“This is the first volume of the Handbooks on the Fauna of British India published since the death of Dr. Blanford, under whose Editorship the series was initiated and carried on for over twenty years. The many obituary notices that have appeared in the publications of the learned and scientific societies fully testify to the great value of the work done by him during a long and strenuously productive life, and the loss that science has sustained by his death. To few, however, will that loss be personally so great as to those who under his direction were working for the Fauna of India series.”
This wistful note in the Editorial preface to the third volume (1906) on the Rhyncota (the old name for the true bugs, now known as the Hemiptera) by W L Distant (1845-1922) was penned by C T Bingham (1848-1908), successor to the first overseer of the Fauna of British India series, William Thomas Blanford. It pointed to the extraordinary contributions of a man who, in his role as editor of the series, would play one of the most important innings of a multifaceted life. Born in London in 1832, Blanford over the course of his early years would dabble at carving, gliding and designing before joining his younger brother, Henry Francis Blanford (1834-1893) at the Royal School of Mines.
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA The Blanford brothers were appointed to the Geological Survey of India in 1855 and in fairly short order attained prominence in the field by identifying the effects of ice in the boulder beds of the Talchir tillites while surveying the eponymous coalfields in Orissa and Bengal, a study of extensive Permian glaciation that would anticipate and contribute to later conceptualisations of the southern continental landmass of Gondwanaland. Other geological expeditions would follow for W T Blanford, including Burma (1860), the Bombay Presidency (1862-1866) and possibly his most celebrated, that of the Indo-Persian Boundary Commission (1871-1872). There would also be a foray into Sind (1874-1877) during the course of which he would describe the Indian bush rat (Gollunda ellioti). The zoological interpolation was not stray; Blanford had earlier been assigned to the Absyssinia Expedition (1867-88) as part of the Bombay Army led by Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier (1810-1890) to relieve European missionaries and British Governmental representatives imprisoned by the local ruler Emperor Thewodros II (1818-1868). During that effort, Blanford made considerable collections, which would be central to his acclaimed Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia (1870). A journey to Sikkim the same year with H J Elwes (1846-1922) would result in a paper describing new bird species in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, while, in a marvellous commingling of geological and biological interests, i.e. palaeontology, Blanford would write at length on the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene fauna of the Siwalik range in A Manual of the Geology of India (1879), a book he co-authored with H B Medlicott (1829-1905), also of the Geological Survey of India and for a period its Superintendent. Blanford would also contribute substantially to natural historical reports emerging from expeditions to Yunan and Yarkand in the 1860s and 1870s, particularly with reference to malacology (the study of molluscs).
THE FAUNA OF BRITISH INDIA It was however in the context of the Fauna of British India that Blanford would achieve lasting renown. Part of that accrued reputation would emerge from well beyond Blanford’s own immediate stature, eminent though it was—the supporters of the effort to produce a series of handbooks on zoology for the Indian region included such stalwarts as Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the grand old man of evolutionary theorising, Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825- 1895), ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ and celebrated comparative anatomist, Sir William Henry Flower (1831- 1899), Conservator at the Hunterian Museum, Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), the first Baron Avebury, Member of Parliament and strong votary for science and Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913), the founding editor of the journal Ibis. At the time of the memorial (1881), duly signed by these heavyweights of establishment-science in Great Britain, Blanford was ill in Quetta, Baluchistan, a condition that would largely force his retirement to London the following year. Nonetheless, given his immense knowledge of the natural history of the Indian region, the suggestion was made by the aforementioned luminaries that he edit the first series of the fledgling Fauna of British India. To this he acceded, being paid at a rate of two thirds his regular salary whilst in harness. Even as he gained public approbation for his work in his original field of endeavour, receiving the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London, he was sedulously making plans for the new series. A decade and a half later, he would have this to write in the preface to Volume 4 of the Birds (1898):
Brown palm civet
“The Vertebrate animals of British India have now been described for the first time in a single uniform series, consisting of eight volumes, of which this is the last to appear. The work comprises two volumes on the Fishes by the late Dr. F. Day, one on Reptiles and Batrachians (an older name for the Amphibians, in particular the Anura which include frogs, toads and tree-toads) by Mr. G. Boulenger, and two on Birds by Mr. E. W. Oates; the remaining two volumes on Birds and one on Mammals, together with the editing of the whole, having been my own contribution to the undertaking. Five volumes on Invertebrata – four on the Moths of British India by Sir G F Hampson, and one on the Hymenoptera by Colonel C T Bingham – have also been published on the same plan. The work has fully occupied me during the fifteen years that have now elapsed since my retirement from Indian service; but the completion of the Vertebrate series would not have been practicable without the valuable cooperation of the able naturalists already mentioned.”
Blanford’s major contribution to the Mammals and Birds of India therefore was in a work of synthesis and editorship, bringing everything that was known at the time in the region into taxonomic relief. His achievement at the time was towering and would set the stage for the continuation of the project, something that lasts to this day, if under the title of The Fauna of British India, reflecting the status of an independent nation free from its colonial adjective. Blanford himself had embarked on a malacological project potentially to attend his work on mammals and birds for the series at the time of his demise in London in 1905. For the organisational context in which we know so much about the mammals and other elements of the fauna of the subcontinent, so very much is owed to this indefatigable geologist.
Suggested reading: W T Blanford. Birds, Vol IV. The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1898), iii. J Mathew. 2011. ‘To Fashion a Fauna for British India,’ Doctoral Thesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University).
Thomas Caverhill Jerdon, a medical surgeon with the East India Company, is better known for his contributions to the mammalogy, ornithology and herpetology of British India. He is credited with the compilation of the first comprehensive book on Indian mammals.
Early Life Born on the 12th of October, 1811, in Durham, Northeastern England, Jerdon’s keen interest in natural history, particularly plants and birds, was believed to have been encouraged by his father. In 1828, he went to Edinburgh University where he studied natural history under Professor Robert Jameson, who had tutored several well-known naturalists like Charles Darwin. While at the University, Jerdon was a part of the Plinian Society, a club for natural history enthusiasts. Scottish students of the time received a broad education in a variety of fields including history, geography, navigation and philosophy. In the same spirit and perhaps because natural history was not a particularly lucrative career prospect, Jerdon also trained in medicine between 1829 and 1835.
In 1835, he joined the East India Company as an assistant surgeon under the Madras Medical Service of the Madras Presidency and was posted to the Ganjam district of Orissa where he was responsible for the treatment of troops affected by fever and dysentery. His passion however lay elsewhere. Apart from his physician’s duties, he diligently started documenting the birds of the Eastern Ghats. This trend continued as he moved to various parts of India, especially the south, including what is now Andhra Pradesh, Ooty and Trichy. He obtained information on endemic birds through observation as well as interaction with the locals. After the Mutiny of 1857-58, he was named Surgeon-Major. Around this time, he went to Darjeeling on sick leave and spent considerable time studying the Himalayan fauna.
With the requirement of a comprehensive and brief compilation of all the characters, descriptions and classifications of the vertebrates of British India, Jerdon proposed in a prospectus directed to the British Government in India to publish a series of books for the Mammals, Birds, Reptiles and Fishes. Having already produced Illustrations of Indian Ornithology in 1844, Jerdon’s ideas were well received. The purpose behind Jerdon’s compilation of The Mammals of India was to provide a complete data base for observers and sportsmen. Recognising Jerdon’s passion, Lord Canning, the then Viceroy, placed him on special duty that enabled him to work on a series of books on Indian vertebrates. This began with his works on The Birds of India, a 3 volume treatise on the birds in the subcontinent which led to the discovery of the Jerdon’s Courser, a rare nocturnal bird found in present day Andhra Pradesh.
The Mammals of India Jerdon followed this by works on mammals, reptiles and then fishes of India. These manuals were some of the most comprehensive works on Indian fauna at that time. The Mammals of India: A Natural History of all the Animals known to inhabit Continental India was first published in 1866, in Roorkee, in current day Uttarakhand, India, with a second version appearing in 1867. However, Jerdon, notorious for being disorganised with his specimens, is said to have made several errors in the early version, compounded by typological errors by the printers. Thus a third, corrected version was published by John Wheldon in London in 1874 two years after Jerdon’s death.
Travancore flying squirrel
The Mammals of India provided a comprehensive and brief compilation of all the characters, descriptions and classifications of the vertebrates of British India. The book included the observations made by Georges Cuvier, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (France) and Richard Owen (England) working with specimens sent from India, and other naturalists such as Edward Blyth, Colonel William Sykes, Sir Walter Elliot, Brian Hodgson, William Blanford, Colonel Samuel Tickell and Thomas Hutton while they travelled in India. In his description of mammalian species, he pointed out that the richness as seen on the Malabar Coast and in the Western Ghats was unparalleled when compared to the plains of Central and Northern India, although he acknowledged that the greatest diversity was to be found in the Himalayas.
He also made the first ever attempt at providing complete descriptions of all the mammal species of British India. He placed hedgehogs in the now defunct order Insectivora. The book also paid great attention to game species most attractive to trophy hunters, particularly the Himalayan black bear (Ursus thibetanus), the Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), now extinct in India (although still found in small populations within Iran) and the Indian wild ox or gaur (Bos gaurus). He was the first to examine the Lesser Fishing Cat (Felis jerdoni). Ironically, the same species was later named after him by Edward Blyth and concluded that the animal was not a distinct species and possibly a juvenile form of the Rusty Spotted Cat (Prionailurus rubiginosa). However, Jerdon did not suffer for taxonomic posterity with species such as the brown palm civet (Paradoxurus jerdoni) being named after him by W T Blanford in 1885.
In the preface of The Mammals of India, Jerdon stated that he hoped the manual would be as useful as that on birds, as he knew that many sportsmen and observers had been keenly awaiting its appearance. While admitting that the book was incomplete, particularly with regard to smaller mammals like bats, shrews, rats and mice, he trusted that the work would spur further efforts to render in time a more complete volume on mammals. Nonetheless, his effort marked the first serious attempt to provide a systematic account of the mammals in India and in that regard he at least partially achieved what Brian Houghton Hodgson with his proposed Fauna Nepalensis, and Edward Blyth, with dreams of a Fauna Indica, could not.
The Mammals of India, apart from being much sought after by hunters and sportsmen of British India, also served as the template for the multivolume series, The Fauna of British India. As the Scottish naturalist Walter Elliot would remark in Jerdon’s obituary, “Although he did not live to complete his grand design, he accomplished enough to be of incalculable value to the lovers of natural history scattered over the length and breadth of that vast country in which he laboured so zealously himself… Works of greater pretension and more accurate detail have been given to the public and at a cost beyond the reach of ordinary students. To no one is Indian science more indebted as to Mr. Jerdon, not for his discoveries, considerable as they were, but for enabling others to follow his steps.”
Suggested reading: Walter Elliot. Memoir of Dr T C Jerdon. Hist. Berwickshire Nat. Vol. 7: 143–151. Thomas C Jerdon. The Mammals of India – A Natural History of all the animals known to inhabit continental India. London: John Weldon, 1874.
A different version of this essay was first published in IndiaBioscience.org.
Robert Armitage Sterndale was a British naturalist, statesman and Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. He moved to India at the age of seventeen to work for the East India Company. His administrative duties aside, Sterndale took a keen interest in natural history, geography and other scientific studies. He was an avid naturalist and writer, and published a number of books based on his experiences and observations of wildlife in India. His writings include Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon, Seonee, or Camp Life on the Satpura Range and Denizens of the Jungles, the last a series of sketches illustrating wild animals, their forms, behaviour and natural attitude.
Sterndale was a close observer of animal behaviour and made detailed notes on captive animals such as chevrotains, gibbons and cheetahs often kept at his home. He observed for instance that gibbons were largely docile and capable of great attachment in captivity and that young cheetahs were not as consistent in chases as adults. Such information was often taken seriously leading to several Indian Princes capturing adult cheetahs to tame for hunts. Sterndale’s writings also influenced several naturalists and writers in India at that time. For instance his work, Seonee, or Camp Life on the Satpura Range published in 1877 set in the Seonee district of Madhya Pradesh, was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Seonee documents the wildlife of the Satpura Range and describes Sterndale’s adventures and experiences with the wildlife and the local inhabitants of the landscape. He also provided a topographical and historical sketch of the Seonee district, which helped Kipling create the setting for the Jungle Book in a place Kipling had never seen.
Thomas Hardwicke was a soldier with the East India Company and a naturalist. Hardwicke entered the military service of the East India Company in 1778 as a country cadet and served till 1819 rising to the rank of a Major General. During his time in India, he undertook several major military expeditions and used the opportunity to survey local fauna and amass a huge collection of specimens. From these, Hardwicke described several new species including the the long-armed sheath-tailed Bat (Taphozous longimanus), Himalayan goral (Naemorhedus goral) and the Indian gerbil (Tatera indica). At the time of his death he bequeathed his collections to the British Museum (Natural History),which led to more new species being described by other naturalists (e.g. Thomas Horsfield who described mammals such as the small mouse-tailed Bat (Rhinopoma hardwickii)) and Hardwicke’s forest Bat (Kerivoula hardwickii). He was also a gifted artist and compiled a series of drawings on Indian fauna that were published by John Edward Gray in his Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830-35).
Hardwicke was also believed to be the first person to discover the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) and present it at the Linnean Society in 1821. He called the animal ‘wha’, after its characteristic loud cry. Hardwicke, however, did not receive credit for his find as he was delayed in bringing back his specimens from India to England. By the time he published his findings in 1827, he was already two years behind the first scientific description of the species, by French zoologist Georges Cuvier who had also acquired a specimen from India.
Reginald Innes Pocock was a British naturalist, who is today considered one of the most important mammalogists connected with India. Born on March 4, 1863 in Bristol, England, Reginald Pocock was the fourth son of Rev Nicholas Pocock and Edith Prichard. As a child he had varied interests; he was athletic and played rugby, lacrosse and lawn tennis. He was fond of poetry and was a skilled artist. He also showed keen interest in animals and frequently visited the Zoological Gardens at Clifton where he learned about keeping and breeding mice, lizards, turtles and other smaller animals.
THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM As his interest in zoology grew, he went on to study biology and geology at University College, Bristol. His education made him ideal for an Assistantship at the Department of Zoology at the British Museum (Natural History) now known as the Natural History Museum in London. The position involved mainly organising the Museum’s zoological specimens and describing those that were unidentified. After a brief stint arranging British birds in the public gallery, Pocock moved to the Entomology section where he took over the arachnid and myriapod collections, becoming a recognised authority on these groups. His stint with the Zoological Society museum substantially increased its entomological collections. He worked at the museum for the next 18 years, publishing over 200 papers, including a special volume on Arachnida for the Fauna of British India series. He also contributed several of his own illustrations to his papers, enhancing their aesthetic value.
