scientists, politicians and hunters, mahouts and zookeepers, temple priests and elephant ‘owners’. Everyone knows, or seems to know, the elephant.

From the forests come stories of great tuskers and makhnas and their roving lives of ranging and musth and disproportionate peril. There are tales of tenderness among mothers and calves, and of itinerant family herds led by rugged matriarchs over familiar routes across vast and varied landscapes. The stories speak of communication by unheard sounds, unfelt vibrations, and undetected pheromones, and of elephant memory and cognition. They speak of individuals that are self-aware and social, that can be doting or depressed, loving and forgiving. We learn of stable yet sensitive societies, and begin to know sentient and intelligent individuals. These stories proclaim an understanding of elephants that is barely beginning to grow.

From crop fields and human habitation come tales of rogues and raiders, marauders and mayhem. There is an image of a lone tusker, willful and vicious, or of a huge herd on a rampage of raiding and pillage. The elephant tramples, the tusker gores, snuffing the lives of the few people whose path has converged tragically with its own. The elephants are not on old routes anymore; they are said to be straying herds, individuals on trespass. The words say it all. Each elephant and its action, known or unknown, is judged and placed within the ambit of a common belief. Pinioned by belief and judgement, claims and media reports, the elephants, unaware, must await retaliation. Retaliation and pain at the hands of the self-aware, social, sentient, and intelligent human.

The pain of the elephant

What does it take to cause pain to an elephant? That great beast, ponderous and thick-skinned, that stands tall in its calloused feet, but is still dwarfed by the immensity of its worldly landscape and its perpetual perils.

Will it take a land mine, planted in a contested forest by warring people, which tears away its leg? Or the final body blow to an elephant on its path delivered by a speeding train that brooks no obstruction to its own? Will it be a flaming torch flung on its skin by an irate farmer, whose ire has overwhelmed his tolerance? Or perhaps the pain from the sting of an electric wire strung deliberately across land that someone now claims as his, and only his? It could come, too, from a bullet as it bursts its way into its heart or brain—from the gun of a poacher who wants only its teeth.

Any of this may bring pain, and yet, the deepest pain to an elephant may come from the loss of one of its own. A pain we barely sense, far less understand, as we watch the elephant visit and caress the bones of the dead.

We have arrived at a grim moment; one where we must, it is being said, rethink our tolerance and veneration towards the elephant, a relation that has spanned millennia. We must, it is being said, find ways to deal with the elephant, as one would deal with a troublesome pest, a pest spawned by an interaction between people and landscapes gone awry.

Something missing

And so, the ecologists, wildlife scientists, forest managers, judges, and administrators are coming up with their answers. Protect the reserves and the movement corridors, they say, and the elephants will find their way through ‘our’ land. Erect this kind of barrier, not that, and here, not there, this way, and not that, they say, and the elephants can be kept at bay. Compensate the people for their loss justly and quickly, they say, for everything today has a price and perhaps people’s love can be bought, too. Understand the elephant, they say, strapping a collar on its neck or probing its DNA and its habits, for this will inform us, and information is power. Capture and relocate the elephant, or kill (cull) it where it lives, say the pragmatists, for we can then evade the elephant as easily as we evade seeing the brutality that is in us. We can even mark our broken tolerance by filling elephant camps with broken elephants. By and large, these methods and answers have one character. They treat the elephant as an object, a commodity even, to be valued or traded, upon whom, in the words of G. A. Bradshaw, “things and people act to produce a programmed response”. As J. M. Coetzee writes, in The Lives of Animals:

The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another.  Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object… There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

Are we not missing something? Will it not help to bring in an element of empathy to elephant individuals, societies, and cultures? Should we not aspire to a higher understanding of the psychology of elephants whose selfhood, rights, and emotions should matter to us, but are relegated to the dustbin of false anthropomorphism or misguided pragmatism? Is this pragmatism and experience pointing us toward the right solutions, or have we wavered in our direction from a shallowness of our understanding? Manuals and action plans are written on how to understand and stave off conflict with the elephant-object in India. Why is there so little said about the elephant-being with whom we share so much of our true nature? As Bradshaw notes in the fascinating book Elephants on the edge: what animals teach us about humanity:

