And there is, with the wind, the gentle wind, tugging at my t-shirt, sifting through my hair, my eyes, eyelashes, over my hands and my legs, sighing in my ears, a light swell on which the boat rises, and a moment poised on a vertex of consciousness, filled with being.

In boundless seas, I am transfixed, I am moving, I am.

The moon is yet to rise. Behind me stretches the boat, its throbbing engine now silenced with a switch. The mizzen sail billows with mainsail and foresail and the boat leans into the darkness. There is a lull and a surge of air as if the ocean has held its breath briefly and the sails slacken and then fill with a pop, like a slap on the rump of a horse that gets it going again.

There is no other boat or ship around. Except for the faded glow of an instrument panel astern, there is no other light not of the seas. There is just us, in a boat pointed towards an unseen island. People of a purpose sailing on the undefined and relentless purpose of the seas.

Dawn flenses the cowling of night off the waters, revealing clear blue unmarked by cloud. The world opens before us and the bow parts the brightened waters. Flying fish break forth, like a fountain of grasshoppers flushed in a meadow. They arch through the air gleaming and flashing in sunlight. They skitter the surface, rise briefly, and plunge. The water is glassy smooth and secretive again.

Suddenly the sea is alive with spinner dolphins. Their sleek and shining shapes course through the waters in a sibilant rush. In energetic waves they rise and breathe and curve and dip, in a sinuous symphony that scarcely mars the waters.

In the distance others breach the waters into the air in exuberant bursts, spinning and twisting and falling in founts of spray.

The water is cobalt and clear and I watch a dolphin near me swimming its sea as he watches me sail through mine. His curved fin and flippers and flukes, the snout and streamlined body are all crafted to perfection in the waters.

The dolphin effortlessly keeps pace, now scouting ahead, now falling back. And then with a surge he is gone and the rest of them are gone. Barely ten minutes of being with dolphins and yet there is a pang of loss at their passing.

The boat cruises on and the sun rises into brilliant day. Did we come upon the dolphins or they come to us? The dolphins have the answer. And I wish I could ask them. I feel a strange kinship: is it because I know that they know?

The biologists have figured this much. Dolphins and their kin, porpoises and whales, are counted among the most intelligent mammals. Their large, intricate brains, in relation to their body mass, place them somewhere between humans and the great apes. Faced with a mirror, a bottlenose dolphin can recognise himself, a self-recognition that bespeaks a self-awareness and earns a membership in a small but growing club of animal species, which includes the human being. Dolphins are social and empathic, intelligent and emotive. They can be affectionate, enchanting, aggressive, playful, endearing. Their life is in the open sea. The life of the sea is in the dolphins.

The sun sears its way west. As dusk settles, a pod of pilot whale makes its way through the darkening waters. A brown haze hangs over the water, like an airy smog, the breath of a sea monster. Through the haze, the sun drops quickly from blood-red sky to bloodied sea. Our journey is not over.

The intelligence and sentience of dolphin and whale carries consequences, as does ours. Dolphins and whales such as orcas can be driven from delight and vitality to depression and debilitation when held captive in artificial sea ‘worlds’ that are more like tanks and puddles. They can become extremely distressed when people drive them for slaughter or separate a mother and her calf for capture and trade. Then the dolphin or whale must buy its life, its existence of sorts, by succumbing to perform and amuse other people to the chimes of artificial music and the ringing of the cash registers. We know now for sure, the biologists say. They can feel pain. They can suffer. They are sentient beings, too.

Darkness returns and we are enveloped by the seas, with dolphins on our minds. What does it mean to be a human being in a world with other sentient beings? And what the moral imperative of our ability to bring far greater harm and pain to a dolphin than he or she can ever bring to us? Will our search for new worlds and other intelligent life bring us great discovery from the starry sea above, or from the yielding sea below? Or will it come instead from the sea within us, in surprise and joy and revelation? “When it is dark enough”, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “you can see the stars”.

