“How many of you listen to music?” All twenty hands in the room went up. “How many of you share music with your friends?” Again, the twenty hands in the room went up. “And how many of you know that sharing music is a violation of the copyright law?” All hands stayed up. “Then, why do you still do it?” Many reasons followed, topped by this one: “Music is like nature. It is universal. It belongs to everybody. So, I think it is not morally wrong to share music with others even if it is technically illegal.” Nineteen heads nodded in affirmation. Then, the clincher. “If the law were invoked and one of you was arrested for pirating music, how many of you would support such an action?” Not a single hand went up.
The previous afternoon, the same group, comprising mostly young and sincere foresters, had listened closely as a Forest Ranger recounted how he had dealt with local villagers entering the National Park—in violation of the wildlife law—everyday to gather firewood. The group was training to manage reserves under our wildlife, forest and environmental laws. “The villagers know it is illegal to collect firewood from the park, but they still come in,” the Ranger thundered. “So, with help from our local watchers, we identified every villager who came in and booked trespass cases against them. They received a reprimand from the magistrate, and a warning that they would be jailed for repeat offences. From that day, all firewood collection in the park stopped.” The group looked suitably impressed. Then, the group’s instructor asked, “What did the villagers do for firewood then? Did they have alternative sources?” The Ranger replied, “No, these forests are their only source of firewood, but you see, it is not our job to find them alternatives. Our job is simply to implement the law.” The trainee foresters nodded in agreement.
Seen separately, these two anecdotes are unremarkable. But taken together, they raise important questions about the very nature of law and its enforcement, especially in the context of wildlife conservation. Why would a group of people with abiding faith in the tenets of one law, reject entirely, those of another? And, if the enforcers of our wildlife laws could thumb their noses at the copyright law, would it be fundamentally wrong if villagers outside the National Park did likewise to the wildlife law?
Given that over 250 million Indians depend on forests for their daily needs, there is no doubt that even modest acts such as firewood gathering can have a huge impact on our forests. But it is also amply clear that just enacting and enforcing laws to keep forest-dependent people out has simply not worked. Take the example of Bandipur National Park. Although it is illegal to gather firewood from its forests, most of the 40,000 households residing outside Bandipur, including families of forest staff, have done so for decades. What the law expressly forbids—firewood collection, in this instance—has always seemed a totally reasonable thing to do, not just to local villagers but also to the forest guards who implement the law. And the consequences for Bandipur’s forests have been severe. So, how can such a law actually be made enforceable?
The solution is beautifully demonstrated in the story of Namma Sangha, an organisation that has quietly set up a cooking gas distribution service now covering 35,000 households that earlier depended on Bandipur for firewood. Today, with most households having cooking gas, they are less reliant on the forests. But there’s a subtler, more significant change Namma Sangha’s work has brought about. By widening access to cooking gas as the alternative to firewood in these villages, Namma Sangha made the decades-old legal restrictions on firewood collection seem more reasonable, and hence, more enforceable. To be enforceable, a law thus needs, not just the weight of legality behind it, but also the force of legitimacy.
Any law has a greater chance of being effective if it is also reasonable. Is it any surprise then that there is less of a moral dilemma in condemning an ivory poacher than a villager gathering a head-load of firewood to cook a meal for her family? Adherence to the law will remain a distant dream if we continue to thoughtlessly enact and enforce legislations, even well-meaning ones, that criminalise reasonableness. Some of the biggest threats to our wildlife still come from the reasonable acts of ordinary people. And to fight these threats, we sure must employ the law, but not before we have employed reasonableness.
M. D. Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran
This article appeared in Down To Earth issued dated 15 November 2011 http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/staying-legal-staying-reasonable
How should we as humans value and relate to other animals? When we use animals in research, in zoos and aquaria, as food items or body parts, as specimens or experimental models, as pets, as machismo-inflating trophies to be bagged, or just as objects for entertainment, do we fully understand their needs, their welfare, their interests? Do we also comprehend our own underlying values, overt or covert, that are revealed in the way we deal with other animals? Is it right to speak of animal interests, pain, and suffering? The implications of the knowledge we have gained in recent times from scientific research on animal societies, behaviour, and cognition on the way we view animals is profound. This year, I was fortunate to read two very different and remarkable books, both compelling and thought-provoking, which bring these issues to the fore. Taken together with the leading primatologist Frans de Waal’s book The Age of Empathy, that I have referred to in an earlier post, these books are a valuable read for wildlife scientists and all those who have the interests of animals at heart.
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.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez pens an interesting story that unfolds in a mythical place known as Macondo, somewhere between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea. It is the saga of a family trapped in solitude, both in time and space, and a wonderful account of their adventures and misadventures.
Much before this classic took the world by awe, several seas away in a remote corner of another continent, a similar tale had been composed. The writers of that multi-authored epic came from the Far West to change the fate of a terra incognita, where wilderness abounded and where a thriving civilization had long collapsed, unceremoniously and tragically. It was the story of an unbroken swathe of jungle nestled in the flood-plain of the Brahmaputra river in Assam and its transformation into parcels of land, surrounded by a brewing landscape. And it was the story of a family of several souls, whose fate was sealed forever in one such sliced piece: Hollongapar and its primates who continuing solitude of over one hundred years may last to perpetuity.
However, unlike the fate of Macondo’s founding Buendia family—one that eventually perishes after six tumultuous generations—Hollongapar’s family has successfully fought for and earned their lives against all odds. And in contrast to Úrsula’s (the matriarch of the Buendia family) fear of the potential birth of a pig-tailed child in her family—one that eventually comes true at the end of the story—the pigtails of Hollongapar are struggling to further their lineage, ironically for the same reason—an incestuous legacy. Both are the products of extreme transgressions—one against culture and the other against nature.
However, if one peeled the layers of the history of Hollongapar’s forests, one would find the seed of this story formed long ago, the year 1687 to be precise. An Ahom king, Gadadhar Singha, mobilised several thousands of dhods (lazy persons) of his kingdom—who pretended to be sluggish in order to skip compulsory royal service—to construct a 212-km road through this forest that connects Kamargaon in Golaghat to Joypur in Dibrugarh. Aptly named the Dhodar Ali (the sluggard’s road), the road came to delineate the southern periphery of Hollongapar. Perhaps a narrow brown strip of mud and dirt at the time, but a wide, rolling black belt of asphalt years later; today it separates two worlds—one that supports nature’s and other nourish and nurture state’s economy.