INTEREST IN MAMMALS While still at the Entomology section in 1897, Pocock came across a zebra like specimen in the museum simply labelled Quagga. Curious about the taxonomical affinities of the animal, he examined it and came to the conclusion that it was closely related to the plains zebra Equus quagga found throughout East Africa. The animal, extinct by the time Pocock came across it, featured in his first paper on mammals, ‘The species and subspecies of Zebras’. Soon after this, Pocock helped Dr P L Sclater, Secretary to the Zoological Society of London (1860-1902), finish the remaining chapters of the Book of Antelopes, co-authored with Dr Oldfield Thomas, Pocock’s colleague who headed the section on mammals at the museum. This helped him develop a better understanding of mammals. He then made trips to the Balearic Islands of Spain with Oldfield Thomas to collect mammals, arachnids and myriapods. This trip further spiked his interest in mammalogy leading to the publication of several papers in Nature during this period. So great was his interest that when fellow naturalist R C Wroughton, who was then interested in studying arachnids, approached him for help, Pocock advised him to instead turn his attention to studying mammals.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAMMALOGY Having decided to focus on mammals, Pocock was eager to move to the mammalian section of the Museum. However no position opened up for him and in March 1904, he resigned from his assistantship at the museum to become the Superintendent of the Zoological Gardens at Regent’s Park, which held a curious connection to his past; the quagga specimen that first drew him to mammals was housed there when it was alive. Although the position mainly involved administrative duties, Pocock spent considerable energy trying to improve living conditions for the captive animals. Here, his experience from childhood days spent at the zoo in Clifton came in handy. He also started collecting skins and skulls of dead animals at the zoo, and realised the importance of external features such as ears and hooves, which most animal collections lacked, for accurate identification of species. He went on to thus pioneer the use of external morphological characters for classifying mammals.
During this period, Pocock also worked on a revision of the genus Cercopithecus, Old World monkeys from Africa and on digestive systems in ruminants. He wrote a series of papers on carnivores, such as ‘The Jackals of SW Asia and SE Europe’, from 1914 till the time of his death. These works earned him a reputation as an authority on mammals. His specialty was considered ungulates, carnivores and primates, with notable writings on the external characters of Artiodactyla or eventoed ungulates such as pigs, deer and antelopes; the classification of felids and mongooses and the external characters of Madagascar-restricted lemurs and South American monkeys.
INDIAN MAMMALOGY In 1923, after nineteen years, Pocock resigned from his post at the Zoological Gardens to dedicate the rest of his life to the study of mammals. He went back to the Natural History Museum as a ‘temporary scientific worker’, a voluntary position. His second stint at the museum marked a period of great advances in Indian natural history. Pocock became a regular contributor to the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, and wrote several important papers describing langurs or leaf monkeys, Asiatic lions, leopards and civets.
His greatest contribution to Indian mammalogy was perhaps the Mammalia volume of the second edition of Fauna of British India series in 1939. In this revised edition, he highlighted a new more systematic approach to mammalogy based on a method devised by American naturalist C Hart Merriam. Pocock pointed out the inadequacies in the first edition of Mammalia produced nearly 50 years prior by W T Blanford, where specimens (mainly skins) were often poorly preserved and rarely accompanied by details of their geographical origin. Using the new approach that involved collection of entire animals and notes on location, altitude and date of collection (all common practices now), mammalogists were able to identify whether an animal was indeed a new species or merely a sub species or race that showed minor variation in morphology due to its local environment. The trinomial system of nomenclature was also introduced in this new edition by Pocock. Using this method he pointed out that Blanford had for instance classified the Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes montana) found in the Himalayas and Desert Fox (V v pusilla) as two distinct species when they were merely sub species of the common fox (V vulpes) that showed morphological variations. Using this new method he examined minor variations in skulls and skins of forty specimens of felids previously classified as five distinct species and concluded that they were subspecies of the wildcat Felis silvestris. The taxonomy of the species however continues to remain in flux. While the International Union for Conservation of Nature only recognises four sub species, Mammals of the World (third edition, 2005) the standard reference guide by Wilson and Reeder recognises twenty two subspecies.
Desert fox
Pocock continued to work till the day before his death on 9th of August 1949, at the age of 86. At the time of his demise, he was involved in the compilation of a systematic monograph of Felidae, the Catalogue of the Felidae in the British Museum, and a description of the external characteristics of rare mammals, such as the endangered one-horned rhino Rhinoceros unicornis, from the Indian sub-continent. He described over 85 species of extant mammals from around the world and inspired several other naturalists to take up the study of mammals.
Suggested reading: Reginald Pocock. The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma – Mammalia Vol. 1 (1939) and Vol. 2 (1941). (London, Taylor and Francis, 1939, 1941).
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a civil servant, known for his years as the British Resident at the court of King Rajendra Shah of Nepal. He was a shrewd diplomat and, like several of his contemporaries, a scholar who contributed greatly to our knowledge of the people, culture, history and fauna of the little known Himalayan regions of British India.
EARLY LIFE Hodgson was born in England on the 1st of February 1800/01. Although born into considerable wealth, he grew up amidst financial difficulties after his father lost huge sums in a bad bank in – vestment. With support from relatives, the young boy and his six siblings managed a decent education. He was, from a young age, a good student and an accomplished athlete and entered Hailey – bury College (in Hertfordshire, 20 miles outside London, the breeding ground for future functionaries of the East India Company) nearly a year before he turned the regulation age of seventeen and graduated at the top of his batch. He was then appointed a civil servant with the East India Company (1817-19) in Calcutta and after a few years an assistant to the commissioner of Kumaon, in Nepal.
LIFE IN NEPAL It was a relief for Hodgson to leave the stifling British social life in Bengal (not least on account of indifferent health) and move to the remote Himalayan forests. Here he encountered dense forests, snow-capped peaks and hill tribes like the Gurkhas from Nepal. What excited him most perhaps was the diversity of wildlife that was a part of everyday life. The Kumaon region had been recently annexed from Nepal (under the terms of the treaty of Sugauli, 1815/1816) because of which the British Empire had to face intense resentment from the Nepalese people. In such a scenario Hodgson proved to be a shrewd diplomat. He was a keen scholar of all cultures and threw himself into the study of Sanskrit, Buddhism, Hinduism and the history of the Gurkha and Lepcha tribes, in the process earning the trust of the local people.
This goodwill proved invaluable during his expeditions in the Himalayas. A keen outdoorsman, Hodgson impressed the Nepalese hunters with his athletic nature and naturalist skills. This provided him the opportunity to learn hunting and trapping techniques of the hill tribes which he employed to collect specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish from several parts of the Himalayas, including, Sikkim, Tibet and Darjeeling. Within Nepal, however, he was not allowed beyond the Kathmandu valley by the Nepalese authorities, leaving him reliant on indigenous collectors to bring materials to him, which he then described.
While the posting to a remote region provided him the opportunity to document little known fauna, it also hindered his endeavour to publish his findings. He had little access to libraries or published literature, often leading to descriptions of several species that had already been furnished earlier such as the golden cat (Pardofelis temminckii). He also routinely clashed with Edward Blyth, the editor of The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, who took notoriously long to review papers, which allowed other workers who sent their collections directly to the Natural History Museum in London to gain priority in publication.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDIAN MAMMOLOGY
Tibetan Antelope
In 1832, Hodgson wrote the first catalogue of mammals based on his encounters during his postings in the Himalayas. Unable to gain access to much scientific literature, he could only record 20 species by name. A revised catalogue published by the British Museum in 1846 showed that he had recorded a total of 115 species (10 belonging to Tibet) from the region. He discovered 39 species of mammals new to science, including the Tibetan sand fox (Vulpes ferrilata), takin (Budorcas taxicolor, today the national animal of Bhutan), and bharal (Pseudois nayaur nayaur) along with a number of rodents and bat species.
However, his greatest contribution perhaps was that he not only described new species but also their behaviour at a time when field studies were ignored in Europe. For instance, he not only collected specimens of the Tibetan antelope or chirù (Pantholops hodgsonii), which fellow naturalist Clark Able named after Hogdson in 1826, but also made notes on their herding behaviour. He recorded several wild groups while he was posted in the remote Tibetan plateau and noted that the chirù lived in large herds of up to 100 animals in which males fought over females and territories and often broke their horns during the mating season. He also made observations of captive mammals and their breeding. For instance, he was the first one to observe and estimate accurately the gestation period of the one horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis). He was also interested in the anatomy of different animals. His study of the chirù showed that the animal’s nostrils were designed to assist in breathing when exerting itself in the low oxygen environment of the high altitudes. He believed that a study of comparative anatomy of antelopes, goats, sheep and cattle, which were physically similar species of ruminants, was important to understand the relatedness of these species.
In 1850, Hodgson wrote an important paper on the physical Geography of the Himalayas. In this paper, he recognised that the Himalayan Mountains had three distinct altitudinal ranges with distinct fauna. His study of species distribution along an altitudinal gradient in the Himalayas preceded other such studies by a 100 years.
OTHER WRITINGS AND PUBLICATIONS Hodgson wrote more than 70 scientific papers on mammals in journals like The Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal and the short-lived Calcutta Journal of Natural History. A skilled sketcher himself, he trained Nepalese artists in the use of water-colours to create an extensive pictorial collection of the fauna of Nepal in the style of British zoological illustrations. In 1830, he tried to collaborate with eminent naturalists such as John Gould to publish these illustrations. Gould, however, wanted the book to focus exclusively on birds and not to include mammals. After corresponding with each other for a long time, Hodgson withdrew the idea of a collaborative book with Gould and approached noted Scottish ornithologist Sir William Jardine in 1835. In 1837 Hodgson sent a box of Nepalese bird skins to Jardine which included around thirty new species. However, in 1840 Jardine too withdrew his prospective collaboration. When Hodgson returned to England in 1843, he engaged Frank Howard an illustrator to reproduce some of his original drawings by lithography. However, this collaboration produced only one hand-coloured lithograph of the chirù. Unfortunately, most of his illustrations, which were an excellent depiction of Hodgson’s field knowledge along with biological data of species, were not published during his lifetime. Dejected by his failure, Hodgson donated most of his papers and lithographs to various institutions like the British Museum (Natural History) and the Zoological Society of London, where they are displayed today.
Hodgson’s work on mammals and other taxa will always be the backbone of Himalayan vertebrate zoology. His descriptions of new species and observations of the behaviour along with internal anatomy were the first of their kind for this part of the world. But his achievements seem even greater when we consider that they were accomplished without access to any of the great museum collections or libraries in the Western world.
Suggested reading: Cocker Mark and Carol Inskipp. A Himalayan ornithologist: The life and work of Brian Houghton Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Sir William Wilson Hunter. Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson (London: J Murray, 1896)
The 17th and 18th century witnessed intense competition among the British, Dutch and French East India companies to monopolise trade, commerce and knowledge in South and Southeast Asia. While key trade routes of the region were usurped as a result of defining battles, scholars from these European nations also raced to study the geology, ethnology, linguistics and most notably the flora and fauna of these exotic lands, often piggybacking on the armies of their countries. During this period of British dominance, one man, Thomas Horsfield, stands out as one of only a few Americans from that newly born nation to study and document the natural history of the South and Southeast Asian region.
BEGINNINGS Born on the 12th of May 1773 in Bethlehem, a small town in eastern Pennsylvania in the then British North America, Thomas Horsfield belonged to the Moravian sect of Christianity. From an early age he showed interest in all branches of biology, especially botany. While working towards a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, he studied the toxic effects of the poison ivy (Rhus toxicodendron) for his thesis. It was this interest in plants, particularly those with medicinal properties that led to his natural history career.
EDEN OF THE EAST In 1799, a year after graduating in medicine, Horsfield took up the Surgeon’s post on the American merchant ship, China, bound for Asia. During its voyage from the United States to Southeast Asia, the merchantman briefly docked in Batavia, better known today as Jakarta, capital of Indonesia. The natural beauty of the island and the rich variety of medicinal plants that the natives used enthralled Horsfield; he returned to the archipelago in 1801 as a Surgeon for the Dutch East India Army, a position that gave him great freedom to explore the island. For the next 18 years, Horsfield studied the flora, fauna and geology of Java, working initially with limited funds from the Batavian Society of Arts and Science, a group of educated Dutch settlers on the island. Much of his specimens, during these early years in Java, were lost because of poor equipment and collection practices.
Fortunately, in 1811, when the British East India Company took over the island Horsfield met Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the new Lieutenant Governor of the island, better remembered today as the founder of Singapore. It was an odd friendship between a man from a deeply religious sect formed on the tenets of love and non-violence, and Raffles a man believed to be both visionary and ruthless in the expansion of the British East India Company. What the two had in common though was their interest in natural history; the founder of the Zoological Society of London and the London Zoo, Raffles was an enthusiastic naturalist himself, and encouraged Horsfield’s work on the natural history of the East Indies. Under his patronage, Horsfield officially joined the British Company as a surgeon. For the next eight years, he travelled extensively on the island of Java and later Sumatra observing various taxa and making detailed notes on their behaviour and natural history. He also collected valuable specimens of flora that he donated to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew and fauna that he sent to the India Museum (founded 1801) of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street, London.
Nilgiri marten
However, he was forced to move to a temperate surrounding after his health deteriorated. He continued to be under Raffles’ patronage and in 1819, was appointed the curator of the India Museum, a position he kept until his death in 1859. During his time in London, Horsfield synthesised his work in Southeast Asia, into his best known book, Zoological Researches in Java and the neighbouring islands.
Published in eight parts from 1821-1824, the book was a synthesis of knowledge of fauna of Java, and provided notes on the taxonomy, morphological characteristics and some behavioural observations on primates, bats and birds by various naturalists including Raffles. While several of the species mentioned in the book have since undergone substantial taxonomic revision, the book remains relevant for its physical and behavioural descriptions of species that are restricted to few unexplored islands in Southeast Asia.
INDIAN MAMMOLOGY Although he never visited India, Horsfield was responsible for describing several mammals and plants found in the region. A huge number of floral and faunal specimens from India started to flood the India Museum collection. Horsfield painstakingly examined, identified and catalogued these specimens. This resulted in the description of six new mammalian species from India and neighboring regions—the Intermediate horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus affinis) and the Intermediate round-leaf bat (Hipposideros larvatus) in 1823, Hardwicke’s forest bat (Kerivoula hardwickii) in 1824, the golden cat (Pardofelis temminckii) in 1827, the Common yellowbellied bat (Scotophilus heathii) in 1831 and the Himalayan striped squirrel (Tamiops mcclellandii) in 1840. In 1851, he published what could be his most extensive work on the Indian subcontinent—The Catalogue of the Mammalia in the Museum of the East India Company. In this book he described all the mammals from this region in great detail, including their taxonomy, and added five mammal species new to science including the Indian endemic bare-bellied hedgehog (Paraechinus nudiventris) and the elusive Nilgiri marten (Martes gwatkinsii).