It is early yet in our quest into the lives and languages, the cultures and personalities, of dolphins and whales. The interpreters are still busy: marine scientists and other philosophers, the writers and the poets. Every day they probe the seas, to fish out a nugget of knowledge or ravel out the skein of connections. It is an expansive, artful, expanding world.

Meanwhile, I am on the bow of the boat again, cruising the dark seas. I sense an impending arrival at a place ordained but of my own choosing, too. And a sense of place impels me through waves of thought into a consciousness of what it means to be.

This article appeared titled Dancing with Dolphins in The Hindu Sunday Magazine, 18 Mar 2012. Photographs and latter video courtesy Kalyan Varma.

Conservation caveats

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

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

Develop and perish?

MEERA ANNA OOMMEN, KARTIK SHANKER | February 19, 2012

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

Fading of an invisible map

VARDHAN PATANKAR & ROHAN ARTHUR | February 12, 2012

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

An intricate web

PANKAJ SEKHSARIA | February 5, 2012

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

Imported Threat

RAUF ALI | January 29, 2012

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

Targeting Tillanchong

MANISH CHANDI | January 22, 2012

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

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

A convoy of vehicles on the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR).

Just beyond, on either side, stretches the home of the Jarawa—lofty rainforests with tall dipterocarps and padauk, myriad trees and lianas, palms, cane, and bamboo. If the forest bears the human mark of the Jarawa, it is subtle and difficult to discern.

The forest of the Jarawa...

Up in the trees, a flock of birds is busy hunting prey. Dressed in smart black, the Andaman drongo forages in the canopy with long-tailed Andaman treepies. The forest resounds with the territorial drumming of the black woodpecker of the Andamans, even as a spectacular dark serpent eagle cries its shrill cry skimming the skies. Towering above the other trees, an emergent Tetrameles, smooth and leafless, holds a dollarbird on a high exposed branch. The endemic Andaman birds mark the uniqueness of the forest, but the dollarbird suggests an ancient commonality with lands across the ocean, for one can see it similarly perched atop great trees in the rainforests of the Western Ghats, in north-east India, and in south-east Asia.

Dollarbird on the lookout from a leafless Tetrameles branch.

Into logged forests

The road hurtles on, like an arrow of time, past the island of Baratang, into a more open forest.

The Andaman Trunk Road brooks no obstruction... and hurtles on...

Huge logs lie by the roadside. ‘Welcome to Middle Andamans‘, proclaims a signboard of the Forest Department. The signboard is only half green—the other half is red. This forest bears the mark of a different kind of man.

Huge rainforest trees cut for timber lying beside the Andaman Trunk Road.

Here, the tall trees are few and scattered. Amidst remnant evergreen trees are many that are deciduous. The undergrowth is dense with palms, shrubs, and saplings, in dense tangles with weeds and vines.

Through the canopy, shredded by logging, sunlight streams to feed the light-hungry weeds in the undergrowth. The alien weeds thrive: the Chromolaena in dense clusters, the Mikania woven into green shrouds over saplings. The forest is criss-crossed with logging coupe roads. Some are overgrown, some erode away, but some remain, like a tenacious scar marking an old, unforgotten wound.

In the forest itself, the ground is thrown up into little mounds. The mounds are covered with a fine sort of soil that termites conjure from earth and wood. Little seedlings germinate on the mounds. There is ficus, of course, but ferns and other plants, too. The mounds are rounded at sawing height off the ground. Theirs is a strangely haunting presence in the forest, like ghosts of trees past. On the forest floor all around are dotted seedlings and saplings of forest trees—pioneers, deciduous, and evergreen—a tenuous cohort presaging an uncertain forest of the future.

Ghosts of trees past: the mounds in logged forest...