The Bhogdoi stream on the eastern flank of the forest, which was deepened to channelise the surplus water of the Disoi River and prevent flooding; also separates the forest from the small dusty and bustling town of Mariani today.
These forests once were an important resource for the Ahom kings, who could fall back on them whenever they needed timbers to build boats, an indispensible component of their naval fleet. Riding on their strength, the naval infantry of the Ahom kingdom had been able to defeat invaders as formidable as the Mughals. Just as the sal and teak forests of North and South India won the British Crown many a battle, so did these forests for the Ahoms.
Arriving in the Upper Brahmaputra valley at the behest of the Ahom king to aid the kingdom in defeating Burmese invaders, the British had no intention of staying back in a land full of “inferior” jungles, wild beasts and a sparse human population; it was not tempting enough to seduce their colonial lust. Then, someone struck ‘green gold’ in the valley.
And a war against these forests began. Forgotten were their glorious contribution to Assam’s past and the promise they held for its future. Use of these vast forests now took the form of desecration rather than veneration. The coming of the colonial British changed the historical trajectory of Hollongapar forever.
****
One fine morning in the late nineteenth century in Hollongapar, a pair of gibbons wakes up from deep slumber. The sun had just emerged from the horizon and the cool breeze of the morning had a nostalgic feel. The pair couldn’t help themselves but sing. A song of freedom, of contentment, and of a carefree future. A song of the deep rainforest! Swinging from one branch to another, they looked ethereal. They traversed through the canopy, merging with the dappled sunlight and leaves as they went further.
Suddenly everything turned quiet! The breeze carried an unfamiliar whiff, the sun seemed to blaze harder; they had reached the end of a seemingly eternal freedom.
They found the forest before them had gone. The umbilical strip of trees that kept it connected with the swathe of forests on the other side had been snapped, replaced by numerous saplings of a shrub the world would later know and cherished as Assam tea.
Since that eventful day when they had discovered a new world beyond the tree line, the gibbons watched tea saplings coming into their jungle from every direction. By the time the pair reached a ripe old age, the saplings which now became bushes, had enveloped the entire forest within it. Their hearts knew there was no escape from this isolation.
The forest kept shrinking further until one day, it suddenly stopped. Several khaki-clad white men were seen in the forest, clearing edges, erecting pillars and measuring its periphery. The gibbons watched, uncomprehendingly. Their home even got a new name—the Hollongapar Reserve Forest. That was the summer of 1881.
Only last winter their son had left the family and was seen courting a female in the vicinity of the group. Soon, one more pair of songs added to the forest orchestra, a sign that their son had successful wooed his lover. They might now have a second generation roaming in the remaining forest. But unbeknownst to them, somebody had already decided their fate.
Nobody knew who saw it first–some say it was the stump-tailed macaques during their foraging tour—a clearing as straight as the trunk of the hollong through the middle of the forest. Looking at the unfamiliar bare strip, the oldest female, who was leading the troop, decided to abort the tour and adjusted her troop’s route for the rest of the day, never realising it was the start of a new routine that would last forever. Months later, she saw two long ‘poles’ lying parallel to each other on a raised platform all along the clearing as far as her eyes could see. Their forest was neatly sliced into two unequal parts.
She would never forget the day when a moving beast whizzed passed her with a deafening sound, leaving a trail of black smoke hovering over the forest. The smoke infiltrated the fragrant forest air with its soot and an obnoxious smell that overpowered all senses.
She wondered about the gibbon pair on the other side of the clearing, who would perhaps never been able to free themselves from the clutches of solitude. And she wondered about the rest of the valley, its forests, its creatures, many of them her kin and cousins, and about her own future.
****
With time, the moving beasts called trains made their brief but unpleasant appearances more frequently, carrying away coal, tea and oil from the valley and bringing in dark-skinned people from far away lands. These terrified and fragile looking, near skeletal people arrived in huge numbers and many settled down along the edges of the forest.
Initially, after their arrival, they were seen working in the middle of the bushes, plucking the leaves with their feeble but deft hands. Their dark-skinned bodies and gaunt faces distinct against the light green of the bushes. Men and women, boys and girls, young and old, none rested. Only the toddlers, who slept on the cloth hammocks tied to the unfamiliar Albizzia trees amidst the bushes, were free from everything.
Source: http://siris-archives.si.edu as mentioned in http://tinyurl.com/3szadnc
Much later, the new people began to come into the forest to collect outenga, dhekia, bamboo, honey and many other things. First only a few, but slowly hordes of them. Abject poverty, frequent hunger and an uncertain future pushed them deeper into the forest.
The journey these wretched people had made to this ‘Promised Land’ had been marred by unthinkable miseries. During the sojourn many lost their lives to epidemics that broke out on the ships that sailed the Brahmaputra. Those who discovered the betrayal of the contractors who had lured them with promises of a better future and dared raise their voice, were rested forever at the bottom of the river. Only those who defied everything reached the valley. Shaken and terrified to the core; each one’s dream had long died in the arduous journey, each one had already resigned to his fate. Exactly the kind of labourers their white masters were looking for.
Source: http://siris-archives.si.edu mentioned in http://tinyurl.com/3mbm4ve
Like Paul Robson’s Mississippi, Bhupen Hazarika’s Burah Luit kept ferrying these destitutes into the valley, neither affected by the miseries nor moved by their cries. It flowed relentlessly; at once providing hope by enriching the land with its deposits and eroding the same land as if venting its anger. The poor peasants on its banks were always in a conundrum whether to venerate the whimsical river or be terrified by its might.
****
India was winding up the third anniversary celebrations of its newly-acquired freedom when the young Soneswar prepared to retire to bed. He had been preoccupied with a single thought the whole day. The river was rapidly approaching his land; if it got washed away Soneswar would have no other livelihood. He knew that his fight against the might of the Brahmaputra was an unequal one and sooner or later, he would have to accept the inevitable. But it hardly occurred to him that it would come so early. That evening, the entire valley shuddered in a tremor that shattered everything including Soneswar’s hopes. It was the worst earthquake the valley had witnessed in a century.
The next day, he sensed something strange about the Brahmaputra. The ‘Old’ river had surprisingly gathered much strength overnight and was looking mightier than ever before. Within a fortnight, Soneswar had lost his land. He was now one of the many ecological refugees that Brahmaputra creates year after year.