Elephants are merely mirroring the circumstances in which they have come to live… Under such conditions, human-elephant conflict (HEC) takes on a very different meaning. … issues surrounding elephants are “not about the animals”. Rather, they are about humans: human-elephant conflict revolves around questions of social justice and human introspection. Much like other cultures that have refused to be absorbed by colonialism, elephants are struggling to survive as an intact society, to retain their elephant-ness, and to resist becoming what modern humanity has tried to make of them—passive objects in zoos, circuses, and safari rides, romantic decorations dotting the landscape for eager eyes peering from Land Rovers, or data to tantalize our minds and stock the bank of knowledge. Elephants are, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote about black South Africans living under apartheid, simply asking to live in the land of their birth, where their dignity is acknowledged and respected.

One is forced to wonder what the future holds for the human – elephant relationship, a relationship between two intelligent, sentient species. Will it remain a perception of elephants as objects of conflict seen through the lens of science, when it could lead to coexistence if passed through the prism of humanity?

One morning in the summer of 2005, our country woke up to the news that the national animal had disappeared from Sariska, a well-funded tiger reserve close to Delhi. Public shock and outrage followed, and the government set up a Task Force to look into why the tiger had declined and what could be done to reverse this.

While the Tiger Task Force toured the country, meeting and speaking with a variety of people to understand why India’s premier conservation programme, Project Tiger, had failed, some conservationists were busy with another set of debates. These concerned the upcoming Forest Rights Bill, which proposed to confer rights to adivasis and forest dwellers over lands they lived on and the forest resources they used. The bill ran afoul of conservationists and foresters who feared that recognising people’s rights would jeopardize the already fragile protection of forests and wildlife. They also felt that these rights over forests and resources within would worsen the pressure these habitats already experience from firewood harvest, cattle grazing, collection of forest produce and other local livelihood activities.

Recognising the rights of forest-dwelling communities is key to gaining their support for conservation

But, existing forest and wildlife conservation laws such as the Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972 (WLPA) already provided for the recognition and settlement of some of the rights of local communities. So, why was a new law being drafted with very similar provisions??

For a rather simple but disturbing reason: while creating most wildlife sanctuaries and national parksForest Departments had not implemented the available provisions to recognise and settle the rights of local people. As a result, for several decades, millions of people in our forests and wildlife reserves have lived in the fear that they could be declared trespassers and removed from their lands anytime.

Seeking to correct this miscarriage of the law, adivasi groups campaigned for change and the Forest Rights Act (FRA) came into effect in 2006. This law effectively took away the sweeping powers of government departments to settle rights and greatly empowered the gram sabha.

Interestingly, several of the concerns that adivasi rights groups raised also figured in the Tiger Task Force report. It noted that people sharing lands and forests with the tiger often suffered because of selective implementation of the laws that protected the tiger. And this in turn eroded local support for the protection of the tiger and its habitat. The report stressed that without taking local people’s concerns into account, ongoing conservation measures risked failure.

Until this point, conservation policy in India was enforced from top down. That it was possible—and in fact necessary—to build conservation ground up, seemed a dangerous new idea. But to succeed in India, conservation could not continue to remain a middle class concern for which the rural poor paid the price. If we were to end the hostility local communities felt towards the current manner of implementing wildlife conservation, they would not only have to become partners in conservation, they would also have to benefit from conservation.

The opportunity to do conservation in this democratic participatory way existed from the beginning but unfortunately we chose backdoor means. Instead of creating conservation policies by involving all concerned people with their differing opinions, conservationists believed it would be easier to do this with government officials and people in power. And despite efforts to change things by amending conservation laws, this trend continues, allege activists like Bijoy.