Contested spaces

At either end of the road are altered landscapes of settlement, agriculture and forest remnants, seeming destinations—end points—not just in space, but in time as well. Here, alien mynas and native starlings share and contest space, in the continuing biological tussle of introduced and indigenous so unfortunately frequent on islands. Crows and bulbuls, spotted deer and elephants, many animals have been brought and released here, subsequently thriving as feral populations. By the roadside in Port Blair and Wandoor are rain trees, another alien, festooned with bird’s nest ferns and orchids, growing luxuriantly in the humid tropical climate and soil. As people and lifeforms have arrived, the land has accommodated them, providing resources and succour. How those arriving have accommodated to the land is another matter.

After a long spell of logging and a brief reprieve, the forests are on the cutting block again. The island forests rise behind a skirt of dense mangroves whose aerial roots claim purchase at the very edge of land, forming a shelterbelt from the surges of the sea. The mangroves now give way to desolate wastes and burgeoning resorts with the all-important sea-view. The sand beaches that hold the nests of turtles and the roots of manilkara trees are mined away for the homes of men and the foundations of buildings. The soils from slopes and crop fields erode into streams and into the sea to smother with silt the coral reefs—those not already bleached and crumbling from ocean warming or extraction. A tsunami came and went but the tsunami of a certain type of development continues—yet, it seems only a promise to squander in years what peoples such as the Jarawa have sustained over millenia.

A coastal mangrove with its aerial roots: holding on to land, only to be cleared for a resort's 'sea view'?

Will the spread of the alien plant and animal species into the sensitive landscape of the islands ever abate? Will the tussle over space and resource, over lifestyle and culture, among the indigenous and the settled peoples amicably resolve? And yet, isn’t alien and native a matter of perspective, too? Seen with immigrant eyes from the streets of Port Blair, the introduced myna and house crow appear more familiar than the Andaman teal or treepie. To the native Jarawa still embedded in the island ecosystem, whose name for themselves ‘eng’ means people—to them, we are the alien, people from another world barely known or understood. But to us, as people bereft of intimate connection with nature, it is the Jarawa—our name for them meaning ‘the other’, ‘the stranger’—who appears alien. And so it may remain. The Jarawa lives a world apart. A world he can scarcely construct for us without somehow losing it in the process.

Unbidden, a strange feeling then appears on the journey down the road. A feeling, as if we are destined to always be second-comers, carrying an atavistic insecurity originating in early human migrations from the African savanna into new lands. As aliens forever, we cope with insecurity by revelling in alienness, seeking shelter in superiority, making it an aspirational, a developmental goal. It is our proud red against the darkling green of the Jarawa, who are people like us but who arrived in ages past, taking a path towards a destination altogether different.

Our road could yet lead to a different sensitivity and perception. A sensitivity that allows us to make space for diversity—biological and cultural—on the land itself, in our hearts, our minds. A perception that we simultaneously inhabit different worlds and that a more powerful world should not trample a weaker one to the earth. By making space for survival and recovery of other peoples and other species in their natural homes, the forest of the future may be, not a forest of aliens, but a forest of the human and the humane.

This article appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on 1 January 2012.

In Kedarnath, October 1993, from left to right: Sridhar, Madhu, Kavita, Advait, Rohan, Suhel, and Sara.

“We at W. I. I.” I curse, “are nothing but a bunch of overgrown children playing at Cowboys and Indians. I mean, is this any place to be? The temperatures are so low, I am sure any decent thermometer would freeze over, my cerebrospinal fluid has icebergs that would sink a Titanic floating about in it, and my teeth have started a healthy erosion process from all the chattering.”

“Shh…” says Advait, while I pause to take a breath, “Shh… You won’t get words like that past any subeditor.”

We are on our way up Rudranath towards the end of an enlightening, enriching, exhausting trip to the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary as part of the M. Sc. high altitude techniques tour. The air is rare here, so my tirade is rendered much less effective by my constant need to stop for breath.

My lungs are full again. “When we first got here, it was fine.” I continue, “Mandal and its surroundings were breathtakingly beautiful, with landscapes that would need the brushstrokes of a Monet to describe them, sunsets that would require the lyrical abilities of a Naidu to capture, bird songs that would send Vaughn Williams into a musical compositional frenzy. The butterflies on the wing, the Strobilanthes in bloom, the mysterious fern at our feet and the pine cones on the trees, all these were stunning in their beauty, don’t you think?”