Months later, after the quake, several miles away, the seeming tranquility of the Hollongapar was about to vanish forever. Soneswar was among the first to clear a patch of forest for a new beginning; away from the unpredictable vagaries of nature and in hope for a better future. Many joined him; almost everyone had similar stories to tell. Within a decade or so, Hollongapar was virtually sieged by Madhupur, Lakhipur, Rampur, Fesual, Velleuguri, Afolamukh and Kaliagaon leaving human footprints everywhere in the rapidly shrinking forest, which retreated to a mere shadow of its past.
As for the gibbons, the stumptails and others, the solitude was nearing eternal.
The final blow came in 1965 when a huge chunk of Hollongapar was taken away to establish several hutments for the Army under the pretext that the nation’s safety was paramount. Within that chunk, everything was cleared. The tall hollong trees, the thickets of bamboo; the undergrowth of palms, the carpet of aathubhanga. Nothing survived the mayhem. The slow loris too could not outpace the human’s axe. And the pigtails and the langurs? These fortunate ones were able to pack themselves into the remaining parcel of forest, competing with each other over depleting space and food.
****
For the last three years, I have watched closely the remaining populations of primates in Hollongapar. The forest has received a promotion for successfully protecting its primates for so many decades: it is now the Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary—the tall tree and the ape are synonymous with this forest island.
The Dhodar Ali and the railway track have prevailed. The moving beasts still make regular appearances and carry on their tails tea, coal and oil. But it has stopped bringing the dark-skinned souls − known to us today as the “tea tribes”. Old Soneswar is still there, still hoping for a better future and struggling to eke out a living on his meager piece of land. The Army camp and the tea gardens are bustling with their usual activities. Only the bushes and the white masters have been replaced but their legacy endures.
The old female stump-tailed macaque, one who first saw the railway track, is no more, but her descendants have survived this solitude. But, only a few hundred are left. They still come up to the railway track and still never dare cross it. Unlike their predecessors though, they have to comb the entire forest looking for food and shelter. Even for this, they have competition—with other primates as well as the dark-skinned people who still come inside the forest in huge numbers, pushed by the same century-old forces.
The pair of gibbons on the other side of the railway track have long gone but three other families are still around. They often come to the edge of the forest, sometimes catching a glimpse of their own kind on the other side of the track, instinctively burst into song. Today, their voices carry more aggression, and perhaps a note of desperation too. But, maybe both of them understand the futility: neither of them will be able to cross this gap to claim other’s territory or even to console each other. Although the gap is only a few strides, their separation looks eternal.
In Hollongapar, everything has survived these tumultuous centuries: the animals, the trees, the people, the solitude, the poverty, the hunger, the hope. Except the Assamese macaque, for none have been sighted since 2005. Is it the beginning of the end?
Or are one hundred years of solitude too soon to write a requiem for Hollongapar and its primates?
It is not often that one finds a person who is equally comfortable with his place at the head of a corporate boardroom of a leading company or being in a line of people trekking up a leech-infested rainforest or even diving into the ocean to admire the beauty of coral reefs. Someone who can meld vision with wit, lace seriousness with humour, and soar with lofty thoughts while remaining firmly rooted on the ground. A person who can step outside comfortable boundaries to engage with other worlds and world views, bringing refreshing insights while being refreshed by the experience himself. NCF is fortunate to know and have a friend in such a person in Venky Muthiah.
Venky Muthiah at the NCF Annual Academic Meeting, July 2011, Valparai
For more than two decades, Venky Muthiah (more formally, Mr. M. M. Venkatachalam) has held senior positions in the Murugappa Group of Companies, one of India’s reputed business houses. After his graduation from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, he went on to obtain a Masters’ Degree in Business Administration from George Washington University, USA. He is presently the Chairman of Parry Enterprises Limited and Parry Agro Industries Limited, and serves on the boards of Laser Words Limited and other companies.
Venky has been a supporter of NCF’s research and conservation work in the Anamalai hills in his avatar as Chairman of Parry Agro Industries Ltd, a company partnering with us on rainforest restoration and conservation education programme. Still, most others in NCF had never had an opportunity to meet and interact with him. This year an ideal opportunity came up. For the first time since its inception in 1996, NCF’s annual academic meeting was being held, not in Mysore, but in a field location, in Valparai in the Anamalai hills. The venue was the stunning and elegant Sinna Dorai’s Bungalow perched atop the Iyerpadi hill, surrounded by organic tea fields of Parry Agro and commanding a breathtaking view of the Valparai landscape, and the rainforests of Vellamalai and Akkamalai in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve. Here, from 29 to 31 July, NCF students, staff, and scientists gathered for the annual meeting, while enjoying (or, in the case of some, braving) the monsoon mists and rains.
One of the monsoon visitors at the meeting hall...an atlas moth
The schedule was tight (full programme of the meeting here). There were nearly 30 presentations, a field visit to rainforest nursery and restoration sites, a stunning visual presentation by our own world famous, felicitations for field and office staff, and a special interlude to honour and thank our close associates. And with a delightful extempore extra presentation by young Violetta and not-so-young Nachiket on the nearly 60 species of moths they catalogued and photographed over the 3 days at the venue, plus the Great Hornbills flying overhead and the friendly neighbourhood gaur around everyday, it was a heady mix of serious presentations peppered with fun and laughs, watching wildlife and monsoon mist and rain, and time to reconnect with chatter and music and dance in the evenings. Venky, brave soul that he is, sat through or stood it all, even called it ‘amazing’ and a ‘refreshing NCF weekend’.
Sitting through it all... a packed programme in a packed hall...
And, ask anyone, and they will all agree that Venky’s presence was equally refreshing, and his “special address” equally fabulous. He had the audience in splits while at the same time reining them along with thoughtful words to ponder over. Bowing to popular demand, Venky was kind enough to jot down his speech for us and here it is for you to read, ponder, enjoy!
A mutated version of the special address
NCF Annual Academic Meeting 2011, Sinna Dorai’s Bungalow, Valparai
Good Evening,
I have been badly inflicted by a rare disease caused by Raghunath tanujaensis. The manifestation of which is the loss of sleep when a presentation is due to be made in the near future. Hence, I have lost a lot of sleep over the past two days, thinking of what I am to say to you. I finally decided on a ramble, so here it is:
"...so here it is!"