The Wild Life Protection Act was amended in 2006 to make conservation more fair to local people. Now, the WLPA and FRA both make it mandatory to recognise and settle the rights of local communities and obtain their written consent before declaring a tiger reserve. Yet, Forest Departments have declared several new tiger reserves with scant regard for the ongoing FRA’s rights settlement process. Nor has informed consent of rights-holders been obtained, prompting activists to term these reserves “illegal”.

This stand-off between conservationists and tribal rights groups is tragic and undermines both their goals.

It was not wildlife and conservation laws that stalled Vedanta Aluminium in Orissa’s Niyamgiri forests but the company’s failure to satisfy the requirements of the FRA. With such a legal precedent, conservationists have had to grudgingly acknowledge that while the FRA is mainly meant to uphold the rights of forest dwelling people, doing so could also help save their forests.

Similarly, the amended WLPA has strong provisions for safeguarding local people’s rights even while securing the needs of endangered tiger. Both these laws have been crafted with necessary safeguards for both disempowered people and wildlife. What they need is a sensitive and complete implementation through new and creative partnerships.

Going forward, the rights of the forest dwellers must be recognized just as much as the needs of wildlife must be secured. The way we chose to do conservation for the last four decades years is not only undesirable, it is simply illegal today. If we want a conservation that is not only effective but also sustainable, we have no option but to bring in greater democracy in the way we implement conservation.

Many conservationists continue to lament that the Forest Rights Act closes the doors on conservation of forests and wildlife. This is perhaps true. But, to be sure, what is closing are the dim back-alleys and backdoors to conservation. Even as the shutters come down on these shortcuts, the front-gates of conservation have opened wider than ever before. And it is entirely up to us which entrance we choose to take as we move forward to conserve our wildlife.

- M D Madhusudan & Pavithra Sankaran (An edited version appeared in the Times of India dated 4 March 2011)

Finding a middle path: While roads and highways are indeed critical for development, those passing through forests cause heavy collateral damage

by Pavithra Sankaran & M. D. Madhusudan

The gaur have been trying to cross the highway for a while now. They stand in an alert huddle, their dark coats gleaming in the headlights of trucks and cars passing through Bandipur Tiger Reserve. This stream of traffic between Ooty and Bangalore seems unending and the speed limit seems irrelevant. Dusk falls fast and it is soon night. Forty-five minutes later, the gaur are still waiting for a pause in the traffic, simply to get across this ten-metre strip of road, in a Reserve where they are supposed to be able to roam fearlessly.

The road that brings vegetables to Calicut, tourists to Ooty and seafood to Bangalore also slashes the forests of Bandipur in two. On this narrow 15-kilometre strip of asphalt, the lives of thousands of animals–from dragonflies and deer to tortoises and tigers–have been lost under the wheels of passing vehicles. But the same road also allows hundreds of wide-eyed travellers, like us, to experience the beauty of a deciduous forest and catch a glimpse of its inhabitants.

To be sure, roads do serve the country and its people in critical ways. They are indicators of development, providing access to education, healthcare, markets and even a platform for people to hold protests simply by sitting on them and staging a rasta-roko.

But for a while now, conservationists in India have been holding their own form of rasta-roko. In several of our sanctuaries and national parks, roads have become the subject of much controversy. Thousands of kilometres of roads weave through our forests, posing all manner of threats to our wildlife. As gashes in the habitat, roads open up dense and closed forests to invasive plants, to pollution from vehicles and to the garbage that always trails people. Trees along roads are also known to die off faster because of exposure. Retaining walls and safety barricades make parts of the forest inaccessible to small animals like turtles, which are unable to cross these barriers and sometimes die trying. All this, of course, in addition to the roadkills that smoother roads and faster vehicles inevitably leave behind.

While standing together with conservationists in defending our parks against highway projects of other government agencies, the Forest Department is itself often involved in expanding road networks within reserves. Some length of dirt roads are certainly needed for patrolling and controlling fires, but some of our parks have a road density—one kilometre for each square kilometre of forest—that parts of rural India would certainly envy!