“Hmm”, says Advait in his typical loquacious manner.

And as we run down the steep slope of Rudranath, Advait asks Kavita: “Are there red and yellow spots on your jeans?”

“No.”

“Then I must be giddy”, says Advait.

High altitude sickness has struck, and while we watch the monal pheasant through the spotting scope, wonderfully majestic, a poem in colour, manoeuvering the rocks on the far slope, Advait is busy with his reverse peristaltic manoeuvres in the far corner of the hut.

“The food tastes better the second time around”, he quips between movements.

“Just shut up and throw up”, says Madhu, who is conducting the next movement.

“Quiet!” says Madhu in a loud whisper, his eyes blazing a rebuke. All around the sounds of night, in soft complacency, hum their serenades, and I shut up, swallowing the joyful hilarity that provoked my unfortunate outburst.

We are looking for flying squirrel, and we obediently follow with our eyes the dull beam of light from Madhu’s torch. Shapes leap out, not from the trees, but from our minds, but we feel safe; with Madhu in charge, the night could do its worst.

Madhu, the Protector.

Yet back in the hut, in the grainy glow of candlelight, we see him again, pulling Kavita‘s leg, ribbing her with mindless puns and childlike abandon.

Madhu, the Boychild.

Kavita’s knee is bad but she plods on with single-minded determination. “A stubborn mule she has to be” I think, “to keep her calm with us rowdies.” Nothing fazes her, no length of road and no amount of ribbing will get her down.

“You are just one of the guys” I tell her. She winces as I whack her squarely on the shoulders. “It’s difficult to treat you as the unequal that you are.”

But we try. By God, we certainly try.

“Come on, come on” says Sathyakumar who is goading us on our way down to Mandal, “we have to reach before sundown.”

“This is my kingdom” says Sathyakumar as he waves his hand with regal flourish across the postcard scenes that stretch before us. Trishul in the distance, with the red of the sunset on its peaks, the pine forests below us, the craggy rockslopes, the pika, the raspberries clinging to the rockface, the musk deer farm, the leopard on the street, the call of the Khaleej, the stone huts of Chopta, the windswept alpine meadows and the gritty little temples, all this he encompassed with the sweep of his hand and: “This… this is my kingdom. I call and it responds.”

“Damn the cold”, says Sara softly, for Sara very rarely says anything very loudly. He swears that he will never work in any area where the temperatures are not nicely tropical and sweaty. And though he loathes the cold with a silent vehemence, he does better than most of us in facing it, almost sneering it in the face as he does.

Sara has the poetic eye of an artist, for he sees hidden symmetry where others don’t, beauty in a certain play of light, music in a certain droop of the leaf. It is a magical, faery and exciting world, the world that is Sara’s lens.

“It was not very cold that night—just touching the –5 °C mark.” Dr Chundawat, sitting on the cold, stone quadrangle outside the Rudranath huts, is at his best today. The exceptional sunset, the rise of the stars in the moonless sky, the milky way, bright and dreamy as it lazes through the deep blue of the night, the smell of potatoes being cooked by Jabbar inside the hut and the soft drift of voices from within, all conspire to bring out the storyteller in him, and tales of Ladakh flow easily, in the curious anecdotal style that is his alone.

And in a style very much his own, Sridhar recounts the story of the Amazon researcher, and his experience with the rainforest flies. Satyakumar will spend the whole night wondering about it.

Sridhar is like that. He speaks, his nostrils flare, and he leaves you wondering.

The brook burbled and sang to us, inviting and cold. I resisted, the coward in me for once providing me with wise caution. Sridhar is more impetuous, but needs company to give it action.

“Let’s”, he pleads, “It won’t be all that cold.”