I have been greatly disillusioned over this time that I have spent listening to all of you. At first it was Rohan who went on about some Wilfred Voynich and his document and I was certain that he had lost it and I was sitting in the wrong place. Then there came Narayan, who for some strange reason spoke about carpets and cutting it up into pieces. He even showed us a photograph of the knife that was used. This was followed by Johnsingh who couldn’t tell a four-horned antelope from a barking deer. This shook my confidence in the ability of you researchers.
Furthermore there was the diminutive Rucha—whom I sincerely believed was playing hookey from high school—she goes on to make an impressive presentation on coral reef structure and groupers and later deflates my almost 100-dive ego with a casual comment that she is a certified rescue diver.
Koustubh with his fancy camera that could make me look like Dan, fooled all of us about the snow leopard in his photographs. Continuing with these elusive cats, the learned Vaibhav Chaturvedi proposes to leave his place in front of the havan and move from giving discourses on the four vedas that all Chaturvedis commit to memory, to collect scat over a 4000 square kilometre area in the Pin Valley. And this after having first swept the area clean. Which is good for Rishi’s PhD because he will not have to step on any snow leopard doo when he traverses the same 4000 square kilometre range setting up camera traps to take photographs of the snow leopard. This he could have easily bought from Kalyan Varma for a fee or from Koustubh for nothing.
Finally Rohit came along with an understandable presentation on hornbills. This heartened me, which was until I saw him and the usually serene Shankar defile my conference room floor with their dancing. Mr. Kalyan Varma—another accomplished dancer who takes better photographs than I do—was the final straw.
But there were bright moments—(A) There is this engineer in our midst, who on graduating, did not go into the financial service business and drive the world deeper into debt, but instead went into conservation. (B) Karthik’s interesting work on alternate weed control, although it will spell doom to my weed control business and Amritendu’s work on pollinators, the number of variables that he is dealing with—phew—but then he is from West Bengal where nothing is simple and everything requires discussion. (C) The fact that I now have exciting places to visit during my next seven years of vacation. On the cards are travel to Central Asia, the Pin Valley, Spiti in Himachal, all of the Western Ghats, the Andamans, Lakshwadeep, Mongolia, Arunachal, and sunny Brighton. So don’t be surprised if one day I knock on your door or tent or hut.
So coming to my ‘special address’, here it is in the form of a calling card, it has all my details and please let me have yours as well and I promise you that unlike Anand, I will not send you obscene text messages in the middle of the night.
A 'disillusioned' Venky planning his next seven years' vacations
Moving on to a more serious platform—We at Parry Agro, and I personally, are committed to support your effort in any way that we can. Be it the use of our land and facilities, infrastructure, labs, housing, conference facilities, and some cash. Not anywhere near Dan’s 4.1 million GBP! But I would like to start with a modest Rs. 1 million, and being a good Chettiar I will not tell you when you will get it. Suhel keep guessing.
I understand that Koustubh requires another $200 million to fool us completely about the existence of snow leopards in Mongolia; unfortunately I am in an agri-business and I lose vast sums of money due to the animal raids on my crop. So if Atul can help me with that and Madhu can get me the compensation, all that cash is yours. I, however, will lose my job and will have to necessarily go back to my alternate job of driving for the NCF. A responsibility that I will take up with great seriousness and care so that Jegan will not have any opportunity to report on my roadkills.
Back to business—what I see around this room is an extraordinary diversity of ideas, skills, academic training, and research interests. I see a great amount of commitment to the cause, of passion, of humility, and of fun. I see a lot of mutual respect and concern for each other. Traits hard to find all bundled up in one person, when you look around the country.
I also see a growing organization and feel that managing your growth while still being integral with your philosophy, is the tough one to address—so we have this classic dilemma before us–grow and perpetuate or … Well, I believe that small is beautiful. Applying that to the growth paradigm, the solution is to grow slowly and consistently. NCF is its people—when newbies come in, let them experience and imbibe the essence of NCF. This can only happen over time, and time spent with the elder citizens of the organization. Once they integrate, then look at the next infusion or installment for growth. Please guard against whizzing around attending numerous conferences, presenting numerous papers, and churning out proposals with little consequence. Keep the visits to the state and national capital to a minimum and snare the policy makers to your turf.
It is obvious that there is a diverse portfolio of research interests within the NCF. There is research rigor and there are standards. All very well, but being in conservation, you need to balance it with development and the reality of the pressure of population on the land. Ask yourself why do we do all this? What are the consequences of what I do?
It is important to go beyond and take your work forward :- (a) to inform and educate the people at large and the next generation in particular, (b) to solicit more funding for your efforts, and (c) to influence the formulation of public policy directly and indirectly through better informed people at large and local communities in particular.
So, in addition to your scientific papers, please write popular articles on what you do or inundate Pavithra and Anush with a lot of information and pressure them to publish it in no less than National Geographic! Your presence in the field for long years has endeared you to the local communities. The likes of Manish while celebrating with the islanders and our gaon budi with the red coat can influence equivalents of the Ghora Aabhe Council and pressure change for the positive.
Take conservation to the people and take me with you!
Cheers, thank you and all the very best.
Venky
P.S. If any of you share my keen sense of observation(!), you will notice that I have not made mention of a few people, dogs, dugongs, and turtles. It is just because my battery is running low!
In front of the Sinna Dorai's Bungalow...
Photos by: Rishi Sharma, Kalyan Varma, and Divya Mudappa
Like a deep gash from shoulder to chest, the Great Rift Valley plunges into the heart of Africa. In the landscape to the west, below a clouded sky, a Marabou soars above everything—vast plateaux with weaving rivers, steep-sided valleys spotted with shimmering soda lakes, and a landscape peppered with cities and settlements, farms and savanna. Standing on a little promontory, we do not feel disadvantaged by the Marabou; from horizon to horizon the sweeping view is nearly as much as the soaring stork may see.
There is the endless tawny gold of dry grass, flecked with emerging green, and studded with Balanites trees like dark poster-pins on a golden velvet. Extending to the grey-blue of distant hills is the grey-brown fuzz of thorny acacia and candelabra trees alternating with stream-side ribbons of deep green forest.
There is the ringed boma, from where clusters of cattle radiate, bells ringing, watched by red-cloaked Masai. By the muddied river is the tinsel tourist town with large-wheeled vehicles and workshops, decrepit streets and shanty houses, signboards of luxurious resorts pointing beguilingly away from the squalor where blank-eyed youth stare impassively at wide-eyed visitors who have traveled far to be here. And there, in the distance, is the long, dark line of several thousand wildebeest.
