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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

―Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

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

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

―George B. Schaller, Stones of Silence

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

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

―Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

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

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

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

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

―Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution being proposed is a new scheme with an annual worth of 800 billion US dollars that has been given the moniker, Payment for Evolutionary Services and Technology fund (the PEST fund). Explaining the principle behind the PEST fund, Dr. Gonsalves said, ecstatically, “Species are the cornerstone of evolution. The extinction of a species signals the end of a long evolutionary process and deprives us of vital evolutionary resources that we could otherwise exploit for the benefit of mankind. In order to prevent the extinction of species, we have evolved a novel market-linked fund that will incentivise governments, private players, even individuals, to conserve evolutionary processes that make species what they are.”

Initiatives launched with the fund include a 10 million dollar grant to a field research centre in Ecuador to keep Darwin’s Finches evolving in the Galapagos Islands, a 2 million dollar community-based project that will enable villagers in Mexico to keep the mutualism between yucca and yucca moths going, and a seed-grant to an industrial consortium in Birmingham that will experiment with different kinds of air pollution to promote the evolution of different races of peppered moths in the region.

Laboratory-based evolutionary scientists around the world are also overjoyed at the initiative as it earmarks a full 50% or 400 billion US dollars for direct payments to labs breeding populations of the ultimate evolutionary milch-cow that never seems to run out of milk: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. An additional 5% allocated just for experimentation related to tinkering of Drosophila salivary glands has left competing scientists working on other aspects, such as growing legs on fruit fly heads, virtually salivating.

Financing the fund is the world’s behemoth financial institution, the Bank of the Earth, which is providing the fund on easy terms. For implementing institutions in developed nations, it is provided as a low interest loan, while emerging economies may obtain these funds as interest-free loans or straight grants. This would be decided by economists at the well-staffed Bank of the Earth Coordination Centres currently being established within the offices of Prime Ministers and Presidents in the latter countries.

As in the case of many such large and popular schemes, the PEST fund has led to controversies in academic circles. Trenchant criticism has emerged from rival players who have tried to establish payments for ecosystem services (such as clean air, water, and carbon capture). Besides the loss of a pithy acronym to a larger project, proponents of payments for ecosystem services are worried that PEST funds will actually work against their own limited achievements thus far. The rival group is led by a group think-tank called the Coalition Against Vitiating Evolution for Monetary or Economic Net profits (CAVEMEN). CAVEMEN spokesperson, Dr. Clubb Hunter, in a press statement said, “Many evolutionary processes unleashed by humans work against nature and ecology, such as the evolution of more virulent diseases resistant to our best drugs, the varieties of invasive alien species spreading on every continent, and the evolution of couch-potato genes among certain human groups. Should we really be paying for all this, and that too in hard cash?”

Climate change nay-sayers also receive a fresh shot in the arm as aspects of human endeavour leading to further climate change that is likely to drive adaptation and evolution in plant and animal species are now eligible for PEST funds. The beneficiaries may range from airlines spewing greenhouses gases and engine fumes into the upper atmosphere over polar regions, nuclear and thermal power plants emptying warmed-up coolant water in cold rivers with endemic aquatic fauna, to those raising high-yielding, high-belching methanogenic cattle on Amazonian pastures adjoining biodiversity-rich conservation areas, observers of the PEST fund have noted.

The PEST fund has, however, won support from an unlikely quarter: social scientists and anthropologists. “This scheme is founded on well-established theory in social and human psychology”, said Dr. Eliza Doomuch, a retired social scientist and farmer in Kentucky and an architect of social revolution in the American South. “People will value things only if they are paid to do so”, she said. Taking a leaf from this successful scheme, she has founded a novel movement that promises to rid the world of racism, torture, and genocide, among other things such as parent-offspring conflict and sibling rivalry. This initiative, tentatively labeled Payments for Decency, will provide direct economic incentive to any human who shows basic decency, as defined by the International Consortium of Decent Human Beings, to other humans. Knowledgeable sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that keeping the future potential of this seminal idea to alleviate human suffering in mind, Dr Doomuch is already in the reckoning for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet, not everyone is happy. Among the first to raise questions about this trend to pay even for basic decency to other humans or to our planet is the Dixie Endeavor for Ecology and Population Solutions for Humanity In Transition, the only such NGO on the planet that does not use any acronym. When contacted for their opinion, this writer was told tersely, “We are refuse to accept this.”

None of these misgivings deterred the gala press conference in Washington, D. C., however. As Dr. Gonsalves said, in an euphoric tone, “We need to save species for human benefit. When humankind stands to gain so directly, it does not really matter how we do it, does it?”

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Disclaimer: All future events even remotely resembling the above fiction are entirely coincidental and unintentional.