Suhel looks on with a little smile, refusing to be drawn into the pleading game. “Not me” he gestures.

Sridhar and I sit in cowardly camaraderie for an hour, with our feet in the flowing ice of the rivulet without further attempting to explore the limits of our bodies’ endurance.

Suhel stands alone against the railing at Mandal, staring out at the sky. We leave today, and I take my last looks, with the elated sadness that always grows within me at the end of a trip.

But Suhel has none of that sentimentality, none of those nonsense emotions that make man weak and frail. He is stoic, binoculars and notes in meticulous shorthand.

I watch him now as I dump my dirty socks into the rucksack, staring almost wistfully at the sky, drinking in the Mandal morning air. Later, in the bus, as we race back through the narrow mountain roads to Dehradun, he will play a jaunty, sad, “Oh Susanna” on his harmonica.

With the sardonic half-smile that is his trademark arranged on his face, he turns to me to make some soft, cynical comment.

“You’re fooling no one laddie” I say to myself, “You’re fooling no one.”

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)

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?

M D Madhusudan & Pavithra Sankaran

It was an hour after dawn. Siddarama, a forest watcher, was walking to the Tiger Reserve’s headquarters from his village a good six kilometres away, when he heard the faint sound of voices. Suspicious, he approached quietly, and saw three men sitting by a stream, smoking and chatting. Two guns leaned on the rocks behind them and a dead giant squirrel lay on a sackcloth. Siddarama was alone and unarmed, but all he could think of then was that he simply had to catch the poachers red-handed. Figuring quickly that the roaring stream would drown any sounds he made in his approach, he crept towards the men on his belly until he was within reach of the guns. He felt certain that one of them would still be loaded. In a swift move, he grabbed the guns, taking the poachers completely by surprise. In no time, he had one of the men tie up the other two. Tying up the third himself, he marched the trio through the forest to the park headquarters and handed them to over to his superiors.

A week later, the poachers roamed free again. Siddarama had risked his life for nothing.

Tens of thousands of men like him guard our forests and wildlife, working in extreme conditions for little more than a paltry wage and a khaki uniform. In a job that depends heavily on individual motivation, there are few incentives for people to give their best. Yet, there are not one or two, but dozens of Siddaramas, willing to take extraordinary risks to protect our elephants, rhinos, hornbills and turtles.

Although they are the bottom rung of a large and rigid hierarchy, even lower in rank than a forest guard, it is through them that the law makes contact with local people. They are thought of as unskilled workers, but in reality, they bring a practical understanding of ecology, society and politics to their jobs.

Forest watchers often come from impoverished local communities, which have few employment opportunities besides those the forest department offers. To their superiors, they are the face of local resistance; to local people, they represent the oppressive establishment. Caught in this bind, they also bear the brunt of other conflicts played out in our forest areas—many have been kidnapped and even killed by Maoist forces.

Despite such extreme threats, many of these people in the frontiers of wildlife protection in our country are merely daily wage workers—their jobs are not permanent positions in the government; regardless of how sincerely they serve, they are dispensable contract labour. Salaries are sometimes delayed by several months, but these men continue to work, hoping that their services will one day be regularised. Jayaram, a watcher for 22 years, nurses hopes of becoming permanent employee, but it is only a hope. Committed and sincere, he has job offers with researchers and tourist resorts, but finds it hard to abandon the years invested as a watcher—if his service is confirmed, he may receive large pay arrears. But dozens of watchers we know have grown old and left the service, their hopes fated to die with them.

The forest watchers who toil to protect our natural wealth—unlike the jawans who guard our borders—are nobody’s heroes. These foot soldiers for conservation get neither benefit nor credit for their struggles to save wildlife. Theirs is still a life of ramshackle field camps, measly rations, overbearing superiors, angry neighbours and neglected families. If we care so much for our wildlife, must we not also care for their guardians a little bit better?

An edited version of this post appeared in the Times of India, 31 December 2010

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.