Great migration
The wildebeest are hunkered down on the long walk. The rough grass is knee-high to the front-runner. As thousands of hoofs pass, press, push apart and down, tear and crush, the grass is flattened, shredded, crushed into the earth or dusted aside, until, at the end of the line, one can see hoof marks on the thin strip of naked earth winding through the grassland. The trail of the wildebeest will stay for a few days or weeks until the grass covers it again—a soft mark on the landscape, unlike the road-scars made for vehicles and the traveling people.
By all accounts, this is an old, old human landscape. Humans evolved, as a species, from other primate forebears, not far from here. In the last two million years, and in the geological blink of the last ten thousand, the species spawned by this land has spread out, transforming themselves and the Earth. Today, the new peoples return to the land where others of their ilk like the Masai still live. They arrive as spectators of the great migration of wildebeest.
Across over 30,000 square kilometres of the Serengeti – Mara ecosystem in Tanzania and Kenya, over a million wildebeest join over half a million zebra, gazelle, and other ungulates on the annual migration. Early in the year, the journey of hundreds of thousands of wildebeest begins, too, with their birth near the ‘cradle of humanity’ in the grasslands near Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti and in Ngorongoro. Then, as the dry season arrives and grasses begin to dry, the herds move, past feeding and mating grounds, to the north and north-east, to arrive, by June and July, in Kenya’s Masai Mara.
And there they find both profusion in the grass and peril at the jaws of lions.
Drama of renewal
At the Mara River in Kenya, the wildebeest throng at the water’s edge, bleating and pulsing with purpose at the perilous crossing, eyes alert for the wraith-like crocodiles in the swift current.
In their great journey, the perils of the crossing appear momentary, but many do not make it across. Those that do, spend the next four months in the Mara landscape, feeding in long grass woodland and savanna.
Still, the real drama is not merely in the pulse and throng of the Mara crossing. The flecks of green in humble grass, energised by sun and rain, are the markers of a greater drama played out across vast space and time.
Low clouds streaking grey shafts of rain are visible from many kilometres away in the open savanna, but the migration is provoked by changes across even longer distances. The wildebeest, incredibly, seem to track that vast sweep of rainfall and grass production. For, as rains bring lush growth to the short grass plains to the south, the ensuing pulse of nutritional profusion propels the wildebeest to loop back to the Serengeti plains.
And so, the wildebeest move. And with their bodies, their feeding, and their dung, they transform the grasslands in their passing. Scripted by evolution and directed by ecology, and spanning hundreds of kilometres every year, the annual migration of these hoofed engineers of a great landscape is one of nature’s most remarkable phenomena.
Spectator or spawn?
And so the people watch, at the Mara River, crowded in four-wheel drive safari vehicles, vans, and trucks. Here, nature is placed on display for the tourist. Vehicles rev and vie for the best spot for their customer to take that perfect photograph.
Later, they will discuss their ‘take’ at the river’s edge, over tables set with white sheets, served French-press coffee and fresh croissants by white-gloved waiters from the resort. The hippos and crocodiles pursue ancient custom in the river, as the riverside tourist, a human whose journey originated in the great landscape of Africa, is back to ogle or ignore at will, and return to the power-fenced resorts beautified with manicured lawns and ornamental plants from faraway lands.
This is the human domain, it all proclaims, and nature is out there.
And when the people depart, taking photographs and memories, nature is left behind, as are the leavings of their visit. As just another species born of this landscape, the human does not seem out of place here, but his new presence and manner betrays a different sensibility.
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The journey of the human, set against the journey of the wildebeest in the land of Marabou and Masai, then evokes another sense. A sense, paraphrasing the poet Gary Snyder, that nature is not a place to visit—it is home. And of this land, we are the spawn not the spectator. That what is needed to replace people within nature is not the bringing of more people and vehicles into trackless wilderness, but a realisation, espoused by thinkers such as Aldo Leopold, that nature is the land and community to which we belong. In the absence of such a sense of place, the great rift then appears not just a gash in the earth in Africa, but a rift that threatens to sunder human from nature in our hearts and minds.
(Photographs by Divya Mudappa and T. R. Shankar Raman)
I live in Bomdo1 (http://tinyurl.com/bomdo-village), one of the oldest among the Adi community inhabited villages in central Arunachal Pradesh. There are several things I am interested in telling you about my tribe; we cultivate rice, millets, corn, vegetables and edible tubers in the slopes of the hills that surround our village, we follow the Donyi Polo religion and are basically animists. Though we don’t have a written script for our language, we have names in our Adi language for everything you may see around our village and in the forests; different types of moths, birds, stones, trees, insects, bats, mammals and everything else.
A bird eye view of the Bomdo village with the Siang river in the background
I could go on and on but this account is mostly about a hunting trip I made to the banks of the Angong river. This year too as every year we have set up temporary hunting camps a days’ walk away from the village. From the months November till February we venture fortnightly in small groups of three to four people into forests that extend from right below the 3000 m tall Mouling peak to those adjoining the mighty Angong river. During these five months we target large-bodied animals like barking deers, serows, wild pigs and bears and bring the meat back to the village for the Aran festival2 in the last week of February. In this festival its our custom to distribute meat to clan members. In Bomdo, we have the Panga, Medo, Lonchung, Duggong, Nyodo, Yalik and Tali clans, of which I belong to the first. My team has Petang and Sikung in it, both good companions, excellent hunters and good at carrying load, in case our catch is good.
Our Sipu camp close to the Angong river bank
We were planning our last visit to the Sipu camp on the banks of the Angong river hoping to get lucky since the meat we collected, meticulously smoke-dried and cached in our camp was raided by a sun bear and we lost most of it. The evening before we left, Tigbo, a friend of mine from Bangalore, casually asked me if he can join me. I’ve seen Tigbo walk the mountains around our village and I think he can endure the trek we plan, so I tell him to get ready by 3 am the next morning and to pack only essentials since it was going to be a long trek. It was February, the time of the year best suited for hunting; no dangerous snakes, no rain and a pleasant cold weather. I had laid three dozen cable wire slip knot traps a fortnight ago and was hoping to trap a few animals. We have to return every fortnight to make sure the animals caught in the traps do not get eaten by other meat eaters in the forest. Also, sometimes we abandon our catch since the animals get trapped and then get rotten.