LATE RECOGNITION Despite his many accomplishments recognition was hard to come by in English society, where one’s lineage mattered. It was finally perhaps his friendship with Raffles that led to his being elected the First Assistant Secretary of the Zoological Society of London at its formation in 1826 and subsequently a fellow of the Royal Society in 1828. However, several naturalists from the Indian subcontinent such as George Gray and John Gould paid tribute to Horsfield by naming new species of animals they discovered, such as the Javanese flying squirrel (Iomys horsfieldii) and the Horsfield’s fruit bat (Cynopterus horsfieldi) after him. On the 24th of July 1859, Horsfield passed away in his English home in Camden Town, London, at the age of 86. After his death, all his personal papers were destroyed according to his prior instructions.
Owing to this we have little information about his personal life. Why he undertook such a course of action is now a matter of speculation—perhaps he wished to conceal something or as some historians speculate, in keeping with the Moravian traditions of modesty and privacy, he believed his personal life would be of little interest to others. What we do know however is that he left behind a great legacy in terms of the natural history of India and Southeast Asia.
Suggested reading: John Bastin. 1978. ‘A Pioneer American Naturalist of Indonesia: Dr Thomas Horsfield’, Indonesia and Malay world newsletter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. G K Harrington. 1997. ‘Thomas Horsfield: An American Enigma’, the International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter.
I still recall the frisson of excitement that attended the rediscovery of Jerdon’s Courser (Rhinoptilus bitorquatus). One of three avian species that marked a Holy Grail of sorts to naturalists, young and old, it would trip off the tongue in connection with the fact that it had last been sighted in the wild in 1900, close to half-way between the other two, the Himalayan Quail (Ophrysia superciliosa) recorded in 1874 and never afterwards (an abortive attempt in the late 1980’s by India’s bird-man, Salim Ali notwithstanding) and the Pink-headed Duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllacea) in 1935/36. Then came 1986 and Bharat Bhushan of the Bombay Natural History Society, who, with local help in Andhra Pradesh, effected the find. There have since been sightings of other South Asian species long believed extinct, such as the Forest Spotted Owlet (Athene blewetti) with 1884 as a standing record until found again by Pamela Rasmussen in 1997. Yet the point being made is not about rediscoveries, salutary as they are. It is about names. So it was that even with the hoopla over the Jerdon’s Courser, there was very little comment about just who the Jerdon might have been in the equation.
Edward Blyth
In hindsight, this may not be very surprising. Former colonial cities in India are (or least were) chock-a-block with names redounding to the particular cultural potentate in question, be it Montieth Road in Madras (British) or Rue Vicomte de Souillac in Pondicherry (French). The imprint of the European would, it seem, naturally extend to other areas where nomenclature was tried, such as a mountain (Godwin-Austen (1) for K-2, the second highest in the Himalayas), a tree (Beddome’s Cycad, Cycas beddomei) or a bird, such as Jerdon’s Courser, especially when the person doing the naming was another European. Unlike roads, however, there was often an umbilical connection between the trivial name of a species and a naturalist for whom it was named. So it was that budding birders would internalise such names as Jerdon’s Chloropsis or Leafbird (Chloropsis jerdoni), Hodgson’s Pipit (Anthus hodgsoni), Tickell’s Flowerpecker (Dicaeum erythrorhynchos, among the strongest candidates for India’s smallest bird) and the alliterative Blyth’s Baza (Baza jerdoni).
The issue remained, just who were Jerdon, Tickell, Hodgson and Blyth?
Thomas Jerdon
In the accounts that follow, we are afforded an opportunity to find out (with the exception of Tickell). The brief biographies we encounter are those of natural historians who were substantially given to the study of South Asian mammals in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some were just as passionate about birds (as suggested above); others sought out arachnids; still others, reptiles and molluscs. In a world of so many possibilities for the pursuit of natural history, to confine oneself to any one group was often remarkably difficult. So it was that Thomas Caverhill Jerdon (1811-1872), Surgeon-Major in the employ of the East India Company in Madras wrote both The Birds of India and The Mammals of India and had he had the opportunity, would have embarked substantially on The Reptiles of India as well. So it was that Edward Blyth (1810-1873), the first salaried curator of the Museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, paid considerable attention to higher vertebrates. So it was that Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800 or 1801–1894), long time British Resident in Kathmandu, named several new species of birds and mammals, including the takin (Budorcas taxicolor), now the national animal of Bhutan. So it was that William Thomas Blanford (1832-1905),stalwart in the Geological Survey of India would be named the first editor of The Fauna of British India series and would write both the early mammalian accounts for it as well as some of the books on the birds.
Brian Hodgson
Yet not every person who contributed was an old India hand. If on one side, there is mention of Thomas Hardwicke (1755- 1835), who spent so much of his life in India amassing one of the largest collections of natural history specimens that returned with him to Great Britain, on the other, we have a Reginald Innes Pocock (1863-1947), who updated the section on mammals for The Fauna of British India sedulously studying series of specimens at the British Museum (Natural History) in London in the 1930s and 1940s while never laying eyes on the country of their origin. Of course even the figures discussed here are but a scantling of the whole. Others were given in the main to the descriptions of other elements of the Indian fauna. Still others belonged to different empires, returning their specimens to Paris or Leiden or Lisbon. Many of them helped to define European natural history abroad at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They too deserve mention.
Thomas Hardwicke
Let me elaborate. Joan Gideon Loten (1710-1789), after whom the Loten’s sunbird Cinnyris (formerly Nectarina) lotenius is named, was for five years Governor of Ceylon (1752-1757) in the employ of the Veerenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) or the United East India Company accruing to the Dutch. From the Netherlands himself and a long-time VOC employee, Loten was afforded the opportunity to live for significant periods in South and South East Asia, making significant collections of specimens of natural history in the process. Later in life, he would spend about 22 years in total in Great Britain where his neighbour and friend Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), a key player in the development of the gardens at Kew and President of the Royal Society, would introduce him to many like-minds and where his collection would be employed by such influential purveyors of natural history as Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), the author of Indian Zoology (in 1769 as a booklet and 1790 in a second volume as an expanded book), who, ironically, never laid eyes on South Asia. Loten’s contribution, however, was as limited as that of the Dutch generally in the region. If anything, the major power rivalling the British in the subcontinent was the French and while the political back of the latter as the Compagnie des Indes or French East India Company was largely broken in the wake of significant reverses in the last of three Carnatic Wars (subsumed essentially under the better known Seven Years War of 1756-1763) and pushed to tiny redoubts in the main on the East Coast of India, the fact of major maritime voyages at the instance of the Jardin du Roi or King’s Garden (and after the French Revolution of 1789-1793, the Jardin des Plantes or Botanical Garden with its associated Muséum National d’histoire Naturelle or National Museum of Natural History) in concert with the Ministère de la Marine (the Ministry of the Navy) ensured that France remained at the vanguard of exploration abroad.
William Thomas Blanford
If for the British in the South Seas there was Captain James Cook (1728-1779), for the French there were such notables as Louis-Antoine, le Comte de Bougainville (1729-1811), after whom the plant genus Bougainvillea is named and Jean Francois de Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse (1741-1788). There were other great voyages as well, some of which included stops at French outposts in India, including Chandernagore in Bengal and Pondicherry in the Tamil country. Several of the individuals associated with these voyages made considerable inroads into parts of India such as Jean Baptiste Leschenault de La Tour (1773-1826) who helped to establish a botanical garden in Pondicherry while also collecting specimens more generally of natural history interest including memorably in 1820 an Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus), a black buck (Antilope cervicapra), an Indian Giant Squirrel (Ratufa indica) and an Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), the last of which he transliterated through his training to be a coconut marten (marte des cocotiers), surmising that the viverrid (i.e. the civet) was a mustelid (i.e. the marten). Between the 1760s and the 1830s, legions of French naturalists descended on India, including Alfred Duvaucel (1792-1824), the stepson of the famed comparative anatomist at the Jardin des Plantes, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the mastermind behind sending out so many collectors (he called them voyageurs-naturalistes) and Pierre-Médard Diard (1794-1863), one of Cuvier’s students, both of whom were originally charged with establishing a botanical garden in Chandernagore before being contracted by Sir Stamford Raffles (1781- 1826 and founder of colonial Singapore and the Zoological Society in London) after discussions in Calcutta to serve as collectors of specimens of natural history in South East Asia.
Reginald Innes Pocock
Duvaucel would eventually return to India where he, after making one of the largest known collections of bird specimens among other faunal groups in the region, would die in Madras at only 31, a fate he would share with another renowned French naturalist, Victor Jacquemont (1801-1832), although the latter would succumb in Bombay. These are but a few of the many names associated with French-driven natural history in the subcontinent during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first three of the nineteenth, leading to a mournful miscellaneous note in the 1829 edition of the journal Gleanings in Science associated informally with the Asiatic Society of Bengal that said, ‘…our neighbours, the French, have we suspect been far from idle. With scarcely any establishments in the country…we suspect that they know more of Indian ornithology than we who have been masters of the country for 70 years’. If my own research into Eurocolonial faunal natural history is any indication, the same case can be made for mammalogy and elements of botany as well. Keeping this element of history in mind, the presentation of contributors to early mammalogy in the pages ahead are, by virtue of restriction to one European domain, Great Britain, necessarily selective.
Yet this set of accounts is a welcome beginning. It enables some of those workers who gave so much of their energies to the making of Indian natural history in a more contemporary sense, to receive some measure of their due. This is not a moment too soon! Even as revisionists in India are making merry renaming cities and streets, so too the colloquial names of many birds are being stripped of the names of associated naturalists they once bore with some tepid descriptor (Tickell has apparently been forced to cede to Pale-billed before the word flowerpecker). Perhaps the trend is inexorable. For those given to a historical bent, it is tinged with the melancholic. This collection of informative articles therefore is a nudge to remind us to take just a little longer before we forget.
Endnote (1) Technically, Mount Godwin-Austen was never the formal name for K2, but it does honour the intrepid eponymous climber, who was also a major contributor to Indian zoology, if in the field of malacology.
Sea turtle conservation in India started with turtle walks in Madras (now Chennai) on the east coast in the early 1970s and coincidentally at about the same time in Gahirmatha, Orissa, at one of the largest rookeries for olive ridley turtles in the world. Started by a group of enthusiasts, the turtle walks and conservation activities on the Chennai coast continued through state agencies (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute and Forest Department) for about a decade.
In 1988, the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN) was formed and has, for the last 25 years, run a conservation programme centred around its sea turtle hatchery. Kartik Shanker talks to Romulus Whitaker, the founder of the Madras Snake Park and the Madras Crocodile Bank Trusts (MCBT), not to mention the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station (ARRS) and the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team (ANET). Best known for his work on snakes and crocodiles, Rom played a crucial role in starting the turtle walks and talks about the early days.
KS: I’ve probably asked you about this many times since we first met when I was working with the SSTCN in Madras in the late 1980s… What was the scene like in the 1970s? Why did you guys decide to do turtle walks and where did the idea come from?
RW: I’ve probably told you this already that by 1973 or so, the Snake Park was already well-established; almost a million people a year were already coming there. After we moved to Guindy Deer Park in the city, someone brought in a female ridley that they’d found on the beach. I think he was a fisherman. He said, “This is the kind of thing that you guys do, right? I mean, turtles and crocodiles?” So he had it right. We realised of course that we couldn’t keep the turtle. But it was kind of a fun thing for all of us to do—to go to Elliot’s beach, which was the closest to the Snake Park and release the turtle.
KS: And you didn’t know at that point that ridleys nested on this coast? RW: No idea, no idea at all.
KS: And you guys didn’t know about the rookery in Orissa either? RW: No. Wasn’t that later?
KS: Robert Bustard visited Orissa in 1974 and discovered the rookery at Gahirmatha. But, J C Daniels and Hussain of BNHS apparently had heard of a turtle rookery in Orissa and that’s 1973. RW: Yeah, I do know that they—Daniels and Hussain—were the first to mention Gahirmatha.
KS: So when you guys saw that first ridley, you had no idea that ridleys were nesting in Madras or anywhere else? RW: No.
KS: That’s quite a coincidence, that you were independently discovering ridleys in Orissa and Madras. RW: If we had known, we would have looked into it and realised that ridleys were one of the main turtles nesting on this coast, but we didn’t have any information.
KS: Then you guys started the turtle walks and the hatchery, right? RW: Yeah, I think it must have coincided with other reports of people from Cholamandalam . We knew some artists there like S.G. Vasudev, Thambi (S. Nandagopal) who would say “Hey man, we saw a turtle!” And then, it sort of started clicking, that from December or January onwards, that’s the time the turtles nest. And that’s when the turtle walks started. Initially, it was informants— people who were just interested in coming around who went on walks. But then we really did it in a somewhat systematic way… I mean, all the way to Kalpakkam, 50 kilometres away.
KS: So, who were the people who would have been part of the first season? RW: A bunch of us including my sister, Nina and her (now) husband, Ram Menon, Zai Whitaker, Jean and Janine Delouche, Anne Joseph, Wendy Bland. And Valliappan, who worked in Central Leather Research Institute across the road from the Snake Park. Not only was he on those first turtle walks collecting eggs and dissuading poachers, but he took the first pictures of the sea turtle slaughter at the Tuticorin Market which mobilised the Forest Department to clamp down. The turtle killers then started the “Turtle Blood Drinkers Association” to try to fight the ban—but they failed.
Turtle slaughter at Tuticorin market
KS: So, what was his connection with you? RW: He was bored with what he was doing— almost all these guys were. They were just bored with their IIT and CLRI and ABC College and God knows what else, and they just didn’t want to do their thing. It was much more fun hanging out with us. They didn’t know anything about reptiles.
KS: Really? RW: And sea turtle walking, it was more fun than college. I mean, there were few other things you could do. Yeah, we could go snake hunting with Irulas, but this was something that was very cool, you know? There weren’t many party scenes happening probably at the time either, so it was a good thing to do in the evening. But, we took it very seriously. And we did sections, you know, from Thiruvanmiyur south, and up to Neelankarai and further. We were doing 10-15 kilometres in one day, then often we’d just get wiped and go to the main road and take a bus back. But sometimes we’d walk all the way back—like 30 kilometers —fairly serious walking. And we dreamed about camels and dune buggies and any number of things, when we were plodding along, stepping on human shit and stuff like that.
KS: Yeah, so there’s a paper written in 1973 by Valliappan and Pushparaj. I’ve never encountered Pushparaj either. RW: He was one of the kids I hired when he was probably about 15 or 16, out there in Rajakilpakkam, along with Motorcycle Mani who’s probably still at the Snake Park or was until recently. Two or three teenage kids started working for me. Pushparaj hung around the Snake Park when it was based in Selaiyur, that’s where he lived too. He was hard working, and accompanied me and others on field work. Later, he joined the Tamil Nadu Forest Department as a guard.
In the early 1970s, when the Madras Snake Park moved to Guindy, it became a local hangout for young folks from nearby campuses like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, the AC College of Architecture and the Madras Christian College (MCC). Even up to 30 years later, I would run into some of these guys in strange places. They’re now mostly as paunchy and balding as I am and we trade a few stories and get into a laughing fit over “the good old days”.