*For die-hard fans of Pink Floyd, a disclaimer that I have taken the liberty to caption pictures with some of their song titles—and have tweaked some of the song titles for my own happiness!

In the 1970s, Pink Floyd released the song ‘Pigs on the wing’ in the album ’Animals’. A youthful fascination for the song made me wonder then if pigs could ever fly. The answer is strangely enough ‘Yes’, only if you consider cockroaches to be piggier than regular pigs. Let me explain.

These thoughts came back to me recently as I stood listening to a bunch of nurses and hospital staff fervently singing ‘Hark the herald angels sing’. It was December of 2009 and we were all passengers on a cockroach-ridden ship returning to Port Blair from the Nicobar Islands. My mind wandered back to Floyd’s psychedelic fancies; cockroaches I imagined could be angels hovering above the bunch of men and women heralding in Christmas.

Sheep (after the sing song)

The tub we were on, the M.V. Sentinel, is an old ship still cutting water after more than 30 years at sea. She had been patched with ‘m-seal’ and coal tar over her rusty edges and then painted up to guarantee a certificate of sea worthiness. Her passengers were ostensibly human, but her main cargo seemed to be cockroaches, bed bugs, rats, and other scurrying creatures. The ships blowers and air conditioner gave up on that journey, and, as the crew’s bunks were located closest to the engine room, it must have been hell for them. I suspect it was to avoid a mutiny, that the Captain decided to let the passenger cabins be used by the crew, with only bunk and deck space available for passengers!

The MV Sentinel in all her resplendent glory docked at Kamorta jetty

I was returning from another bout of field work at three sites in the Nicobar Islands. The Islands are where I attempt to fathom the intricacies of natural resource use and management among islander communities in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. The Nicobaris lived along the coast, fishing, tending pigs and chicken, and harvesting their coconut plantations – the mainstay of their former economy. The coast harbored a host of natural resources and species within easy reach, some which were protected through local regulations and others through seemingly benign consumption practices. The Islands harbor biological diversity despite centuries of use by indigenous Islanders. Their unique management system has largely consisted of access to resources through permissions and sharing among and between themselves. Cheating was rare and strictly reprimanded. The tsunami not only reduced the available coastal resources, but also created unusual social upheavals amidst the rehabilitative process.

'Echoes' of squeals grunts and clucks from the past

My work in the Islands was stressful as I was constantly reminded of how the lives of the Nicobaris had changed after the tsunami unleashed its destruction four years ago. Uncertainty is the cloud that many Islanders travel on today. Soon after the event some were not sure what to make of their circumstances, with the damage caused by the tsunami and the deluge of rehabilitative aid thereafter. For others, this was the moment to amass some wealth by cadging any government largesse through compensation. For many others, the old life that they had been comfortable with made more sense and they patiently struggled to weave back those strands. Through all of these attitudinal shifts I try to understand how events have affected their sharing and cooperation patterns over the use of natural and domestic resources.

Shine on you crazy diamonds. - A dance session in celebration of a new house 2001

Understandably I was weary and the ticket on the old ship back to the base wasn’t a mood-enhancer. Given the condition of the ship, passengers had two choices, the company of bed bugs and cockroaches in steaming hot bunks below, or rats, cockroaches and the occasional bug for company on the airy deck. I’d been on this journey many times before and knew better than to meekly accept what lay in store. After loafing around on the deck till evening – passing time by staring into the blue sea and skimming through my book – I finally came across a friend, the Second Officer. I stored my precious equipment and belongings in his cabin and he kindly offered me a spare sofa to sleep on. Within minutes however, one of the ship’s bedbugs got to me! My friend handed me a few swigs of ‘Royal Challenge’ whisky saying, ‘Drink, you will soon be in a coma and the bugs will disappear!’ I hate the thought of a roach peering up my nostril, or cuddling up with a bed bug in bed. So I chatted with him till he went on to attend duties at the ship’s bridge and then hurried over to my preferred spot—the SOPEP locker on the upper deck! This is a large box containing life jackets, hoses, helmets and other paraphernalia to tackle pollution at sea; being an elevated region on deck, this was my safest bet.