The next morning at about 2.30 am, I reached Tigbo’s place, a Forest Department Inspection Bungalow built over an abandoned graveyard. I was glad he was up and ready but was worried about his huge backpack; whether he can carry it to the Sipu camp on the banks of the Angong river and back. We started our uphill trek along a torch-lit path and I was quite impressed with the way Tigbo was climbing up the hill, much faster than us, but I was still wary about how long his beginner’s luck would last. Two hours later we reached Yabo Roglé3, a resting place. Here we met another hunting party who had left earlier than us and from here on the eight of us were to walk till the Angong river together, for, our hunting camps are located close to each other.
The view from Yabo Roglé, looking back at Bomdo village
Two dead capped langurs hung on a tree by the other hunting team
After climbing down from Yabo Roglé, three more hills had to be crossed to get to Angong. By this time, Tigbo had mentioned that his knees were hurting and was lagging behind. By about 8 am, we had crossed another hill and it was time for breakfast. Tigbo was by then limping and complained that climbing down was getting tougher. We had our breakfast, took a half hour rest and carried on. Since our team was now lagging behind, the other team went on ahead and will probably hunt the animals they find on the way with the single barrel gun they carried. At about 10 am we heard three shots and we were sure the other team had brought down something. Ahead, we saw two dead capped langurs hung on a tree to be picked up by the team on their way back.
We crossed two large streams and two hills in the next two hours and by about noon we were on the banks of the Angong river. The camp was another four kilometers from here. Petang and Sikung went on ahead and I walked along with Tigbo telling him that he is paying too much attention to his knees and that he should just loosen up his legs a bit. On a big stone along the bank I saw a message written for Tigbo by Petang to drop him at a camp that belonged to the Nyishis who were extracting cane from the area where he can spend the night and walk up till the road the next morning and get to Bomdo by road, 15 km away. But Tigbo would not give up and would also not give his huge bag to any of us.
Two hours later, we finally reached the Sipu camp, few hours late, yet not all was lost. We quickly went back into the adjoining forest to check our traps and our luck with that was not that great too. All the traps were empty and untouched. We returned to the camp and did some angling in the Angong river hoping to get something interesting to eat for the night. Petang got lucky with a single medium-sized fish and with the dried meat that Tigbo brought along, at least two meals were assured. At about 4.30 pm, me and Sikung went back to the forest with our single barrel guns since we knew where the macaques roost. Me and Sikung hid in different positions waiting for the macaques to get to their roost site, it was very likely that one of us would get our shot right. While my eyes were focused on the largest male of the group, I saw the second largest male walking towards me and since I was downwind and still, he did not notice me. I took a shot and down he went. So finally we had a kill. We carried him back to the camp and finally we would have some meat for the Aran festival. That night we had a good sleep; we owe it to the 10 hour trek. A drink of rice wine, a sumptuous meal and a discussion over warm fire were our lullabies. Tigbo was fervently apologising for lagging us in return for our praises for his will power and endurance, for only a handful men had visited this camp.
The beautiful Lady's slipper orchid, Paphipedilum sp.
Morning began early and after a meal of rice and boiled mithun meat, we headed back. Our plan was not to return to the village but to a hunters’ camp mid-way since Sikung was having a bad episode of diarrhea and had therefore become quite weak. We were also carrying quite a heavy baggage back to the village since we had emptied our camp. We reached the Imbung camp, which Tigbo thought was even more prettier and cosy. While me and Petang brought back firewood from the forest closeby, the two patients in our team; Tigbo and Sikung were in charge of cooking the evening meal! After the meal we had long conversations about the hunting trips we made the last three months, and in a way I felt that I will miss the makeshift camp we had lived in for several starry nights.
The next morning we left from the Imbung camp at about 5 am and on the way we collected more than quite a few tubers of Minong(black ginger) which is of high medicinal value. On the way back I also showed Tigbo old shifting cultivation fields, located at least five hours walk from the village, these have been abandoned now since they are located too far from the village. I also showed Tigbo Taba, a tree fern, the bark of which was fed upon by the Adis in the days when food was scarce. Tigbo also took a picture of what he called a lady’s slipper orchid, we had a nice laugh about funny common names in English at Yabo Roglé on the way back.
We reached Bomdo by noon and my log ends here. Next year I plan to visit a much farther hunting camp, in a place called Arbo right below the Mouling peak, I think less than ten people from the village have ever been there. Its a two day trek from the village and I do wonder if Tigbo will join me, for, following us will be hard on his knees!
Footnotes
1. Few more details about the village can be found at http://www.anetherworld.blogspot.com/
2. Aran festival is one of the most important festivals of the Adi community. The website http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/living-with-the-adi-preparing-for-the-aran-festival/8921.html has a video about the festival in Jorsing village in Arunachal Pradesh.
3. Yabo Roglé is also mentioned in another post on this blog: http://conservation.in/blog/a-park-too-far/
4. There were at least eight such hunting parties that made seven to eight visits to their camps during the winter. Hunting as labour-intensive as this and as far from the village is undertaken only for four months a year and the rest of the year, the hunting is limited to the village near abouts. Also, relatively large tracts of forest including the Mouling National Park (http://arunachalforests.gov.in/Mouling%20National%20Park.html) surround the Bomdo village, which may mitigate the effects of hunting the locals may have on wildlife.
The BBC Wildlife Fund (BBCWF) and the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) are teaming up with the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) to launch a new program aimed at securing a healthy population of snow leopards across Asia. Snow leopards are one of the most endangered big cats in the world. They are found across 12 Asian and Eurasian nations from Afghanistan to Bhutan, and experts believe that as few as 3,500 may still exist in the wild. WFN and NCF will focus on China, Mongolia and India—the three countries with the highest concentrations of the species.
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].
Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in Pakistan on 2 May 2011, say the news reports. Really?! Or should I say—not again?! He’s been killed twice in India already! Once in 2006 and again in 2008. Yes, it made news splashes even then, although not as large a splash as his most recent death. Osama’s first death occurred in December 2006 in a tea estate in Assam in north-east India, at the hands of a hunter, a hired gun tasked with taking out the terrifying serial killer. And as if that was not enough, he was killed again in May 2008, in the Indian state of Jharkhand, at the hands of an empowered mob of government authority—the Forest Department and the Police. The second death was not easy. It took 20 bullets to silence Osama. And from the recent news, it seems even that did not work, after all.
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?
The colors and smells of the forest don’t stay with you when you leave. Yet when you return, it’s like meeting an old friend. Vaguely familiar, yet forgotten. You need to reconnect again.
How you remember a forest also depends on the season in which you saw it. And much of what you know depends on what you saw in that snapshot of time.