KS: Did you have a hatchery the first year you started the walks? RW: It must have happened right on, because otherwise, why would we be walking? We’d be going to collect eggs before the poachers got them, basically.
KS: And you said that the first hatchery you had was at Jean– RW: and Janine Deloche’s …in their yard. We built a fence with Casuarina poles and stretched bits of chainlink fencing and chicken mesh we had scrounged from here and there, mainly to keep the dogs out. We found that many nests on the beach were being dug up by dogs and jackals. We were careful to measure the original nest holes, and when we reburied the eggs, we tried to make a nest hole as similar as possible to the original.
KS: How many nests did you collect? RW: We collected all of 11 nests in the first year. Over the next few years, we rescued about 20,000 ridley eggs from poachers and dogs. We released more than 10,000 hatchings and it made us all feel real good. “This is conservation action”, we thought, as we patted ourselves on the back. In later years, when we learned about temperature sex determination, we realised our approach should have been a bit more scientific.
KS: Of course, you couldn’t have known then that sex was determined by temperature in sea turtles. RW: Bloody things, like any snake eggs, they’d incubate under the ground, and they’d hatch and you let them go, you know? And then suddenly, these buggers come up with this finding that incubation temperatures determine hatchling sex. That wasn’t till what…mid-80s or late 80s, I think.
KS: Late 1970s, mid-80s RW: It was so cool to give a talk at that time about it, because anybody who knew anything about genetics or anything else would say “No, no! It’s not linked to the temperature, you idiot! It’s chromosomally linked, it’s got nothing to do with temperature!”
KS: Yes, I’ve experienced that when giving talks in schools in the late 1980s. Biology teachers were the most suspicious. Anyway, the other seminal event for me and probably for many people, is the fact that Satish Bhaskar got involved. Do you remember your first encounter with Satish? RW: Actually I don’t. I’d like to make up something like “Sunday! It was a glorious day…it had just rained”, but no.
KS: Well, it’s amazing how people remember him. I’ve had many conversations with fellow students of his from IIT from that time and they say something like “Oh, you work on turtles! You know, back in the 70s when I was in IIT, there was this guy from IIT, who used to go on the beach and look at turtles and I’ve gone out on a turtle walk with him”. I mean, it was Satish, of course—and I keep running into these people from all over. RW: Satish was already a legendary ‘aquaman.’ He was a soft-spoken engineering student, a nondrinker and non-smoker, a real ascetic compared to the rest of us. His passion was the sea and he spent more time swimming than in the IIT classroom. He’d run from IIT to Elliot’s Beach (a distance of 7 kilometres) every morning, swim for a couple of hours and run back to the campus, ostensibly to attend class. Opportunely (for the turtles), Satish was getting disenchanted with his IIT course and yearned to be a field man with a mission.
The thing I do remember is that when we were talking about what he could do, he said, “I’m really interested in the coast, I’m really interested in marine biology, I’d probably end up doing that.” At that time, I was being quite selfish or autocratic or whatever, and thought that there should be one person for each taxa—and that person should just do everything they can to make that taxa happen, and you know… the conservation of it, or whatever. And I said to him, “If you just concentrate on sea turtles, you’ll become “Mr. Sea Turtle”. Because there’s nobody else doing it. You know, elsewhere there’s Archie Carr and there’s George Hughes and all these great turtle people.” And Satish probably wondered, “What the hell’s this guy ranting about?” But he eventually read all these reprints that we’d started collecting. And I didn’t know it then, but Satish ended up walking almost the entire coastline of India, thousands of kilometers, giving us the very first handle on what turtles were nesting, where and what kind of numbers.
KS: Did you know what others were doing elsewhere? RW: I have to say we were writing a lot of snail mail in those days to quite a few people around the world who were into sea turtles. As soon as we’d found out a bit about the ridleys and we realised “Shit, man… we don’t know anything, we better find out what other people are doing”. So I guess it had a lot to do with my sister Nina and Brenda, my secretary who eventually married Satish, and all these girls. They were typing all the letters and the posting that you don’t even do nowadays—and getting feedback from all these fantastic, wonderful people from all over the world… who sent their reprints, folded carefully, and their notes—coming all the way to India and stuff… and that was the thing that got us excited about continuing, because there were other people doing things much more seriously than we were.
KS: So how did Satish get started? RW: When he started hanging out at the Snake Park, we talked seriously about doing turtle surveys along other beaches around the country. The Snake Park had a tiny research budget but it was enough to hire Satish as Field Officer and get him out on his first few survey trips. When the fledgling World Wildlife Fund (WWF) saw the good work he was doing for endangered sea turtles, Satish landed his first grant which really set him in motion. After our first visits to the Andamans in the mid-1970s, I encouraged Satish to go there (we raised the funds for his travels) and start what became almost a decade of survey work for him. In 1978, Satish visited the Andaman & Nicobar Islands for the first time and like so many of us, got hooked. Over the next few years, again thanks to WWF and other funds, he visited many of the islands and most of the major sea turtle nesting beaches in the islands.
KS: And the rest of the Indian coast, and the Lakshadweep, and West Papua…. RW: I can’t imagine another human being on the planet who could have achieved what Satish did in those years.
KS: Tell us about the Lakshadweep adventure. RW: In 1977, Satish first went to Lakshadweep and felt that the uninhabited island of Suhelipara was the place for a green sea turtle study. The only problem was that the main nesting period is during the monsoon and no one goes there when the sea is so rough. In 1982, Satish came up with a scheme to maroon himself (with WWF funding) on Suhelipara for the whole monsoon, from May to September. That way he could collect data on green sea turtle nesting for the entire period. It also meant making elaborate preparations, like calculating the amount of food he would need. We sat with Satish and talked about things that could go wrong during this isolation—chronic toothache, appendicitis, malaria were just a few sobering thoughts. The Navy did provide some signal flares and there was talk of a radio, but eventually Satish just set sail and that’s the last we heard of him till September. Actually that’s not true. A few months after he was dropped on Suhelipara, his wife Brenda back in Madras, received a letter from a Sri Lankan fisherman enclosing a loving note from Satish that the fisherman had found floating in a bottle. We had always speculated whether that would really work! He had launched his message in a bottle on July 3rd. 24 days and 750 kilometres later, the bottle was picked up.
The emergency situation that arose on the deserted isle is something none of us could have predicted: a huge dead whale shark washed up on Satish’s little island and started rotting. The nauseous stench became so overpowering that our intrepid sea turtle man had to move to the extreme other end of the tiny island to a somewhat precarious wave-lashed spit of sand.
KS: Remarkable. The only survey of Suheli that has been done since then is a brief survey in the early 2000s by the Wildlife Institute of India. And plenty of adventures in the Andamans too, right? RW: Yes, another mythological Satish exploit was his many months sojourn, over several years, on tiny South Reef Island on the West coast of North Andaman. He was studying the hawksbill and green turtle population there, but it was tough with no freshwater and of course, no food. He would swim the half kilometre of vicious currents to Interview Island to collect freshwater and swim back with his load. Once though, he ran into one of the notorious feral elephants of Interview which promptly charged. As he ran down the forest path, he threw his shirt down which fortunately distracted the angry pachyderm. Next day, he swam back to Interview to retrieve his jerry can and found his shirt, in three pieces. He posted the pieces back to Brenda with a reassuring note. Bonny, a heavyset Karen who worked for the Andaman Forest Department, was based in Mayabunder. He was so devoted, he delivered rations to Satish braving very choppy monsoon seas. Once he crashed his dhongi and had to repair it to go back to Mayabunder. All these people were so heroic and yet so self-effacing.
KS: Amazing. So, moving on to a slightly later phase in the Madras turtle walks, how did Anne Ahimaz get involved in the turtle walks? RW: She was Anne Joseph then, my secretary at the Snake Park. Annie was one of those rare girls who could work with a gang of boys with complete confidence, and she had the energy to keep up on those long grueling beach walks. Plus she had a daytime job at the Snake Park, so it was a tough, but exciting life
KS: Yes, I’ve heard Shekar Dattatri talk highly of her enthusiasm in organising the turtle walks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think he and Vijaya were really active along with her during that period. RW: Shekar was deeply involved with Snake Park work from the late 1970s onward and was at the forefront of the sea turtle work, along with Vijaya (Viji). Viji was another star researcher. We were then in touch with freshwater turtle man Ed Moll of Eastern Illinois University in the States. In the mid-80s, Viji assisted Ed in doing freshwater turtle surveys. She went up to Orissa and West Bengal and she got some pretty amazing but terrifying pictures of the ridley harvest with the little Minolta film camera we had given her. The turtle slaughter was an annual event up there: they were harvested by the hundreds and even thousands, and being trucked up to the Calcutta market from Digha. Published in India Today, these pictures shook the government out of its lethargy and made them protect the turtle populations. Ed later encouraged Viji to go to the States to do her Master’s degree. Vijaya died tragically when she was still in her twenties.
KS: Quite an amazing cast of characters. Any words of advice for the young enthusiasts going on turtle walks? RW: Well, times have changed and perhaps the first inkling was when a small group of turtlers was stopped by a group of ‘rowdies’ who were pretty drunk and abusive in the early 1980s. Only one of our guys had a watch, which was quickly taken, and they also lost the few rupees they had. But it was a scary event and we were just happy that none of the girls were along that night. It’s good to have a savvy local person or two with you on turtle walks. Involving interested local village youth is not only the safest way to do field work, it spreads the word!
Also, while it’s very satisfying to have a protected hatchery and to be able to watch all the baby turtles hatch out and take them to the sea, it can be argued that it’s better to simply transplant the nest to a place a few metres from where it is found. Chances are animal and human predators won’t find the new site and the problem of temperature related sex determination in a hatchery need not be worried about.
I think the work we started back in the early 1970s has had a positive effect on sea turtle conservation in India, mostly by waking us all up to the plight of these wonderful but beleagured creatures. By protecting the breeding base of India’s sea turtle population, by waking up people all along India’s coast to the problems facing turtles we’ve seen a lot of dedicated young biologists and naturalists getting seriously involved. I do believe all these efforts have helped save our sea turtles and it’s very encouraging to see that the interest persists and that the turtle walks and outreach to coastal villages are still going strong!
Photograph: Valliappan, Franz Ranache, Samir Whitaker, Janaki Lenin
Conservation biology is routinely built on fears and portents, proclamations of one disaster after another. This species is on the brink of extinction; that habitat has been destroyed; such-and-such environment is in crisis… Prospects like these, routinely derived from biological and ecological studies, are indeed frightening; such forewarnings warrant careful attention and diligent action.
Yet conservationists are accused of promulgating a gross overabundance of bad news, often resorting to scare tactics and doomsday predictions to garner attention and raise support for their activities. There is nothing new about this strategy: environmental disasters have been predicted from the time of Genghis Khan and the Ancient Greeks.
But the trend of procuring attention and financial support by proclaiming disaster has often resulted in a jaundiced public; as we know from the children’s story, crying “wolf” can have dire consequences—not on the wolf but on the person who cries its name in vain. Besides, who wants to support a gloomy enterprise that careens from one catastrophe to another? Not surprisingly, conservationists have identified the pressing need to show success and move away from the constant environmental obituaries.
A more balanced approach is long overdue, and in recent years it has become ever more common to recount success stories. Surely we need more manifestations of success, for after all success in solving complex environmental problems is presumably the object of engaging in the great conservation enterprise in the first place. Clearly, there are some excellent success stories from many projects and diverse lands. Yet as this alternate strategy becomes more fashionable the conservation industry is in danger of drifting back into the same swamp as before, only from a different path. Many conservationists now swing to the other extreme—playing up any little improvement as virtually world-saving. Just as there have been countless hoary predictions of environmental calamities, we are now facing a blitz of success stories and with each one the respective bard expects to be rewarded.
But what constitutes an authentic success story? Who defines “success”? The dictionary tells us that “success” is primarily about fame and fortune: is that what conservation success stories are about?
Take marine turtles: there are few turtle conservationists who would question that more turtles signify more success. But if conservation really is based on robust biological and ecological information, then one needs to look more closely at what exactly “more turtles” means. If these are critically endangered hawksbill turtles, then population recovery and more of them is certainly the desired condition. On the other hand, if the more numerous turtles are, say, olive ridley turtles, then their increased numbers may not necessarily be universally appreciated. If you happen to be struggling to rehabilitate badly decimated populations of critically endangered leatherback turtles and the olive ridleys are competing with them for food, nesting areas or other limited resources, the success of the olive ridleys would be a threat to the leatherbacks.
The point is, not all marine turtles are created equal and measures of success need to be gauged by bearing in mind characteristics and situations of different species—information that is often out of reach.
Alternately, consider that a dolphin is severely threatened by incidental capture in certain fishing operations, and there are, unfortunately, many species of dolphins that are in this situation. At the same time, incidental capture and mortality is also a major threat to most marine turtle species. Consequently, there have been diverse attempts to reduce or mitigate incidental capture of marine wildlife. Some of these methods work better for turtles than for dolphins. So more turtles would indicate success in dealing with incidental capture of the reptiles—but if this came at the cost of more dolphin captures, then many people would question if it really is “success” when one endangered species bears the brunt of another species’ triumph. In fact, this dilemma has occurred repeatedly, often with specialists of one group of animals focused on protecting “their critters”, but oblivious of the consequences of their conservation actions on other endangered species.
So, not all endangered species are created equal.
Another critical consideration is what happens to the environments where the species of conservation concern live. For example, when a depleted population of green turtles increases, consequently there will be more turtles grazing more often, looking for more food; the marine pastures on which they depend will be under increased grazing pressure. This will have important consequences on the plants and animals that live in the marine pastures: some of them will be under increased pressure because the green turtle population is recovering. Indeed, an entire marine pasture ecosystem could be negatively impacted if grazing pressure by threatened green turtles increases too much. While it may be a blasphemous question to some turtle conservationists, could it be that too many threatened green turtles in an ecosystem would actually be endangering to the ecosystem?
But these deliberations are simple when compared to others that consider the impact of one other species: Homo sapiens. Even if it there were consensuses that a conservation action was valuable for an endangered turtle species and it did not cause any problems for other turtles or any other endangered species or ecosystems where the turtles live, we have not necessarily reached a universally acceptable state of “success”. More turtles might be celebrated by all conservationists (turtlely ones and dolphiny ones), but the situation could still cause distress or annoyance to other people. For example, fishermen are often bothered by turtles getting into their nets, reducing their catch and destroying their gear. In the case of trawlers, the turtles can crush valuable catch and increase drag, lowering efficiency and profitability of the operation. For longlines, with thousands of baited hooks, a few turtles can cause havoc, not only eating the bait and leaving the hooks bare and useless but tangling up and knotting the lines to create terrible messes that take tremendous time and effort to put right: all this denies the fishermen of the ability to fish. Nesting turtles that wander around on beaches at night, knocking over and destroying beach furniture are not welcome for some hoteliers. More turtles grazing on a marine pasture could mean less fish available to the fishermen. And so on…
The point is: not everyone is madly in love with turtles, no matter how endangered they may be or how politically correct it is to show concern for them. For some people the chelonians present clear problems and threats to their livelihood. From their point of view, more turtles mean more problems, less ability to meet their own needs. Although conservationists are adept at arguing their case, providing alluring pictures and marketing cuddly plush animals, in fact, there are far, far more fishermen than conservationists in the world. So, what may be “success” for a few could actually be failure for many.