What conservationists have been asking for is a more thoughtful planning of roads through forested areas. The Mysore-Mananthavady highway through Nagarhole Tiger Reserve is a case in point. A World Bank funded project to widen and resurface the highway raised concerns about the safety of wildlife in the Reserve. Rather than simply oppose the road, conservationists and local people suggested a diversion that skirted the forest instead of cutting through it. For a small increase in budget and a three-kilometre increase in length, this diversion would also provide highway access to 11 villages along the Reserve boundary. The alternative plan, predictably, was resisted by the government and only after protracted negotiation, finally approved.

Just as we have set limits on what we can take out of our forests, mustn’t we also watch what we put in them? Evidence for the damage that intrusions like highways, pylons, canals and pipelines cause to our sensitive natural areas and their wildlife is indeed compelling. What we need now is a strong and clear policy to regulate their construction and ensure that, while getting the infrastructure our country needs, we do not fray the fabric of our forests further.

An edited version of this article appeared in The Times of India dated 28th January 2011

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.

Another nice thing about this road is that for some stretch it goes along the River Vennaru—one of the tributaries of River Kaveri—until a place called Thiruvarur. It is not uncommon to find some huge Ficus trees along the bank of this river with their roots falling on top of the water surface. It makes for an amazing sight to see kids grab these roots to swing back and forth, and plunge into water. I always fancied doing this someday but have sadly not managed so far. Hopefully some day in future!

We reached Thiruvarur to catch a train to reach our village. I was very excited about this train journey. When I was a kid, my parents used to take us to our native place every year during the summer holidays. The best part used to be this 20-minute train journey. It was great fun just sitting by the train window and watching the fast-moving trees and electric and telephone posts go past. When the train passed through some villages there used to be a bunch of kids standing by the rail tracks waving their hands happily and yelling out. As a kid, I never understood why they did that and why they were so happy to wave at strangers. Nevertheless, whenever I see them, I too wave back and it has always felt really good. Another exciting thing is the sound of the running train (..tadak..tadak..tadak..tadak…) and especially that distinct loud noise it makes when it passes through a bridge on a river (…dudun..dudun..dudun..dudun…). It used to move on a coal engine in old times and sometimes sitting by the window was not always fun. In a compartment near the engine you could get minute particles of coal and soot in your eyes, which spoil your experience of the journey. This time there was no such problem as the train ran on a diesel engine and interestingly the track has not changed. Still a metre gauge! I was by the window experiencing fast-moving trees, electric and telephone posts, waving at kids, listening to the music of train track on the river bridge. I watched birds perched on power lines and vast green sheets of paddy fields.

The train slowed and stopped at the station and I got down to see the first thing on my list. The banyan tree by the side of the ticket counter. No change. I was pleased. I passed a bazaar to reach our village and was greeted by some old familiar faces. As I entered the village, I looked at the pond by the temple (I learnt swimming in this very pond with a dry bottle gourd on my back as a float). The water was not looking very clear. Later I learnt that fishes are being cultured there now and the water is not potable anymore! One thing that still remained unchanged was the sight of cow-dung cakes on the parapet wall surrounding the pond. There are about four ponds in this village. I was walking towards the second one which has lotus and lilies, and a huge Madhuca indica tree by its side.  No change here as well.

These trees and ponds are natural landmarks that helped people find their way and directions. If I asked for a short-cut to my uncle’s house ten years ago, this is how the known local person would have explained…

From the lotus pond go straight and take the cart track which goes through the paddy fields. After about half a mile there will be an eecha tree (Phoenix sylvestris) with baya weaver bird nests, walk for about a mile from there and you will see a series of palm trees with toddy pots on it. From there take the road which goes north and you will see a small Shiva temple with a pond. Walk up to the fourth lamp post and you will see a poovarasu tree (Thespesia populnea) in front of one house…that’s your uncle’s house…

The date palm tree where the baya weavers used to nest

There is a nice tar road that goes to my village now, but I preferred to take the short-cut. I saw the Phoenix tree, but there was no baya nest; I saw palm trees, but no toddy tapping now. I remember having palm and coconut toddy when I was there last time. I wanted to have Phoenix toddy but the season was over. I wonder if I will have another chance to taste that ever!