Goodbye blue sky- at the far side, the remnants of Kakana village Central Nicobar

The dark side of the moon-plantations and coastal forests destroyed after the tsunami of 2004

Astronomy domine- at dusk before the stars take over

I laid myself comfortably and looked up at the ships smoke stacks puffing at the stars above. The eager hospital staff nearby were not finished with their carol singing. I imagined the angel Gabriel as a large cockroach descending upon them and lifting them to heavenly bliss twitching its feelers over them soothing them to sound sleep. I was the one who couldn’t sleep. Gabriel is also the name of one of my key informants from a Nicobarese village where natural resources were wiped clean by the tsunami. Survivors of the tsunami including Gabriel were relocated to the heights on a grassland on Kamorta Island as a precautionary measure, though other factors of livelihood were not considered in this monocular vision of safety after the tsunami. The grasslands are a beautiful landscape that is desolate as far as livelihood resources are concerned; given this predicament the villagers relocated to such regions have survived for the past five years on Government aid and dole. Gabriel is one of the few to bounce back and begin recreating some of what he lost.

On the turning away- Housing style post tsunami for nuclear families on the grassland

The majority lived in pecuniary delight for a while, given the flood of cash compensations and their inability to do much else on the grassland. They live distant from the coast now, with few canoes and functional boats. Fish are far to come by unlike in the past. Feeding their domestic pigs is now restricted to few days in a week, compared to the daily routine before. There are many more uncertainties ahead. I looked up above to see the moon obscured by a ghoulish and cottony cloud on its journey across the sky. The stars literally twinkled and danced about. I felt good on my elevated bed; safe, rocking free on the sea’s swell below the ship, breathing the clean cool air of the night. I didn’t have to worry about a livelihood on the grassland, or of what a governmental rehabilitation program meant, or of who stole coconuts kept aside to feed my pigs. Mosquitoes that come to life at dusk are normal; the heat of the day under tin roofed houses on the open grassland is abnormal. Life before the tsunami was lived under the shade of coconut palms on the beach, with the sea throwing up wonderful surprises on the shore each day, sometimes from distant lands. Rope, wooden planks, plastic or wooden toys, footwear from around the globe, containers of all types from the ubiquitous plastic water bottle to jerry cans and even biscuit packets that arrived every blue moon. There wasn’t much need to go shopping often, as the sea threw up different goods every now and then that could be put to some use or the other. It was possible to innovate with goods available for free on the shore. The rest of the world bought and used those goods, then discarded or emptied their bins into drains that led to the sea. The sea’s currents took over and distributed goods for all those along its shores. There is an old saying – the sea knows how to keep itself clean; what we throw into it, comes back on some shoreline. Islanders the world over and those on the coast have made best of these opportunities with the assortment of trash that washes ashore. Uses of this trash apart, seeing the mess on beaches only increases the disgust I have for urban spoils and chaos.

Welcome to the machine- in the days of wind and oar propelled canoes

Interstellar overdrive-a family waits on the beach to sail to their village

Meddle- a beached Akai television to look at yourself

Material goods came with colonizers from distant lands with the promise of development, but largely to make money and lives of people like themselves more comfortable. The locals were soon won over. The few shops in town were for special occasions when cash was available and rations had to be sourced for lean periods such as the beginning of the monsoon. Otherwise life on the coast was a wholesome existence. Fish and other marine life were within easy reach, coconuts with multiple uses hung just above and the tree’s fronds shaded comfortable stilt houses close to the beach. Many families lived together and ate from a common kitchen, now with ‘permanent shelters’ they all live separate and on cement floors. Around those former stilted homesteads, domesticated pigs squealed and grunted while chickens clucked and crowed providing daily life some percussion. The sea’s breeze kept spirits high along with toddy sessions at the ready for any occasion. Canoes slid into and out of the water whenever needed. There were few motorized boats (if at all) then and the putting of an engine would make every head turn to see who passed by or arrived. Life had surely changed with one tsunami.  For me, life on the SOPEP locker was good except for the thought of them pigs on the wing below.