And we have only considered well-known and innocuous turtles. These reptiles have numerous attractive features, they are central to many cultures the world over and there is no great challenge to get people to identify with these curious animals that live inside a box. In the conservationists’ lexicon, these are “flagship” species, relatively easy to attract attention and interest.
What if instead the conservationists’ attention were focused on some other endangered species, say some critter that is barely known to biologists, much less to the lay public, something that has no clear redeeming qualities and is not attractive but rather is generally disgusting to people. Would most members of society really agree that more of the “what-do-you-call-them” is success?
Or take some very well-known endangered animals. Does everyone whole heartedly agree that more wolves, more bears, more panthers, more tigers, more elephants is unequivocally a success? If your crops were destroyed, your livestock carried away, your child mauled or your own life threatened by one of these endangered animals, would you want more of them?
Without a doubt, we need more success stories. But just like the fashion of effortlessly stamping some living thing with “brink of extinction” or some landscape with “environmental disaster”, conservationists need to be very careful about painting a situation a glowing colour of success. Employing either of these strategies to draw attention and raise support could be counter-productive, not to mention dangerous, if conducted without consideration of the complex ecological, sociological, and political context in which the protected species exists.
It is said that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”: the vision of success is no less subjective. Truly successful success stories must have many and diverse eyes beholding them.
For species of conservation concern, rehabilitation of sick or injured animals is often done with little reflection of where it fits into the larger plan of conservation actions.
The cold wind whipped across the sound, creating little white-capped waves in an area that normally is so calm that the locals often call the waters “slick”. I was waiting for a park ranger to arrive with some hypothermic (or coldstunned) sea turtles that had been found alive but beach-stranded and lethargic. In warmer months, these sheltered waters are often thick with juvenile sea turtles that come to forage on abundant prey. However, when colder winter weather arrives, the turtles sometimes cannot leave quickly enough through the limited number of inlets, and being reptiles, they may easily succumb to hypothermia when the sound’s waters drop in temperatures. The boat arrived with 35 turtles and I stacked them in their various containers in the back of my work truck, before driving them to a wildlife veterinarian for assessment and initial treatment with fluids, antibiotics and anything else they may need. Over the course of a few weeks, we will receive over 150 live hypothermic turtles from a small part of the coast.
Not all hypothermic turtles survive, but most do if they receive appropriate care soon after being found. Many turtles will return to full health in 2 weeks or less, while others may need longer, particularly if they had any complications related to the hypothermia, such as pneumonia or eye damage from cold air or wind-blown sand. Often, the most difficult thing in managing hypothermic sea turtles is finding sufficient space for them during their rehabilitation. When several hundred live hypothermic turtles appear in a small area within a few weeks of each other, it can be difficult to find adequate space for them to recover. Often, sea turtle rehabilitation facilities, many of them volunteer-based, will go above and beyond what seems feasible to make room for as many turtles as possible. Following this, another major problem is what to do with the turtles that have recovered. Often, coastal water temperatures remain cold for several months, so the turtles cannot be released from the beach without running the risk of more hypothermia. Thus, apart from waiting for late spring or summer to release the animals, the only option is to transport the turtles to warmer waters for release, either by boat to warmer waters far offshore, or by truck or airplane to coastlines closer to the equator. In recent years, some hypothermic turtles from the UK and other European countries have been flown to the Canary Islands or the US for release following rehabilitation.
Hypothermic juvenile sea turtles recovered from Core Sound, North Carolina, USA
During the releases of turtles rehabilitated from hypothermia, there is often media attention and the resulting coverage often implicitly or explicitly states that these actions are helping save sea turtles. Strictly speaking, I agree that the individual turtles with hypothermia have been helped, but I wonder about the impacts of these actions on the larger populations of sea turtles. When hypothermic turtles appear on the coast, especially in large numbers, most people involved view it as a crisis that needs immediate response, and there is little time for reflection about what the end goals are (apart from ensuring the animals receive appropriate care). However, given the vast amount of resources expended in responding to and treating cold-stunned sea turtles, it is worth considering whether these are important conservation actions. I do not have the answer, but would encourage the discussion begin with these considerations.
Hypothermia in sea turtles is natural. Although many often consider sea turtles to be tropical or subtropical species, they can and do migrate to more temperate zones, presumably to take advantage of better foraging habitat. Hypothermic turtles regularly appear each year at higher latitudes, and regularly occur every few years even at middle latitudes. There also are historical reports of cold-stunned turtles appearing in various places in the US over the past century (e.g. Witherington & Ehrhart 1989), confirming that it is natural. Should there be an effort to try to reduce a natural source of mortality, such as hypothermia? Or should more effort and energy be focused on anthropogenic sources of mortality or other threats? This type of cost-benefit analysis question could (and should) be applied to any conservation action, although there are few examples where responding to hypothermia is considered. Two notable exceptions are the recent US Recovery Plans for loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley turtles, although no specific recommendations are made for whether or how much action is needed in response. Of course, some may argue that treating hypothermic turtles is good because it is a threat that can be mitigated, thereby increasing the resiliency of the population to respond to threats that we cannot mitigate. This may indeed be the best course of action, but it would require a larger discussion about all threats and responses, and include cost-benefit considerations.
Public release of rehabilitated cold-stunned loggerhead turtle in North Carolina, USA
We have little information about the status of coldstunned sea turtles that have been rehabilitated and released. Some short-term satellite tagging of some turtles has revealed that the individuals appear to survive for at least a few months after release (until the tag stops working or is shed). However, there are no long-term data showing that rehabilitated hypothermic turtles have contributed significantly to larger wild turtle populations. There are anecdotal records of released individual animals subsequently succumbing to hypothermia again at later dates, which reinforces that hypothermia is a natural event and calls into question whether a response is warranted.
Responding to hypothermic turtles does have other types of value. For example, because these events tend to attract media attention, it is an opportunity to increase public awareness and facilitate increased understanding of sea turtle biology and conservation. Cold-stunned turtles offer research opportunities, including health and physiological studies, sampling for foraging ecology, and assessing post-release outcomes (although the latter remain difficult to successfully complete). But none of these actions directly benefit wild populations of sea turtles, and when presenting information to the public, more effort should be made to distinguish between benefits to individual turtles vs. the wild population as a whole (see Loftin 1985). It is likely that many of the current actions in response to hypothermic turtles are driven in part by public perception of sick or injured animals and a general desire to have something “done” about it. If so, then a wider public discussion about threats to populations and impacts of responses is warranted, so that everyone has a better understanding of the different factors influencing turtle population. From there, we can prioritise actions, including responses to cold-stunned turtles. I am not recommending that they simply be left in the cold but rather we need to consider how much time and energy should be spent responding to them and if necessary, divert some of that to other threats that potentially could have greater impacts on wild populations.
Suggested reading: Loftin, R. W. 1985. The medical treatment of wild animals. Environmental Ethics 7:231-239. Witherington, B. E., and L. M. Ehrhart. 1989. Hypothermic stunning and mortality of marine turtles in the Indian River Lagoon System, Florida. Copeia 1989:696-703.
outre’ (oo’tre) adjective. Unusual and startling, violating convention or propriety: “in 1975 the suggestion was considered outre’—today it is orthodox.” Origin French, literally “exceeded,” past participle of outrer (see outrage).
I’m standing on a pier 50 feet above the Atlantic. Ocean to the left and right, forward, back and below. I’m wearing a light blue hat, like a bejeweled swim cap. A heavy black cable snakes down my back like a ponytail. I look like an extra in an Esther Williams swim troupe who wandered into Woody Allen’s Sleeper.
Water fills the light, the sound, the air, and my mind. Waves steadily arrive under the pier, crashing to the beach and suspending their salt mist and negative ions, which I rhythmically inhale with pleasure. It smells like summer to me.
I’m a human lab rat. The cap is the nerve center of a mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) unit. I’m just trying it on for size. The cap is not yet recording anything, but soon 68 electrodes plugged into my head will measure my every neurological up and down. The sum effect of the cap, the grandeur of nature, our imaginations and the academic and experiential gravitas of those with me is one of beautiful absurdity. A somewhat ridiculous high-tech costume masking some seriously interesting—you might even say revolutionary—scientific potential.
An unlikely agglomeration of talent—neuroscientists, big wave surfers, psychologists, educators, seafood experts, veterans, marketers, realtors, conservationists, evolutionary biologists, filmmakers and writers—have schooled up on Jennette’s Pier on the Outer Banks of North Carolina to consider the science behind our emotional connection to water. It’s about time we figured out how the words dopamine and amygdala meld with the words, ocean and wave.
The Outer Banks or OBX, are the long, narrow strips of mostly sand separating the Atlantic from the sounds and from the mainland of North Carolina behind that. The Outer Banks are a sandbar, really. Gordon Jones, a realtor for 22 years who knows these edgy dunes as well as anyone, calls them a “speed bump” for the Atlantic hurricanes, squalls and relentless waves that batter her banks. As a result the beaches—literally, the entire place—are inching incrementally westward, grain by grain.
Living on the Outer Banks requires a certain tenacity, but there is a powerful and unmistakable draw to this place. The twin phalanxes of cars coming and going that queue up every summer Saturday and the two hundred percent premium tacked on to the most sought-after homes in the “front row,” directly adjacent to the beaches, are ample evidence of the draw. My hunch, as I stand there on the pier, is that hidden beneath the surface of the water we will find massive, yet to be quantified, but irrefutable cognitive benefits. I believe the ocean irresistibly affects our minds. It is a force that for millennia has drawn people all across our watery planet to camp out on wind – swept bumps of sand like the Outer Banks.
A set of questions and hypotheses has begun to flow from the consilience of neuroscience and water studies and the sharing of personal—some – times intimate—experiences. It is a conversation I call “Blue Mind.”
In 1987, I was a 19 year old biology student at DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. On a late summer day, I received a message from Reverend Lamar, the University Chaplain. In his office, he explained that a local nursing home had a special patient the nurses thought might benefit from guitar lessons. DePauw, founded 175 years ago in the Methodist tradition, is known for its community service. Students learn that to be whole one must give generously to those in need. I agreed to the challenge. I was a quiet, introverted teenager. Barbara was a terrible guitar player. She had lost most of her memory in a car wreck 15 years before, when she was a university music student, herself just 19 years old. I stammered and had a disabling fear of public speaking and performance. I preferred diving in the quiet rock quarries of southern Indiana and the company of my dog and guitar. In a carpeted corner of the institutional lounge, we started in on the standard folk classics of her teens: Dylan; Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul, and Mary. Simple chords, clear lyrics, nothing too demanding. Our Wednesday guitar lessons continued for 8 months. Some days it was agonising work. We would play into dark dead ends. Our hour together would drag with poorly formed thunky chords and start-overs. Other days, a song—or a simple melodic phrase— would open a door into her memory and she would come alive. John Denver, in particular, caused knobs to turn and long-locked memories to flow. On those days we spoke more than we played. Music brought back images, names, stories and other music. The nurses smiled.
“All my memories, gathered ‘round her. Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.” This was my first intimation of Blue Mind. These moments enthralled and disturbed me. Late nights in the racks of neuroscience journals failed to provide satisfactory answers to my questions. The requisite formaldehyde-infused dissections in my anatomy courses paled in comparison to the wonder of Barbara’s living brain. I began to cherish Wednesday afternoons, strumming my guitar in time with hers and trying to find keys to unlock her memories. In the process, slaking my nostalgia for acoustic three-chord simplicity and swimming holes.
These words from E. E. Cummings haunt me: “it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” The words connect me to a dozen emotions, a hundred places, a thousand memories, and to the color blue. I prefer to read the lines last to first. The preceding ten words of the poem are: “for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)” And the ten words just before that are: “as small as a world and as large as alone” I read them backward and forward, and backward again. I read them that way to myself, to my daughters, to strangers, and to students. I don’t know if E. E. cummings meant it that way, but I like to imagine he did; or, at least, that it didn’t matter to him which way you read them as he wrote them at his desk, seaside, planning the forward and the backward and the forward again permutations of his paean to the sea.
Have you ever lost a you? Did it happen at the sea? I’ve lost several me’s. So many me’s, I’ve lost count. I used to know the number; it was at least ten. They’ve mostly been lost in the sea, but one time I lost a me at the bottom of a water-filled quarry. There must be many me’s lost in the water. With a backlog of me’s-in-waiting, yet to be lost. Sometimes, the me’s or the you’s lost in the ocean will return. Those lost to rivers have to travel to the sea where one can search for them. Successful searching often requires a guide—a young scientist, perhaps.
August 13, 1996. Martin Arce, a thick-handed lobster- man and I watched Adelita, a loggerhead sea turtle, swim under and away from our small skiff bobbing in the immense Pacific offshore Baja California in Mexico. We stared out across the expanse of blue before us and thought maybe, perhaps, possibly these turtles aren’t born in Baja at all. Maybe they migrate here only to return home again—somewhere. We gazed at the horizon. Somewhere out there, across the vast Pacific, was Japan and the nearest known loggerhead nesting beaches, a mere 7,000 miles west. Genetic evidence suggested the possibility of epic ocean-spanning migrations by sea turtles, but in the face of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the hypothesis was revolutionary at the time. Too revolutionary, I guess. Unfathomable. absurd even, but also loaded with scientific potential, as the best hypotheses usually are. I was a doctoral student in wildlife ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Debate was rife among scientists about the origins of endangered loggerhead sea turtles swimming along the Pacific coast of the Americas. As most school kids will tell you, the first and perhaps most impressive thing you learn about sea turtles is that they return to the same beaches where they were hatched to nest as adults. With not one single loggerhead nesting beach anywhere on the shores of the eastern Pacific, many questions were unanswered.
Martin and I had attached a small box to Adelita’s back. It contained a transmitter. Twentieth-century technology glued to a one-hundred-million-year-old body plan. Each day the box relayed her location to us via satellites linked to a base station in France. Each day we studied the data and then uploaded it to the Internet. Each day tiny dots aligned on a map, surrounded by nothing but blue. Soon, other people took note. Then more. Schoolkids, scientists and turtle lovers the world over were watching Adelita’s progress. Alone, but not alone, Adelita stroked on through the deepest, wildest, most humanless expanse of our blue planet.
People would write to me to talk about Adelita: “Hi J., this is Meghan and I was just wondering if you are as excited about this as I am?”
At night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake thinking about Adelita. Praying for her safety. Wondering what was beneath her and above her. Was she hungry? How did it feel to be going home after so many years? I became obsessed with checking my email for the latest position. I’d imagine members of our loosely connected club sitting in front of glowing blue screens all over the world, plotting, calculating, imagining, hoping and dreaming about that vast blue space. We tracked the sea turtle due west out of Baja making a steady 20 miles per day; a healthy walking gait for you or me. By January 1, she was just north of Hawaii. From there, she tracked west and ever so slightly north. Sure enough, she was headed straight for Japan.