I walked through the cart track with a paddy field on one side and a small canal on the other. I reached a small concrete bridge. I remember as a kid we used to sit on that parapet, fishing, using a long bamboo stick with suspended nylon thread and earthworms as bait in the hook. I got my first (and the last) fish from there. It could take us almost half a day to catch one long fish. I remember how fascinated we used to be to watch schools of fingerlings swimming on the clear water surface in that canal. I stopped there for a while and looked around. Vast spread of paddy field filled with spider webs gleaming in the morning sun. The irrigation canal hosting a checkered keelback snake that peeped out from the water and looked around like a periscope. A blue jay on top of a crown-less palm tree, black drongo and yellow-billed babblers sitting on a small nochi tree (Vitex negundo), palm swifts flying overhead, ditch jewels, yellow-tailed ashy skimmers, picture wings, and golden dartlets perched and flew along the canal bank vegetation. Crimson tips, danaid eggflies, and angled castors fluttered around as a lone crab on the bank of the canal moved slowly inside the turbid water. I was surrounded by  the nostalgic thoughts of my childhood days and the different lifeforms of my countryside.

Paddyfield full of spiderwebs

I looked at that moving crab and remembered how locals used to catch it. This crab is called vayal nandu in Tamil (crabs found in paddy fields—is it the Indian rice field crab Oziotelphusa senex senex Fabricius?). These crabs are not huge, like sea crabs, so they won’t yield much flesh but are very tasty when cooked with pepper. It was a dry season and burrows of these crabs along bunds of the paddy fields were visible prominently. People used a small kite made of very thin paper (sometimes very thin plastic sheets), which whirls when wind blows as it is twisted and bent to the shape of a wheel. While it rotates, it produces a sound somewhat like flowing water. They would keep this near the entrance of the burrow while inserting a stick/rod inside the burrow. If the crab catches the stick then they pull it out immediately. But it’s a meticulous work which needs quite a lot of patience. People believe that as the crab hears (?) the flowing-water sound from the kite, it believes that water has come and slowly comes out of the hole.  I am not sure about the hearing skills of crabs, however, inserting a rod into its burrow would surely irritate the crab to catch the other end of the rod and fall into collector’s vessel.

Peeping water snake and crawling crab.

I walked towards my house. It is still thatched with dry coconut leaves in the front and rest of the roof is tiled. Still the same mud walls. It is fenced with adu thoda plant (Justicia adhatoda earlier know as Adhatoda vasica—Adu thoda means in Tamil a plant avoided by goats and other cattle). After meeting my folks, I looked around that old house to find some of the things on my list. They are, the flying insect which goes inside the mud wall with a caterpillar, another insect which wags its tail up and down, a huge black flying insect, and a millipede. I saw all of them! The first one is a wasp which takes caterpillars and other small insects inside the mud wall and seals the hole after sometime. The second one is also a wasp (Evania sp.) that wags its abdomen constantly. This wasp deposits eggs in the egg capsules of cockroaches and the developing larvae feed on the cockroach eggs. The third is a carpenter bee (Xylocopa sp.). When we were kids, our elders told us that it was a kulavi, i. e. wasp in Tamil, although this insect belongs to bee family.  As a kid we were very scared of this insect, especially, of the buzzing noise it makes as it flies around you. I have seen this insect recently in other places but I was particularly interested to see their roosting or nesting site in our old village house. We generally see them going inside the bamboo pole which supports the tiles/thatches on the roof. And I was lucky to spot one this time. I wonder if we can even find this beautiful insect in concrete jungles, and even if we do, I wonder where they would roost or nest.