This time, it’s the beginning of winter and the skies are clear, the sun is hot but in a pleasant way. Even the ‘irritants’ respond to the seasons. The ants are everywhere, creeping up unnoticed and suddenly a sharp stinging pain. The ticks are numerous in this dry time to make up for the fewer leeches whose time, or rather season, is yet to come. I much prefer the ‘harmless’ leeches to the little ticks, which can itch for months afterwards.
Photo by Rohit Naniwadekar
Photo by Saravana Kumar
The Lisu have a smart way of dealing with ticks. Before reaching the camp, they make a small smoky fire with twigs and dry leaves. Then you dance around the fire, waving and beating your clothes, letting the smoke in and the ticks out. The first time they stopped on the trail to do this, I remonstrated with them about making a fire in the forest, but soon joined in the dance myself. If you wait till you reach camp and sit around in your clothes, the ticks will have got you.
Duchaye de-ticking
On every visit, I learn something new. Even a forest I first went to in 1995 and have spent considerable time in since. Maybe a more observant person would have had it all figured out much earlier, but in a way, it’s nice; this slow learning and finding ‘new’ things each time. There’s too much happening in the forest to take it all in at one shot.
The animals know what each season will bring, when to expect bountiful fruits and when, a dry run, what to eat, where to go looking for food and how to go about living out the whole year in the forest.
It’s still a moment of discovery to find that the Phulhingori tree (Echinocarpus assamicus) is leafless in November when in full bloom and that the flowers are yellow with a faint ephemeral fragrance. Insect-pollinated? I don’t know.
The single round large seed I find on the forest floor that looks like a convoluted brain. I have no clue what it may be. No fruiting trees nearby from which it could have fallen. Possibly dropped by a foraging bird.
Or that the flat dry pods of the thorny climber Acacia pennata that elephants eat, ripen in March and have small flat brown seeds.
Or that the saplings of the Tokko palm (Livistona jenkinsiana) are eaten by elephants. They munch on the larger saplings as they amble along, gathering and stripping off the outer rim of the huge fan-shaped leaf leaving the saplings with a frayed and dried-up look. Tasty little tidbits that are a passing fancy.
Many things that I learn on each visit to the forest. And countless still to learn. Small and trivial.
The leaves of the awesome Rhaphiodophora, Pothos and numerous Piper species that smother and snake up the bark of giant trees.
The bird’s nest ferns (Asplenium) that are everywhere shrouding the trees. Once, I saw a palm civet curled up and sleeping inside one in the canopy.
The patterns formed by the walls of Colocasia that line the paths and trails, great places to find colorful bugs.
The giant hanging fern fronds that decorate the steep cliffsides.
The tree ferns, relics from another time.
The fascinating mirror-image fern..
Dipteris wallichii
The grayish underside of the leaves of a Musa (banana) that is covered with a white powder which tribal people gather and rub onto their threads while weaving to make them smoother.
The screw pine trees (Pandanus) that often perch precariously on steep slopes. I learn that its heavy fruits are eaten and dispersed by monitor lizards (from a study in the Philippines).
The magic liana with milky white sap that the Lisu assure me is the best natural adhesive. We routinely use a bit of the sap to bind torn clothes or shoes while camping in the forest. Still don’t know the scientific name. To me, it’s just the Super Glue Liana.
Shades of green, leaves of every possible shape, texture and dimension. There is color too…on the forest floor, understorey and in the canopy.
The saprophytic orchid with delicate tiny white flowers that I picked up from the forest floor in Pakke. And pressed in my field note book to show Dr. Haridasan in 1996. Epipogium roseum (africanus). Apparently first recorded in 1991 from Arunachal. Never saw it again since. All I had was an old dried flower. Till, funnily enough, I saw it everywhere in the forest on this latest trip to Namdapha..guess it just flowers in March-April and is seen ephemerally. Or maybe it decided that the time had come to remind me of its existence. This time around, I was trigger-happy.
The terrestrial bamboo orchid (Arundina graminifolia) so aptly named, that grows in tall reedy clumps often by the roadside or streams, flowering in November.
The epiphytic orchids, Liparis, Eria and Otochilus, sudden flashes of white in a dark forest.
The image of a beautiful unnamed shrub from Namdapha (taken by Sara in 2004) lying forgotten on my computer. Professor Li Heng, an expert Chinese taxonomist who has spent a lifetime documenting the flora of the Gaoligongshan mountains in Yunnan, identified the image on my screen as Paris polyphylla, a rare shrub used in traditional Chinese medicine and also cultivated in China. There are several species in this beautiful genus in the Eastern Himalaya.
The pink and red lantern-like flowers of several Agapetes species ubiquitous on the forest floor in Namdapha in winter. I have never seen the entire plant as the liana hangs high up in the canopy.
The flowers and fruits of Saurauia nepalensis, a smallish tree usually found along perennial streams, an important food source for birds in winter.
The brilliant flowers of climbers like the Aeschynanthes, a trifle unexpected in the rainforest, and the purple splashes from the common roadside shrubs of Osbeckia and Oxyspora.
The little flashes of colour from the many varieties of flowering Begonia.
And the unforgettable splendour of Sapria himalayana, a rare root parasite endemic to Namdapha’s forests, making a brief appearance on the forest floor in some patches in winter.
The stinkhorn fungus (Dictyophora sp.) with a netted veil billowing out like a skirt is another bizarre and beautiful creature of these forests.
The trees, their bark and leaves, are a bewildering variety of shapes, colors, textures and patterns. They stand silent witness to all that happens in the forest with the changing seasons and time.
The flowers of the Chhatim tree or Chatiana (Alstonia scholaris) as it’s known in Assam are blooming now, while an unknown flowering climber growing on the Chhatim tree has an overpoweringly sweet smell.
The fruits of Prunus ceylanica that hornbills and barbets love to eat are beginning to ripen. I still remember back in 1998 when I first found the fallen fruits and saw the hornbills visiting these trees to eat the fruits. It took sometime to figure out the name. The bark and leaves of this tree smell like the almond tree which belongs to the same family Rosaceae; a way to identify Rosaceae species in the field as Dr. Rawat once told me.
One of my favorite trees in this forest is the Lohajam (Syzygium macrocarpum), a sub-canopy tree which seems to mostly grow in patches near streams. The leaves are huge unlike most other Syzygium species. This March, they were flowering, the flowers have a heady fragrance, the flower buds are purple, and when they open fully, they are large and white with long strands. I am not sure who eats the fruits, although I assume birds like them.