Brie, an Internet follower, wrote, “What are you gonna to do when Adelita gets to Japan? I mean are you gonna send a team to get her?” “I’m not really sure,” I wrote back.
March 9, 1997. Barbara Garrison, an elementary school teacher in San Diego who was following Adelita’s progress with her students, receiving my regular emails and thoughts, wrote this poem during the journey as the turtle neared the International Date Line, which bisects the Pacific: Adelita sleeps. Do you ever find yourself thinking of her in the middle of the day? Sister of mercy adrift in the world her carapace around her like a habit following the liturgy of longitude like the Stations of the Cross the draw string of dream gathering with each dive. A sea shadow cradled in the arms of the great Turtle Mother. The Virgin of Cobre guiding through the dangerous sea the black sand memory of her natal beach ringing her course in peals of instinct. Cartographer explorer world traveler Adelita sleeps. A Shinto priestess leads the way a goddess path from Mexico to the arribada on a distant Kyushu shore.
August 16, 1997. Three hundred and sixty-eight days and 7,000 miles after we lowered her into the Pacific, Adelita’s signal finally went dark—her final location put her transmitter at the end of a fishing pier in Isohama, a village in northern Japan since washed away by the 2011 tsunami.
You can see a simple truth in the eyes of quarry people, river people and sea people. You can hear it in their voices. You can feel it in the way they dance with you. It has to do with the accumulated losing, searching, following, and finding of life. It is a state I call “Blue Mind.”
Remarkably, the topic of the human brain’s emotional interaction with water is a new frontier to science. Neuroscientists, including those that gathered on The Outer Banks, talk a lot about the physiological basis of flow, groove and even chills—those peak moments when we feel we are one with the universe as a response to good work, play or music. Neuroscientists say looking at the colour blue doubles our creativity. They say that simply walking outside helps break apart bad habits and that being seaside can boost happiness and engender a sense of well-being. Practitioners have found that water-related activities such as kayaking, surfing, wildlife viewing, relaxed gazing, and sound bathing, the practice of simply listening in nature can be applied therapeutically to mental disorders, post-traumatic stress, autism and addiction. At meetings like the one on Jennette’s Pier neuroscientists are formulating bold new hypotheses about our “Blue Minds” suggesting transformative new ways for humans to relate to water, new possibilities for educating our children, and offering some solace to an increasingly stressed out society. Facing out on the Atlantic, I believe them.
We are learning that the songs that water sings make our memories light up like Barbara’s brain on John Denver. Nostalgia glows in the presence of water. By the ocean, along a river or even from the bottom of an inundated quarry, we get a better view of the whole world and of ourselves, and as a result, we feel small but connected. Because we are small in the face of it and we are connected. From a million miles away, the Earth is but a blue marble. From a billion miles, we are just a pale blue dot; a speck in the collective consciousness of the universe. It’s far easier to appreciate the little blue marble we live on from the water’s edge. Its waves of light and sound can make us feel both small and alone and yet exquisitely connected to the universe and everything in it. Like every little thing we do matters more than we could ever imagine.
Sea turtle ocean highways tracked through satellite telemetry and the NEMO ocean model.
Many marine organisms travel great distances which presents a variety of research and conservation challenges. The movements of large animals like sharks, marine mammals and sea turtles are now routinely studied with satellite tracking technology. Once attached to an animal, these satellite tracking devices send us regular data on the animal’s location. For sea turtles, satellite tracking devices can easily be attached to adults when they come ashore to nest. Consequently, the regular migrations between their breeding and foraging habitats (which can be several 100s to 1000s of kilometres apart) are now well documented. However, one of the biggest challenges in satellite tracking technology is the miniaturisation of these devices. Consequently, many small marine species and juveniles of larger species are too small to be tracked in this way. This is the case for new born hatchling sea turtles which are just a few centimetres when they emerge from their nests; much smaller than the satellite tags currently available. It is thus very difficult to study hatchling sea turtles during their first few years of life (which are commonly referred to as the “lost years”) as these small hatchlings disappear into the sea after emerging from their nests.
A green turtle, Chelonia mydas, returning to the sea after nesting in Aldabra, Indian Ocean
Nonetheless, it is now well established that surface ocean currents drive the dispersion of hatchling turtles from predator-rich nesting beaches to safer oceanic habitats where they live and grow as juveniles. Indeed, ocean currents can transport hatchlings on journeys that can span entire ocean basins; hence the distances that they travel can be much further than the regular breeding migrations of adult turtles. In the North Atlantic for example, loggerhead turtle hatchlings from nesting beaches in the southeastern USA are transported north with the Gulf Stream current and then east with currents at the northern boundary of a large clockwise flowing ocean circulation system, the North Atlantic gyre. Transported in this gyre, hatchlings are able to reach their oceanic development habitats near the Azores islands > 5000 kms away from where they were born. Hatchlings then remain at the Azores for several years before they return to coastal habitats in the southeastern USA as large juvenile turtles. During their return journeys they are aided by the westerly flowing currents at the southern boundary of the North Atlantic gyre. These large juvenile turtles then remain in these coastal habitats until they reach maturity and return to the area where they were born to breed. Whilst hatchlings are too small to be directly tagged/followed on these long journeys, oceanography approaches can be used to study hatchlings during the “lost years”.
Hatchling dispersal pathways in the North Atlantic Gyre. Hatchlings from nesting beaches in the southeastern USA (star) are first transported north east with the fast flowing Gulf Stream, hatchlings are then transported east with the northern boundary currents of the clockwise flowing North Atlantic Gyre (depicted with red arrows) towards juvenile development habitats near the Azores (red circle). At the northern boundary of the gyre, hatchlings risk being transported with the North Atlantic Current (blue arrows) towards the cold waters of northern Europe where they will die as the waters in northern Europe are too cold. Hatchlings that successfully remain in the warm North Atlantic Gyre spend several years feeding around the Azores before the westward flowing currents at the southern boundary of the North Atlantic Gyre aid their return trip to coastal development habitats in the southeastern USA. Turtles will spend many years in these coastal development habitats until they reach maturity at c. 45 years and return to beaches close to where they were born to breed. Coloured lines (created from the pathways taken by floating drifter buoys and virtual simulated floats) represent some potential dispersal pathways of hatchlings from nesting beaches in the southeastern USA.
Measurements of ocean currents are commonly made by releasing objects e.g. surface drifter buoys, into the ocean and tracking their movement pathways. Thousands of satellite tracked surface drifter buoys have now been deployed throughout the oceans as part of the Global Drifter Programme (GDP). Data from the GDP is freely available online and is a very easy source of information for marine biologists to work with. Additionally, sophisticated global ocean circulation models such as the “NEMO” ocean model can be valuable tools for biologists as they enable us to release “virtual floating objects” anywhere in the ocean and the movements of these virtual floats can be tracked on a computer programme as they drift in modelled ocean current simulations. Hence, for small organisms that disperse with ocean currents, drifter buoys and ocean models like NEMO can be used in innovative ways by biologists wanting to study these cryptic animals.
For example, from beaches in the southeastern USA, the loggerhead turtle hatchlings that disperse in the North Atlantic gyre are typically not seen again until they are encountered by fisherman in the Azores. By using drifter buoys and ocean models to study the ocean current flows (and therefore dispersal pathways of hatchlings) between the southeastern USA nesting beaches and juvenile habitats in the Azores, we can get important information about the “lost years”. Due to the small size of hatchlings and the huge distances that they disperse, obtaining even very basic information on the biology of hatchlings is difficult. However, by combining data on (1) the size of new born hatchlings when they first emerge from their nests with (2) data on the size of hatchlings that are accidentally caught by fisherman in the Azores with (3) the time we estimated that it takes for hatchlings to drift between these sites, we were able to produce the first robust estimates of the growth rates of hatchlings.
A female loggerhead turtle, Caretta caretta, returns to her breeding grounds in Zakynthos, Greece
Unlike fish and other marine organisms, for which there are well established techniques to directly determine the age of individual animals and hence the age at which species reach maturity, sea turtles cannot be aged directly with accuracy. Instead, reliable age estimates require information on the natural growth rates of hatchling turtles, larger juvenile turtles and adult turtles. The growth rates of large juvenile and adult turtles can be measured at the breeding grounds and in coastal foraging habitats through mark-recapture programmes where turtles can easily be captured, measured and marked (typically with a metal flipper tag), and then recaptured/measured at a later date. Prior to our estimate, however, the growth rates of hatchling turtles were only well known for hatchlings in captivity. Since these captive individuals are given a lot more food than they would get naturally in the wild, captive growth rates are much higher than natural growth rates. So, by combining our new hatchling growth rate estimates during the “lost years” with direct growth measurements of larger turtles, we were able to produce the most reliable age at maturity estimate to date. In so doing, we revealed that the time these turtles take to reach maturity (c. 45 years) is much longer than other animal species and that past age at maturity estimates based on captive growth rates were underestimated. This has important conservation implications as species, like turtles, which take such a long time to reach maturity, are much more vulnerable to extinction than other species (like fish, marine mammals, birds, lizards etc) that mature at much younger ages.
A hatchling loggerhead turtle in the Peloponnese peninsula, Greece
Since hatchlings are reliant on ocean currents to reach their oceanic development habitats, we can use oceanography data to study the “lost years” and gain important information on sea turtle biology. However, laboratory observations by American researchers have also shown that hatchlings can undertake in periods of active swimming. For example, when they first enter the sea they embark on a period of intense offshore swimming (the “swimming frenzy”) which lasts for about a week. This frenzy period helps hatchlings escape predator-rich coastal waters and reach offshore currents like the Gulf Stream which rapidly transports them towards safer oceanic habitats near to the Azores. Once offshore, hatchlings are also known to be able to use geomagnetic information from the Earth’s magnetic field as a navigational sign post. By adding laboratory observations of this swimming behaviour into ocean models we were able to show for the first time that limited amounts of swimming (just 1-3 hrs/day) can (1) help hatchlings to remain within the warm waters of the Gyre/reach safe offshore development habitats like the Azores and (2) avoid drifting towards northern Europe where the cold water would kill them. This is quite remarkable given the limited swimming capabilities of hatchlings (due to their small size) and the fact that these simulations were carried out in a region that contains one of the fastest current flows in the World (the Gulf Stream).
Our work highlights the value of oceanography approaches for studying the biology of species which are difficult to study using conventional techniques and the importance of taking into account the behaviour of animals when using these valuable, albeit currently underexploited, oceanographic tools. Many other marine species, like fish, have juvenile life stages that also disperse with ocean currents and the swimming speed and strength of these juveniles are comparable or greater than those of hatchling sea turtles. The potential conservation applications of these oceanographic tools are thus huge as key information can be gained on the pathways, habitats, survival and biology of a range of species of conservation concern. This information is all crucial for designing effective conservation and management strategies.
Sea turtles are particularly susceptible to climate change because their behaviour, physiology and life history are affected by environmental changes.
All life stages of sea turtles (e.g. hatchlings, juvenile and adult) can be affected by climatic processes. The more detectable impacts of climate change on sea turtles will occur during their interlude on land (during the laying and incubation of eggs and hatching) because there are clear and relatively straightforward effects of increased temperature, sea level rise and cyclonic activity on their nesting sites and nesting success. For example, predicted increases in sand temperatures will skew sea turtle population sex ratios towards predominantly females, decrease hatching success and alter the size of the hatchlings. Sea-level rise and cyclonic activity will cause loss and/or alteration of nesting beaches and egg mortality. A reduction of available nesting area will decrease the area available for nesting, potentially increasing nest infection and destruction of nests by turtles. Other predicted impacts from climate change include shifts in latitudinal ranges, alteration of reproductive periodicity, changes in hatchling dispersal and migration and indirect effects on food availability. Indeed, research investigating the impacts of climate change on the largest green turtle population in the world, the northern Great Barrier Reef (nGBR) green turtle population, predicts a complete feminisation of annual hatchling output by 2070 and a potential loss of up to 38% of available nesting area across the most important nesting sites for this population.
Ultimately, the risk that climate change poses to sea turtle populations will depend on their ability to adapt. Sea turtles have existed for hundreds of millions of years and during this time, they have survived dramatic climate fluctuations and changes in sea level. It is speculated that sea turtles have historically adapted to environmental changes by redistributing their nesting sites and nesting season, by developing new migratory routes and by changing their behaviour. The extent to which sea turtles will (or can) adapt either behaviorally or physiologically and how these responses may counteract impacts of climate change, remains to be seen. Despite sea turtles’ ability to cope with past climatic changes, their ability to do so again is uncertain. Current rates of climate change are much faster than historic rates and at present, they are being simultaneously affected by a variety of anthropogenic activities.
The uncertainty on whether and how sea turtles can adapt to climate change necessitates precautionary actions and adaptive management. A mix of different short-term and long-term approaches have been suggested including: 1) mitigating the threat by reducing global greenhouse emissions; 2) adaptively managing impacts from climate change to increase population persistence; and 3) employing actions that build biodiversity resilience, such as addressing current non-climate-related threats. Reducing emissions is perhaps the biggest challenge, but even immediate reductions will not stop the already apparent and unavoidable impacts of climate change but are still essential to ameliorate threats. Adaptive management is hindered by risks associated with implementing mitigation strategies (e.g. species relocations, manipulations or management actions that improve habitat) and a lack of understanding of how effective and feasible these strategies will be at reducing impacts at relevant temporal and spatial scales.
The majority of the suggested strategies, to date, focus on the nesting environment, as this is where most research on sea turtles occurs and baseline knowledge is strongest as well as where implementation and monitoring is logistically easiest. However, even on nesting beaches, the implementation of these strategies requires an understanding of the thermal profile at different nesting beaches, the current sex ratio of hatchlings entering the population and the proportion of males to females that are ready to mate at any one time for that population; information which is rarely available. Importantly, not many strategies have been suggested for mitigating in-water impacts from climate change or boosting resilience of foraging turtles, presumably because of a lack of data or an understanding of how these systems will be impacted.
Building biodiversity resilience, to date, has focused on reducing non-climatic threats under the rationale that large, healthy and stable populations will help maintain (1) genetic diversity, which can facilitate adaptation to variable conditions; (2) a wide geographic distribution, which can minimise the overall impacts of area-specific threats; and (3) a large breeding population, which can help absorb impacts through an increased ability to recover from population disturbance.