Some of the insects in my bucket list to see during my trip to the countryside

The last one is a black-and-yellow millipede. I remember everyone hates even the presence of this organism and women in particular. We generally see this millipede in moist walls, bathrooms, and near water taps. Sometimes we can see them in a group and they will fill that place with a strange unpleasant smell. I saw a group of millipedes in the backyard of our house. What was missing in that place was a red-and-black millipede. This one is double the size of the previous one. Apart from this black-and-yellow millipede the other interesting thing that I noticed in our backyard is an unusually high number of snails. I was hoping that this is not an invasive snail. In the quest for identification of this millipede, I later found that it is (Harpaphe haydeniana—yellow-spotted millipede) an exotic species native to America!

An alien yellow-spotted black millipede and a(n invasive?) snail

My next target was Naked Neck! Yes, it is a kind of chicken that I used to see in my village. This breed does not have feathers on their neck and vent. Only a bunch of feathers decorate the top of their head. Locally, it’s called as krappu kozhi, due to its funny-looking hair style! Krappu is a distorted Tamil version of crop—crop-cutting is one type of hair style in Tamil Nadu and kozhi is fowl. The hen and the chicks of the Naked Neck are really cute-looking things with a patch of feather on their head. This was added to my ‘bucket list’ just before my trip as I was reading an article on diversity in farm animals by Theodore Baskaran in one of the Tamil Magazines Uyirmmai (November 2010 issue- http://www.uyirmmai.com). In this article, he mentions how this type of breed is now rare to see as there is more demand for broiler chicken. I took a stroll on the streets of my village with some kids accompanying me searching for and inquiring about krappu kozhi. Although a few old people were aware of this type of chicken, they were unable to tell me where I could find it. Finally, in one corner of the village we manage to sight a Naked Neck rooster but not the hens or chicks. Upon searching on the internet on this, I found that Naked Neck is a breed originally from central Europe.

Naked Neck rooster

It was Diwali eve but there was hardly any noise of crackers. I sat with my folks on the steps of our house facing the street. We recalled our olden days when we used to go swimming in the temple pond, fishing in the canal, visiting our own paddy fields and, watching the toddy-tapper skilfully climbing the coconut trees and elegantly descend from there, constructing toy buildings with sticks by joining the unripe fruits of  Morinda pubescens, having stone-skipping competitions in the pond, riding in the bullock cart for temple festival, throwing stones at jamun and tamarind trees for fruits and hurriedly picking them up from the ground while competing with others, watching movies sitting on the sand in the only touring talkies of that village, panic-ridden cycle rides through the graveyard to the second show of the movie in our village and many such stories.

It was late evening. Street lights were on and the surroundings were filled with the cacophony of birds. But our stories of our past in the village continued like the non-stop call of the common hawk-cuckoo that was calling from the nearby neem tree…

But if you take a morning drive along this road between the months of April and November, one particular species of domestic animal may dominate your sightings. Cattle. Thousands of withered but hardy native cattle are driven into the Reserve illegally each day during the monsoon season. At this time, outside the Reserve, nearly all land is under cultivation, and there is almost nowhere else the region’s 100,000 cattle can graze.

Thousands of cattle graze inside Bandipur Tiger Reserve, degrading forests and severely affecting wildlife.

Cattle grazing inside wildlife reserves is a well-known conservation problem. Over eighty percent of India’s wildlife sanctuaries and national parks are grazed by livestock, posing a range of problems for wildlife. Livestock reduce the availability of forage for wild grazers and severely affect forest regeneration. They may also harbour diseases that can be transmitted to their wild relatives. In Bandipur itself, research has shown that cattle graze over one-third of the Reserve’s 880 square kilometres, rendering it virtually unavailable to wildlife. Without adequate forage to sustain them, species like the gaur, chital and elephants are forced to move out of areas used by cattle and look elsewhere for food.