Khekratenga (a Garcinia species), is another favorite. Monkeys disperse its fruits and the tree is more common in wetter forests like Namdapha which have more frugivorous primates. The ripe fruits are covered by a tough rind which when peeled off have a delicious orange-yellow fleshy pulp that melts in your mouth.
Photo by Rohit Naniwadekar
Then there are other species that have pulpy sweet fruits that we like to eat while walking in the forest. These are mainly dispersed by deer, like Lepchipoma (Cheirospondias axillaris) and Amora tenga (Spondias pinnata). It is quite common to find piles of seeds all together where a sambar or barking deer may have rested for a while and regurgitated the seeds.
Cheirospondias axillaris (Lepchipoma)
Spondias pinnata (Amora tenga)
Yet another favorite is the beautiful liana Tetracera tomentosa with scaly red bark like the Outenga (Dillenia indica) which belongs to the same family. Once in the early years, after a long walk exploring the forest, Japang stopped and before I could say anything, cut it in the middle, swung it around and asked me to drink the water dripping from inside. I remember it as the most delicious water I have ever tasted. Cold, with a sweet aftertaste and a smell like that of ripe Dhuna (Canarium sp.) fruits which are yummy to nibble on. After that, I plead guilty that many a time in the forest, I have searched for this liana to taste its water.
There is the common Boromthuri (Magnolia hodgsonii) which has a cone-like fruit with a bright orange aril entirely covering the seeds. They ripen in November and are strewn on the forest floor, pecked on by pheasants. I had only observed tree squirrels eating the seeds, but Rohit subsequently found that even hornbills eat the fruits occasionally.
Then there is the Callicarpa, a short shrubby tree with large ashen leaves and small black berries that the bar-tailed cuckoo dove loves to eat.
Then there are the really rare trees, several species from the Lauraceae, I still know only single individuals of.
Many trees are patchy in the forest. Suddenly I find a grove of Amselleng (an Aglaia species) trees. Amselleng trees are not that common, but if you find one, look for several neighbours in the vicinity. Amselleng fruits are eaten by hornbills in the early part of the breeding season in March-April in Pakke, and while they have large seeds, rodents don’t seem to like them too much. They also don’t fruit every year. I rarely find many Amselleng seeds below hornbill nest trees. But maybe in the years they are available, they are dispersed in clumps and because rodents don’t eat them much, they come up in clumps forming groves in the forest.
Yet, Beilshmedia, another hornbill-dispersed tree that fruits in the winter in the non-breeding season is also found in patches, but rodents appear to love the seeds of this species, and I wonder why so many adults occur together in patches in this species.
And in another patch I find a grove of Chalmugra trees (Gynoecardia odorata). The species has large brown fruits borne directly on the tree trunk and branches.
Gynoecardia odorata with flower buds appearing on the trunk
I have seen common palm civets feasting on them. Civets, unlike hornbills who regurgitate, bring out the seeds in their defecations, with many seeds of one or several species in small piles. I remember finding civet droppings with seeds of Gynoecardia. Just to check, I planted eight seeds in the faecal clump to see if they germinated. Seven seeds germinated into seedlings. Maybe if the seeds are not eaten by rodents, they can germinate and survive in clumps and that’s how we find these patches of Chalmugra trees close to each other, while at many places there are none.
I find the pattern repeated in many animal-dispersed tree species. It could also be that these trees are simply growing in patches which have soil and moisture conditions most suitable for them, and animals that disperse their seeds or destroy the seeds have nothing to do where they grow and survive. But this possible connection with their dispersers and predators is somehow a more interesting line of thought for me.
First one sees the patterns and then it’s neat to figure out why and how things are the way they are in a forest, although it’s often hard to do and it all seems like far-fetched story-telling.
But leaving aside the questions, every trip to the forest is full of small discoveries and it’s a joy reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones.
There is also pain. Many trees I met – the friends I made – over the years are gone, cut down for fuelwood and timber by people who came from far away, from another place in Assam encroaching into miles and miles of forest which still stood in 1995. Those ‘forests’ are unrecognizable now, a few tree stumps in the middle of houses, shops and clumps of planted Areca and bamboo. These same stretches were once home to hornbills and other hole-nesting birds. A few isolated silk cotton Bombax ceiba and fig trees stand, reminders of what once was, but the next time I return, they too may have gone.
The beginning of the cutting of the forest in 1998
..and a few more years later
A capped langur troop that lived in one patch, slowly disappeared one by one, with no food and shelter, chased and killed by dogs, electrocuted. A few lost individuals started to come and sit on the electric lines in the nearby village. Till one day, they too were gone.
A Great hornbill used to nest on one of the huge Bhelu (Tetrameles nudiflora) trees near this patch.
Narayan had found this nest in 1998 and a pair continued using the nest even after the tree was girdled in 2000 and every year, people felled more trees and set up their homes.
Slowly after a couple of years, it fell and was chopped and taken away.
Japang in 1998 - the chopping of Bhelu trees, the hornbills' favorite nest trees
I cannot imagine how the pair of hornbills must have felt when they returned to nest there. Their landmarks, their favorite food trees, perches in the forest vanished leaving an open ugly landscape.
The road through Assam leading to Pakke is now a broken mud-track after a flood in 2004. And the trees and forest no longer line the road giving shelter and shade with their spreading branches. The sun is blindingly harsh on this barren landscape. In a few years, the tree stumps too will have rotted erasing all memory that once there was a forest here. Not so long ago.
Miles of forests are being cleared everywhere to make way for plantations, mines, roads and farms. Asia has the highest deforestation rate. Yet in some way, those are just distant numbers.
The vanishing of a patch of forest and the creatures that one knew, individual by individual, is so much harder to accept. Every time I pass those stretches, pointless tears come. And helplessness, anger and guilt that I could do nothing to stop this destruction. I could not even save that Great hornbill’s nest tree.
‘Goodbye, my friend, it’s hard to die, when the sun is shining in the sky. Now that spring is in the air, with the flowers everywhere. I wish that we could both be there. We had joy, we had lives, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.’ – the Kingston Trio
Since 2006, the environment ministry has demarcated and declared thirty-nine Critical Tiger Habitats—the core of our tiger reserves. Every one of them, wrote activist CR Bijoy recently, is illegal. To understand this extraordinary allegation, we need to step back in time, to our most recent “tiger crisis”.
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)