In this context, I conducted a survey with other sea turtle specialists, to explore factors that may influence the resilience of sea turtles to climate change, which indicated that persistence of nesting grounds themselves may also influence the resilience of sea turtle populations. This follows the rationale that optimal nesting areas are necessary for reproduction and therefore the entry of offspring into the population. It also provides buffer areas for sea turtles to redistribute the geographic locations of their current nesting grounds, if necessary, as an adaptive response to deal with environmental or land-use changes. This highlights the need to maintain and protect important nesting beaches and to identify and legally protect areas that will maintain suitable nesting environments in the future, even if they are not major nesting grounds today. This will be particularly difficult in areas where coastal development and beach alteration is widespread and continually expanding. Impacts from climate change are likely to interact with other anthropogenic threats, such as coastal development. Therefore, managers face the challenge of addressing the direct effects of climate change, as well as ongoing threats that sea turtles face throughout their geographic range. For logistical, financial and political reasons, natural resource agencies cannot address all of these drivers or “threats” simultaneously; priorities must be established. For this, there is a need to understand the relative impacts of current and future threats to the overall population dynamics and the variation of those impacts. This is particularly important for sea turtles, since each of their life stages has a different reproductive value (potential for contributing offspring to future generations), and therefore reductions to each life stage will impact population growth rates differently.
Risk and vulnerability assessments are increasingly being used to help prioritise management of species in the face of climate change and also to investigate the risk of not addressing evident threats. For example, I used a vulnerability assessment to identify which climatic process will cause the most impact on the terrestrial reproductive phase of the nGBR green turtle population and to explore how the vulnerability of this population to climate change will alter if the impacts of different climatic process are mitigated.
A green turtle, Chelonia mydas, at a foraging ground. Sea turtle can be affected at multiple life stages by climate change
Even with innovative decision-support tools, the implementation of management will likely be compromised without the necessary laws and policy. Existing national and international laws might need to be revisited and adapted to ensure that management can address emerging climate change threats. Arguably, many laws are ill-suited to climate change because of their static nature. Many were written to address specific types of threats at a time when climate change was not at the forefront of concerns and are consequently limited in a changing world. Legislative flexibility will be essential, particularly for emergency responses. But changes in legislation require scientific, political, and community support. Public awareness of the links between climate change, the potential impacts to sea turtles, and the need to take action can provide the momentum to do something about it. As iconic species, sea turtles could be used as flagships to promote understanding of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, to build community support for conservation action and to provide incentives for effective management and support for research, conservation and changes in policy.
Ultimately, an integrated approach comprising several strategies will be needed. Most strategies will require community, government support and voluntary behavioural changes to minimise social and economic impacts and in many cases community consultation to improve the effectiveness and acceptance of new management arrangements. The best set of strategies will likely be site-specific and will depend on environmental, social, economic and cultural conditions at a particular location, yet also will be integrated at the appropriate regional scale. Importantly, targeted research to understand the adaptive capacity of marine turtles, the exposure and sensitivity of populations and key habitat to climatic processes, population-scale thresholds of concern, and synergistic impacts is necessary to help guide future efforts to manage sea turtles and enhance their adaptive capacity.
Suggested reading: Fuentes MMPB, Pike DA, Dimatteo A & BP Wallace. 2013. Resilience of marine turtle regional management units to climate change. Global Change Biology, 19, 1399–1406. Fuentes MMPB, Limpus CJ & M Hamann. 2011. Vulnerability of sea turtle nesting grounds to climate change. Global Change Biology, 17, 140-153.
Despite its age, this book on sea turtle conservation remains relevant today
In 1983, the British Herpetological Society published and printed 1000 copies of a small blue paperback book. The author, Nicholas Mrosovsky, said he wrote this book to analyse various procedures and problems associated with sea turtle research and conservation, and thus facilitate more discussion and eventual improvement in techniques and measures. Prior to this, he already had a reputation as an excellent researcher, publishing seminal work on thermal biology, seafinding behaviour and hatchling sex ratios of sea turtles. He was also the founding editor of the Marine Turtle Newsletter, which was a vehicle to facilitate dialogue and exchange of all points of view on sea turtle conservation. This book, however, established him as someone who wanted to ask difficult questions and create a forum for debate. Even the photos on the book’s cover appear designed to stimulate discussion: on the left is someone kissing a live green turtle; on the right is a small child holding a flipper from a butchered leatherback. The book’s publication stimulated several long reviews in various journals; some were supportive, others less so. Currently, although this book is still occasionally cited in published papers, it appears to be somewhat forgotten, and was not mentioned in Peter C.H. Pritchard’s historical review of sea turtle monographs in his introduction in the recently published book, Sea Turtles of the Eastern Pacific (J.A. Seminoff and B.P. Wallace, eds., University of Arizona Press, Tuscon). This being the 30th anniversary of its publication, it is prudent to reflect on the relevance of this book to current sea turtle conservation.
My first reading of this book was in 1993, and I was greatly influenced by many of its arguments and positions. Reading it now, I find that many of the issues remain highly relevant today. For instance, Chapter 3, entitled “The Tagging Reflex,” reveals that many researchers and conservationists were applying flipper tags to sea turtles without considering why they were doing it or how to interpret the tag return data. The same thing is happening today, although it now includes satellite tags, critter-cams and other types of telemetric gadgets. Although there is great potential value of mark-recapture and telemetry data from sea turtles, Mrosovsky clearly articulates the importance of setting up testable research questions before embarking on a tagging project. Chapters 10 and 11 deal with the issue of whether sea turtle species deserve to be considered highly in danger of going extinct. This remains an important question in the sea turtle community (and beyond)—recently an entire issue of the journal Endangered Species Research was devoted to the relevance of placing species, including sea turtles, on the IUCN Red List, the global authority of species in danger of going extinct. One of Mrosovsky’ main points is that a defendable scientific approach towards assessing risk would greatly improve the way species are categorized as being threatened with extinction. Chapter 8, on farming of sea turtles, remains topical, particularly with the recent debate over husbandry conditions at the turtle farm in the Cayman Islands. Again, one of Mrosovsky’s main points is that analysis based on biological data would greatly enhance discussion and provide room for setting up testable hypotheses and benchmarks.
Of course, given its age, there are some subjects that are no longer “burning issues.” For instance, few today would argue that the black turtle, Chelonia agassizi, warrants official recognition as the eighth species of sea turtle. Similarly, the chapter on head-starting (captive rearing for the first few years of life before release back into the wild) of Kemp’s ridleys is mostly moot, as the program ended in 1993. Yet at the time, these issues engendered debate within the sea turtle community. Rather than take sides, Mrosovsky suggested that the best approach would be to study each problem empirically, and develop testable hypotheses that would serve to resolve the debate. This is exactly what happened in the early 1990s when new molecular biology techniques were applied to green turtles and showed that there was no eighth species of sea turtle. Still, these chapters are of interest, as they provide the historical context of sea turtle conservation.
Upon my latest reading, I found Chapter 14 as riveting today as it was the first time I read it. This chapter addresses the sustainable harvest of sea turtle eggs. Unlike the other issues discussed in the book, such as tagging and tag loss, and hatchling sex ratios, which have generated a fair amount of research and publications by different researchers since the publication of this book, there has been limited research in the area of consumptive use of sea turtles, and policy seems unchanged since 1983. For example, the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group has avoided addressing the topic in two important documents: its Global Strategy for marine turtles and its manual of research and management techniques. Yet, consumptive use of sea turtles continues in various places around the world and has been a major source of debate at international meetings on animal trade (e.g. CITES). Like many of the subjects of this book, sustainable use of sea turtles is contentious, but Mrosovsky argues that the debate would be much improved if scientific data were brought to bear. However, in this case, the lack of widespread debate or discussion impedes progress on this issue.
This was the first small book of three that Nicholas Mrosovsky has written and they all feature constructive commentaries and critiques of various issues in sea turtle conservation. This first book in particular personifies the author’s reputation in the past few decades, in that he has rarely shied away from asking challenging questions concerning thorny issues, either at meetings or during online discussions or even during field-site visits. While some may not agree with his ideas, few could say that they have not been influenced by him or his writings. This book in particular remains highly informative and potentially influential— potentially because it is long out of print, so new readers will have to rely on colleagues who may be willing to loan out this book. It is highly worth making the effort to find a copy and regardless of whether you agree with its contents, this book will be sure to make you think.
First evidence of green turtles carrying passengers, piggyback style
Young green turtles on the Uruguayan coast hang around all year at the second largest South American estuary, the Rio de la Plata, as there is plenty of food. Once they become adults, these turtles recruit to adult populations all the way in UK, Venezuela and Africa. And new evidence suggests they might be carrying several passengers with them, riding on their shell!
Lezama and colleagues in Uruguay counted the number of Rapa whelks, large sea snails, on the carapace (upper shell) of 33 green turtles that were stranded or captured on the coast. They also measured the length of the carapace and weight of the turtles, to see if the whelks had detrimental effects on their hosts. Most turtles had severe injuries on their carapaces caused by the attachment of whelks. They found an average of eight to ten whelks on a turtle and up to 49 whelks on a single turtle, causing a 20% increase in weight! It turns out that the whelks take advantage of the turtles when the latter hibernate, and easily clamber on because the carapace is a harder substrate than the ubiquitous soft sand.
The scientists also expected that whelks would be harmful to turtles and reduce the latter’s body weight. But they were surprised when they found larger and heavier turtles carried more whelks. May be the healthier a turtle is, the more whelks it can support. The scientists now want to see if the added weight affects buoyancy, the extent of damage to the carapace and also how long they remain on the turtles. Do they take these free rides all the way to Africa and the UK remains to be seen.
Green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) are found throughout tropical and subtropical seas, with feeding and breeding grounds often separated by thousands of kilometres.
Further reading:
Lezama C, Carranza A, Fallabrino A, Estrades A, Scarabino F & M López-Mendilaharsu. 2013. Unintended backpackers: bio-fouling of the invasive gastropod Rapana venosa on the green turtle Chelonia mydas in the Río de la Plata Estuary, Uruguay. Biological Invasions, 1-5.(2012).
An inclusive method to measure impact of noise on marine mammals
Noise from ships and coastal industries is capable of traveling miles underwater and scientists have found that, in many ways, this affects marine mammals. They used to consistently record the amplitude of a sound when produced and drew concentric ‘zones of influence’ around it, thus measuring the potential effects of the sound on an animal. However, they had not taken into account some other equally important factors (read on to know what they are). Luckily, some scientists have taken the hint from a few earlier studies.
In one study, harbor seals were played sounds of local fish-eating killer whales, and they barely shrugged their shoulders. But when migrant mammal-eating killer whale sounds were played, the seals reacted strongly. In another study, sonar signals were relayed from a stationary ship en route of migrating gray whales. They moved around the ship and avoided it. But when the ship was moved two kilometers away, even though the sound levels remained the same, the whales didn’t seem affected and continued on their original path. Clearly there was more to this than just the intensity of sound produced.
Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) pick out familiar resting spots, mostly rocky areas where they are protected from adverse weather conditions and predation, near a foraging area.
So, Ellison and colleagues proposed a new method to better assess the effects of sound on marine mammals. This approach includes contextual factors that were not taken into account earlier, such as the influence of distance between the sound source and the animal, whether the animal had heard the sound before and recognised or learnt it and whether the sound was similar to natural sounds like that of an enemy. They call for similar inclusive assessments that will help in more efficient management of all the noise we create.
Further reading: Ellison W T, Southall B L, Clark C W & A S Frankel. 2012. A new context-based approach to assess marine mammal behavioral responses to anthropogenic sounds. Conservation Biology 26: 21–28. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2011.01803.x.
Marine turtles are amongst the most ubiquitous icons of conservation. More, in fact, than perhaps whales and dolphins, or tigers or pandas. Most countries with a coastline—even very cold ones—have some species of sea turtle along their coast. And a conservation programme to go with it. The fact that over 1000 participants from nearly 80 countries attend the Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation is testimony to both the popularity of these flagships, and the threats they face.
In this issue, we take a closer look at some of the concerns in sea turtle conservation today. Sea turtles may be particularly susceptible to climate change as hatchling sex is determined by incubation temperature; hence, rise in temperature
could lead to changes in sex ratios or to mortality. Moreover, sea level changes could impact the sandy beaches on which they nest. Mariana Fuentes uses a vulnerability assessment to examine which aspects of climate change will most affect
green turtle populations in the Great Barrier Reef. Rebecca Scott examines the oceanic routes of loggerhead turtles using satellite telemetry and ocean models. Jack Frazier asks the critical question: what constitutes success in conservation?
Matthew Godfrey takes a closer look at the value of conservation responses to cold-stunned turtles. We also reprint J Nichols’ piece from ‘Catamaran’—where the ocean and the mind and turtles connect. The illustrations were generously
contributed by Smitha Shivaswamy and George Supreeth (Pencil Sauce).
Editor’s Note: Kartik Shanker
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Lepiodochelys olivacea, Odisha Olive ridley turtles are known for their arribadas or mass nesting behaviour. Over 50,000 turtles nested on this particular night in February 2013, the most in the last decade of monitoring at this site. Photograph: Kartik Shanker
New land ethic for an urbanised planet In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov invented Trantor, the center of a Galactic empire where his brilliant “Foundation” series of novels unfold. At its height, Trantor is a planet whose originally Earth-like land surface is entirely covered in metal domes enclosing subterranean metropolises inhabited by 45 billion humans. That is over 6 times as many of us as are currently jostling for space on Earth. And, like one of our megacities writ large, Trantor is an entirely urban planet with an (eventually fatal) dependence on 20 other worlds for food.
No room for bare dirt, let alone natural spaces, within that Galactic capital! Not surprising, given that Trantor sprang from the imagination of a quintessential New Yorker, in a period of technological optimism about human potential for limitless growth to conquer the universe. Recently, as humanity nears 7 billion, we passed an urban threshold: over half of us now live in cities sprawling over the Earth’s landscape. Cities whose alienated dwellers depend on food from ever distant farmlands. But we remain far from traveling to another planet, let alone establishing galactic empires. Instead, as climate change destabilises agriculture and rising oceans threaten to drown some of our most vibrant cities, we worry about sustaining even current human populations.
Meanwhile, an alternative vision of humanity is found in the writings of Asimov’s contemporary Aldo Leopold who, in “A Sand County Almanac”, also written in the 1940s, gave us the “land ethic”: a natural extension of ethics, an evolution of our moral sense of just behavior towards the rest of the natural world. He wrote:
“A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
One can see an amplification of this land ethic in the more recent notion of “Earth Stewardship” which calls upon humans to take an active role in protecting biodiversity as the planet’s only capable “stewards”.
Trantor, with its eradication of nature, would be deeply unethical. Indeed most of our cities seem to lie on the wrong side of this ethical line, containing more concrete and asphalt than biotic communities. Yet cities are also centers of human culture supporting much of the integrity, stability, and beauty of human communities. Indeed, cities are where we also grow most of our naturalists, ecologists, and environmentalists these days.
Is it possible to reconcile human communities with those other biotic communities as equal citizens of Earth? We need an urban land ethic to guide our actions, find ways to preserve the integrity and beauty of the whole, human and non-human, and avoid destroying the living fabric of Earth’s biosphere before we self-destruct.