But Bandipur Tiger Reserve is definitely among the better-protected reserves of the country. The Reserve management takes threats like livestock grazing seriously and has invested in crores of rupees into digging cattle-proof trenches along the Reserve’s 200-kilometre northern boundary. The ground staff regularly patrol the border as well and do what they can to enforce the law against livestock grazing. Clearly then, cattle owners here are taking a big risk by driving their animals into the forest to graze. If caught, their livestock could be impounded and they could be fined. These impoverished farmers simply cannot afford such fines. Yet, what makes them take such risks for livestock that neither yield much milk nor haul the plough?

The answer lies in heaps along the same road. Five kilometres before reaching the Reserve boundary, the highway squeezes through a jumble of shops in the dusty village of Hangala. Piled high between the shops and houses, lie large mounds of cattle dung. Each morning, Hangala’s industrious cattle march off into Bandipur and return in the evening, bearing a bellyful of the forest. Overnight, in their stalls, they deposit it as the dung they are kept for.

Ah, you say. To a predominantly agricultural community, cow dung must be a very valuable input for farming. But wait at the village a while longer, and you will see trucks lumbering into the village, filling their holds with dung and driving away. Surely, people are not simply giving away such valuable manure?

Of course, they aren’t. They are selling the dung at premium prices to coffee and ginger growers in the neighbouring regions of Kodagu, Wayanad and Nilgiris. The dung in Hangala is not a mere by-product of the livestock. It is in fact the very reason Hangala risks living on the fringes of the law. In a cash-strapped economy where the average farming family struggles against many odds to make a cash income of Rs. 16,000 to 18,000 annually, the few thousand rupees they make additionally from selling dung has come as a godsend. And villagers have to invest little to produce it, besides keep the cattle and turn them loose to graze in the forest.

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Agricultural areas fringing the forest, seen from the hills of Bandipur

This is not the story of Hangala alone. It is also the story of dozens of other villages in the dryland agricultural tract that flanks Bandipur Tiger Reserve. Agricultural activity here begins at the end of the dry season in March-April. Farmers till and fertilise their land with the arrival of the pre-monsoon showers, and sow their crop as the monsoon breaks. This means, right at the start of the cropping season, a farmer needs to have invested considerable amounts of cash into agriculture to cover labour, fertiliser and seeds. But seldom do farmers have the necessary capital. Almost invariably then, they finance their agriculture by borrowing from local moneylenders at interest rates ranging from 40 percent to a staggering 340 percent annually!

But before a farmer gets from sowing to harvest, he is forced to play a grim game of dice with a series of hazards. The first is the ever-unpredictable monsoon. While some wealthier farmers sink their own bore-wells, most farmers can do little besides praying to the rain gods.

The second and often more serious hazard is from crop-raiding wildlife. From the time the seeds germinate until the harvest is finally made, farmers spend night after night on rickety tree-top lookouts, struggling to stay awake, waiting, watching and chasing away wild pigs and elephants that come for the crops. They invest time erecting thorn fences, and spend hard-sourced cash on flashlights, batteries, and firecrackers. Those unable to guard their own fields must pay someone else to do so. And yet, despite these efforts, farmers lose an average of 15-20 percent of their crop to wildlife; the unlucky ones farming along the forest’s edge lose even more. Driven to desperation, farmers retaliate by killing elephants that come into farmland.

So serious are their losses, particularly when compounded by the volatile prices for farm produce, that it is not at all uncommon for a farmer, at the end of an arduous farming season, to have no food on his plate, but also to have slid deeper into debt.

Surely then, for a farmer wilting under the multiple risks that vex his agriculture, the opportunity to despatch his herd of cattle into the forests nearby and live by the dung they produce for him, means a great deal.