Comfortably numb- a pleasant toddy session

Shifting my thoughts, I reflected on times when I had seen animals at sea. There were places where I saw real marine angels- manta rays gliding below the sea’s surface like dark shadows from the deep. Such sights were in contrast to the periscope like stare of saltwater crocodiles lying still on the surface of estuarine creeks. There were dolphins and sometimes porpoises that made an appearance while sailing, spinning or somersaulting out of the water or just popping around our dinghy smirking at us slowpokes. The grandest sight was a multitude, literally thousands of dolphins as far as my eye could see. This was when I sailed south to the Nicobar Islands more than a decade ago. It was some sort of mass migration that I’ve never seen again. The ship I was on seemed atom like amidst the sea of dolphins.

Learning to fly

'Hey you'- if you didn't believe that dolphins can smirk!

My biggest surprise was seeing Orcas in the Bay of Bengal one November in 1999. I was returning to the mainland for a short holiday, and saw large fins shearing the water’s surface and moving perpendicular to the ships path at dusk on our second day at sea. Only when I saw the large flipper of one of the males in the pod did I realize they were Killer whales. Seeing a sperm whale spouting into the sky at sea was very different from an occasion when an adult made its way into Port Blair harbor getting stuck and confused for two whole days until it oriented itself seaward and to freedom. Underwater life while snorkeling is another dreamy world of colour, grace and shapes as you glide above the reef peering through the confines of a mask. What’s seen on the surface is usually fleeting, ephemeral, and all about luck. I realized I was lucky to have seen these and more. I was safe from the ravaging cockroaches for now, and I turned myself to sleep.

The narrow way- part 3. Dolphins cavorting

It was the 25^th and I woke up to a beautiful early morning sky tinged orange and blue with a slight but cool breeze. The nurses and hospital staff were still asleep and I had my early morning peace. I sat up cross legged on my prop like crow’s nest, blinking myself awake. The silhouettes of the Andaman Islands were coming into view through the early morning haze. The ship heaved and pitched over a lazy swell taking us closer to urban Port Blair. I reflected on the short visit to my field sites, knowing that it could be a while before I got back again. I idealistically hoped that things would change in the Nicobar Islands and that life wouldn’t be lived on the grasslands forever. My ideal is the beach. Then my eye caught sight of a being below. Just a few yards away from the ship, a huge grey brown shape appeared on the surface, moving in an opposite direction alongside. I thought ‘shark’! but ….in a few seconds, I saw its flat tail and a rounded head that could belong to only one creature- a dugong! It drifted by without a care, being heaved by the swell of the sea and carried on a current past the ship’s wake. A few seconds more and it was gone. The early morning sun reflected off the sea’s surface obscuring any further view. This was it then! Hark the herald O angels! This was a beautiful and rare sight-and a total surprise. An obese but graceful animal that is rare to see was my sight of that morning. I smiled to myself; In the Andaman’s, as in other areas, dugongs are called ‘sea pigs’…nothing close to the notion of being mermaids of the sea, but certainly a lot better than those pigs on the wing. In retrospect those pigs on the wing were the reason I got to see the fat mermaid at the gates of dawn-yet another sight to remember!

See Emily play

The combination of ideas in this account may seem strange (the account is true by the way), but when I wrote them out, I realized that I happen to have a fancy for ‘living in the past’, and have lamented on the changes in lifestyle among the Nicobar Islanders. I do not turn back from that lament, but look forward to the surprises that lie ahead. Through my field research I have come across many instances of resilience among many friends and others islanders I meet. As every turn along the beach can turn up surprises, I do acknowledge that social and ecological processes do take unexpected turns-sometimes churning up beautiful versions of change.

Wish you were here

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

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

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

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

Are we a sentient species? Sure, we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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