Bullocks watch as an elephant tusker walks into crop fields. Photo: Sanjay Gubbi

Herein lies the reason why a well-protected reserve like Bandipur, even with sincere staff, is unable keep out the thousands of cattle that graze inside its boundary. Forest guards and watchers,  drawn from the same local communities, and often facing the same predicament themselves, know all too well that farmers here are too poor to afford alternate fodder, and too needy to ignore what the forest can provide.

Yet, conservation continues to view livestock grazing within wildlife reserves simply as a failure of law enforcement. A narrow preoccupation with strict policing, regardless of the human context, has resulted in great hardships for local people, making angry neighbours. While the forest may indeed be protected from livestock grazing in this way, it is often only until the next summer when embittered villagers vent their frustrations by setting fires that destroy many more hectares of forest and affect wildlife more seriously than their cattle may perhaps have.

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A farmer stands in his jowar field, destroyed by elephants. Photo: K Murthy

Farmers and wildlife here are thus locked in disastrous embrace as they plunge down a vortex of losses. Losses from crop-raiding wildlife make farmers helplessly dependent on forest resources, rendering habitats poorer for wildlife. This, in turn, drives wildlife to seek food on farmlands where they occasionally meet their end at the hands of a desperate farmer.

Strict policing of the Reserve to keep out cattle has failed repeatedly because local farmers, utterly desperate for the fodder inside, are willing to risk life and limb for it. Such a conservation approach has only deepened the vortex of losses. Instead, would an approach that addresses the desperation of farmers and makes them less needy of the forest help break this destructive cycle?

A small experiment we started in 2007 attempted exactly this. In two neighbouring villages on the fringe of Bandipur—Maguvinahalli and Melkamanahalli—seventeen farmers who together owned 60 acres of land formed a cooperative which received conservation funding to erect and manage solar-powered electric fences around individual fields.

Fenced farmlands in Maguvinahalli outside Bandipur.

In the year after the fence came up, not a single farmer lost any crops to wildlife. But the real test for conservation lay ahead. Risks from crop-raiding wildlife were now eliminated, but would that actually alter farmers’ dependence on the forest, as the theory suggested?

As monitoring of farm activities continued, some changes in cropping were observed. All seventeen farmers had invested in borewells, thereby reducing their dependence on a fickle monsoon. Year-round availability of water allowed them to grow three crops where earlier they could barely grow one. The fenced lands were abuzz with agricultural activity throughout the year.

Strangely enough, one of the crops on the fenced land was a grass normally used as fodder. Why would farmers sacrifice valuable crop land to grow fodder when grazing was available for free in the forest?

A handful of milch cows have replaced dozens of scrub cattle.

It turned out that farmers had sold their dung cattle and replaced them with a few milch cows. With the farms under cultivation throughout the year, no longer had they or their family members the time to herd dozens of cattle into the forest. What they did have instead was the ability to set a small patch of land aside to support a handful of milch cows which yielded milk they could sell, supplementing their cash income as they had earlier done by selling dung. Soon, all farmers within the fence had stopped sending cattle into the forest.

With no external push towards breaking their dependence on the forest, farmers had taken the step themselves. Of course, their motivations had little to do with concern for wildlife, but did that matter? If the pursuit of the all-too-human goal of an improved quality of life has added benefits for wildlife, is it not time to rethink current approaches to conservation?

Undoubtedly, the challenge of scaling up such an effort to match the enormity of the problem remains. But if conservation must come as a side-effect, should we shy away from the human development activities that precipitate it? Should conservation efforts continue to see wildlife conservation and rural poverty as completely distinct and separate problems, particularly when we encounter them together? Or is rural poverty tripping us up as we march determinedly, in blinkers, towards conservation?

What India’s conservation movement has shown in the past is a strong resolve to protect our wildlife and forests against the poacher’s gun, the miner’s shovel and the logger’s saw. What we are yet to see though, is how justly and creatively this conservation movement can protect wildlife and forests against the neediness of our own people.

- Pavithra Sankaran and M D Madhusudan

An edited version of this article appeared in the Hindu Survey of the Environment 2010.