Urbanisation is fundamentally changing the nature of our planet. Preserving biodiversity on this new urban planet requires going well beyond the traditional conservation approaches of protecting and restoring what we think of as “natural ecosystems”, and trying to infuse or mimic such elements in the design of urban spaces. Cities already represent a new class of ecosystems shaped by the dynamic interactions between ecological and human social systems. As we project the spread of these ecosystems across the globe, we must become more proactive in not only trying to preserve components of earlier ecosystems and biotic communities that they displace, but in imagining and building whole new kinds of ecosystems that allow for a reconciliation between human wellbeing and biodiversity.
While urbanisation displaces many species, we also know that others have evolved adaptive response in behavior and physiology to not only survive but thrive under the sometimes strange and rather sustained urban selection pressures. Novel plant and animal communities have evolved in urban areas, often with active manipulation and management by human society.
Urban residential gardens and parks, for example, have become an important reservoir for populations of bees and other pollinators that provide valuable ecosystem services for farmers, but find it difficult to survive under modern intensive agriculture. Innovations such as rooftop gardens and vertical forests, other structural design elements that form the scaffolding of urban habitats, and human interventions such as supplementary feeding and watering, have the potential to offer novel habitats and niches for species that may be quite different from those in more natural ecosystems. Populations and assemblages of species that evolve under such urban conditions may well represent what the future holds for much of earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. As such, human society must take a more active role in understanding and shaping these ecosystems, and assume the mantle of Earth’s stewardship in the deepest sense.
As centers of human innovation, and perhaps the most active frontier of our impact on the planet, urban areas offer enormous opportunities to re-imagine and invent a different kind of future with room for humans and other species to thrive. As humanity continues to grow and build cities, our hopes of avoiding urban collapse lie in growing movements for green roofs, urban farming, alternative materials, and landscape designs that soften our hard urban edges, and offer novel habitats for even endangered species, by making cities more permeable to nature.
Even Asimov, in sequels written decades later, recognised the hubris and ecological folly of a wholly metallic urban planet, adding farm sectors open to the air, and even dirt and trees growing atop the metal domes! It is in the nature of life to colonise and adapt to new habitats, so in the long run, the evolutionary biologist in me knows that the earth will eventually reclaim all of our novel habitats as its own, even if we kill off many species and ourselves in the process. We would all be better off in the short run, however, if we allow nature and its biotic communities some more breathing room within our urban realm. We must heed Leopold and spare our planet the fate of Asimov’s Trantor. Even Asimov would have agreed.
Selling PES in the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Park Payments for ecosystem services (PES) interventions aim to subject ecosystem conservation to market dynamics and are often posited as win-win solutions to contemporary ecological, developmental and economic problems. While popular in mainstream policy domains, a major academic debate has erupted over whether PES can actually fulfil all (or any) of the promises it makes. Some scholars argue that PES, despite its challenges and shortcomings, is good for rural development and social equity. However, others such as Nicolas Kosoy and Esteve Corbera have referred to PES as ‘commodity fetishism’ implying that when nature becomes a commodity it will have negative effects on how humans relate to and value nature and can lead to social inequalities. Still others argue that PES instruments can contribute to improved environmental governance, but that they might not be universally applicable and might lead to perverse or ineffective outcomes, and hence that there should be a discussion about where they could be appropriate. Here I argue that PES can best be conceptualised as ‘neoliberal conservation’: the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.
I first came to this conclusion based on extensive research on a conservation and development intervention in southern Africa, the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project (MDTP). This project sought to stimulate local development, environmental conservation and international collaboration in the mountainous Maloti-Drakensberg area between Lesotho and South Africa. Amongst its many activities, the project introduced several market-based strategies to achieve its objectives, including PES. PES seemed a welcome solution to the many problems and political issues in the area. Indeed, for the first 3 years, the MDTP itself was also mired in struggles and tensions, and in this tense atmosphere the PES solution was welcome indeed. A baseline study was commissioned, in which Nicci Diederichs and Myles Mander argued: “Payment for environmental services provides an incentive for directing landowners towards environment management actions that address priority environmental services, such as water security. As a payment system directly links buyers and producers of environmental services, it builds relationships between people who are economically linked and allows market based transactions to take place, reducing the need for further state regulation. Furthermore it focuses on measurable deliverables and consequently sharpens the performance of conservation actors (public, private or communal).”
Interestingly, the study says almost nothing about the complex context and chequered history of the Maloti-Drakensberg area. Rather, in paragraphs such as the above, these are replaced by a closed (ahistorical) framework whereby social relations, individual behavior and their environmental effects are (efficiently) directed by market incentives. Moreover, the reports replaces cultural, political and social dynamics with a focus on ‘relationships between people who are economically linked’ thus reducing the area and its inhabitants to a technocratic, neoliberal model that would subsequently have to be managed into reality. Indeed, the goal of the MDTP, from the start, was to set up PES as the magic bullet, as the ideal mechanism to ecological, developmental and economic concerns in the Maloti-Drakensberg. Interestingly, the same baseline study admits this by stating that: “The resources available to this project (MDTCDP), both internally and externally (by means of partners), and the willingness of the MDTCDP to use economics for conservation action, generates a practical opportunity to initiate a market development process in the next three years. Furthermore, the current activities of the existing project, such as research and public education, are complementary to the development of a payment system.”
All of this sounds ‘neutral’, straightforward, and apolitical, exactly how markets are often depicted in general. Yet, it needs to be stressed that this scientific practice of framing institutional arrangements according to markets and market metaphors means bringing actors and ecosystems (further) into the capitalist mode of production.
Hence, where some authors ask ‘can markets do better?’, the point is that ‘markets’ are not an instrument that can be switched on and off to see whether they ‘work’. Markets change social and socio-ecological relations, and markets in a capitalist political economy change these relations according to the capitalist mode of production. In turn, the capitalist mode of production harbours particular socio-ecological contradictions in general and with specific reference to ecosystem services.
Yet, it is clear from the above quote that the resources available to the MDTP were put to use in a very specific way, namely to render the Maloti-Drakensberg area as an ‘ecosystem services market’ and so subject it to deepening capitalist relations and power structures. In turn, this corroborates the point that market forces are not ‘natural’, but need to be ‘constructed’ into place through what Jim Glassman refers to as ‘extraeconomic’ means. In other words, a whole host of political, social and scientific tools are necessary to construct (and oversee) particular ‘economic relations between people’.
In turn, these political, social and scientific tools were grounded on rather tenuous and/or one-sided arguments and evidence. While I refer the reader to the main Conservation & Society article for substantiation of this claim, what matters here is that despite the tenuous and one-sided evidence, the transfrontier project and the consultants it had contracted for the PES studies started marketing the potential for successful PES implementation in the area very early on in the project. PES was not only pushed through as a panacea for many of the area’s ills, but the same consultants hired by the MDTP to set up a PES system, started marketing this system as a ‘success’ towards associated and likeminded, or ‘epistemic’ communities who were implicated in, and depended on this ‘success’. This directs attention to a point which is often only alluded to in the PES literature, namely that the evidence built up in scientific constructions of PES depends on it being validated and taken up by particular epistemic communities, which are “experts sharing a belief in a common set of cause-and-effect relationships as well as common values to which policies governing these relationships will be applied.”(1) In other words, scientific representations of PES in the Maloti Drakensberg area were marketed through epistemic communities that already support and/or depend on the success of these same PES models, and as such a seemingly convincing case is set up, backed by scientific evidence.
But this goes further still: many of those involved in constructing PES markets are also those that posit them as a ‘success’ in policy, academic or other arenas. For example, the same consultants and researchers hired by the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Project to explore the suitability of PES in the Maloti-Drakensberg area between Lesotho and South Africa marketed their own PES constructions as successful through epistemic communities and policy arenas that already support and/or depend on the success of these same PES models. Crucially then, the interpretation of scientific evidence also resembles a market— if particular epistemic communities ‘buy’ into this evidence, it can seem to be legitimate and/ or attract attention and more resources. In other words, the case of the MDTP functions in a broader ‘scientific context’ where likeminded epistemic communities valorise and indeed promote the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets can be the answer to their own ecological contradictions. In turn, this dynamic can become self-reinforcing in that more attention and resources are employed to further strengthen the power of the PES discourse, making it susceptible to becoming a relatively closed loop that effectively shuts out the complex socio-ecological dynamics it aims to address. An interesting—and disturbing—corroboration of this point relates directly to the Conservation and Society article itself. Before publication, I sent a version of the article to some of the MDTP PES consultants in order for them to respond to my criticisms, but they did not bother to give it any attention or feedback, despite several reminders from my side. The precise reason for this is of course difficult to grasp, but since I am not part of the epistemic communities that they depend on for their livelihoods, it seemed my article was not worth their attention, as the only thing it could do was rupture their carefully constructed discourse and the myth about the Maloti-Drakensberg as a ‘successful’ PES case.
Taking the alternative evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg area case study, one could simply conclude that PES indeed seems a familiar progression of capitalist expansion and intensification in the area of environmental conservation. Yet, at the same time it is important to point out what seems new is that it openly acknowledged that conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems should occur through its submission to the capitalist mode of production while being completely blind to the contradictions and histories of this same mode of production. Indeed, this article shows that conservation projects and associated epistemic communities work hard to produce evidence that works to establish scientific credibility while erasing difficult and conflict-wrought histories in order to effectuate this submission. In turn, this enabled those same actors to market PES as a ‘success’, and so build a context that serves to attract resources and cement actors’ careers within a popular paradigm. To capture these dynamics adequately, one needs to acknowledge PES and the way in which it is marketed within a global political economy that has sought to undo the restraints placed on capitalism since the 1970s and now seems to be at its zenith. PES, therefore, should be recognised first and foremost as ‘neoliberal conservation’—as a response to the global neoliberal political economy that South Africa has also adopted and strengthened over the past 15 years.
Unless one takes this context into account, one risks missing the bigger picture—that the political-economic realities that cause many of the environmental and social problems frame solutions for them in the same spirit, for example through ‘PES’. And as these are built into the same mechanisms, they might equally strengthen, rather than alleviate, the dynamics that cause the problems in the first place. Only by first framing PES as ‘neoliberal conservation’, and thereby acknowledging the broader point that capitalist markets cannot be the answer to their own ecological contradictions, can we begin to understand contemporary socio-ecological problems in their full complexity and start working on devising meaningful and constructive solutions.
Suggested reading Büscher, Bram (2012). Payments for Ecosystem Services as Neoliberal Conservation: (reinterpreting) Evidence from the Maloti-Drakensberg, South Africa. Conservation & Society 10, 1: 29-41 Kosoy, N. and E. Corbera. 2010. Payments for ecosystem services as commodity fetishism. Ecological Economics 69(6): 1228–1236. Muradian, R. et al (forthcoming 2013) ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services and the fatal attraction of win-win solutions’. Conservation Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2012.00309.x
Forests are now being quantified and monetised so that they can be traded like other commodities. Talk of a Green Economy is everywhere. As climate related anxieties take hold of the psyche of large numbers of people living across the globe, several governments have responded by way of initiatives that evaluate and monetise the services performed by ecosystems under threat such as forests and fresh water. Economists, ecologists and policy makers are trying to incorporate into national economies what might have earlier been considered ‘free’ and commonly accessible goods. By this, the rhetoric of state or market control over land, water and forests has been virtually extended to genes and carbon—the units by which we have come to measure diversity and conservation.
The experience of the last 30 years of forest conservation in India is instructive to understand ‘neoliberal nature’ where commodities are the outcome of conservation and not production (McAlwee, 2011). Starting with the legislation of 1980 that identified loss of forests to development or broadly defined “non forest” use as a key threat, the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) set down rules and procedures for the grant of forest clearance based on assessments and evaluations when a project needed forest land. One of the main ways of offsetting this loss was to make it mandatory for project developers to pay for afforestation over an equal area of non forest land and when that is not available, twice the area of degraded forest land. Conservation, it seemed then, was based on the premise of keeping a certain percentage of land under forest. As this form of forest conservation progressed, official data shows that over 1 million hectares of forest have been put away through forest clearance since then. Of this, over 300,000 hectares were granted clearance between 2003 and 2007 alone, which was possible as procedures for clearances have been streamlined to cut down delays, grant of clearances centralised and expert groups and technical bodies established for decision making. With such ‘success’ in the clearance process, compensatory afforestration efforts were challenged both materially and morally. While the forest departments complained of funds not coming in on time, land not being available and poor monitoring of plantation sites, forest dwelling communities resisted more and more their displacement from forests, loss of access and impoverishment.
One of the most significant interventions in the arena of forest governance came from the Supreme Court in 1996. Known popularly after the name of the applicant from Tamil Nadu who is understood to have sent a post card to the court complaining of indiscriminate felling of trees, the Godavarman case (T. N. Godavarman Thirumulkpad vs Union of India and ors {WP No 202 of 1995}) has gone on since, issuing overarching orders to extending the jurisdiction of the central government and state forest department to any area or land which would attract the dictionary meaning of forests. Through the Court’s order dated 26.09.2005 in this case, it also introduced the ‘Net Present Value’ (NPV) for the diversion of forests based on tree density and ecosystem services as a way of making forests more valuable in the process of development. NPV is understood as a value to compensate, in money terms, for the loss of tangible as well as intangible benefits flowing from forest lands due to their diversion to non-forest use. The preliminary idea was that this would either act as a deterrent to forest conversion, or as a compensation whereby the money collected could be ploughed back into conservation activities of the state forest departments. The methodology adopted ranges from charging project proponents amounts from Rs 4.38 lakh per hectare for class IV (open dense forests) to Rs 10.43 lakh per hectare for class I and II (very dense forest). The monies earned are collected by the Compensatory Afforestation Planning and Management Authority (CAMPA) and disbursed to state governments for conservation activities based on their annual plan of operations. These efforts have brought back old and much criticised ideas like Joint Forest Management and invested them with financial resources that have been collected by giving up existing forests.
Whether in the form of land, tree species or density, forests have been classified, monetised and substituted by other products of conservation such as plantations or Protected Areas (PAs). What the dual strategies of valuation and compensation that govern the mechanics of the FCA or NPV have also managed to do is convert forests into decontextualised, mobile and tradable commodities between regions. The condition of compensatory afforestation and NPV in particular meets obstacles in areas such as Kinnaur district in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. A substantial portion of the district is above the tree line and comprises high altitude cold desert areas. The forest types in this region and many alpine pasture lands of the region are not ones where high tree density can be observed. The calculation of NPV is significantly challenged in an ecosystem of this nature. During a conversation with forest officials of the region in June 2011, it was learnt that forest land is continuously being sought for the construction of border roads as well as hydro power projects, but the district does not have any land where compensatory afforestation can take place. Therefore, if any forest land is diverted in Kinnaur district, the compensatory afforestation will need to take place in another district of Himachal Pradesh, land for which is yet to be identified. As such policy prescriptions are carried out in ritualised, bureaucratic ways, fictional forests are being reconstituted in law and policy over and over again. While this has been the scenario at the national level, the new global approach of calculating the worth of forests by the carbon they hold is antithetical to popular imaginations of forests. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has recognised the role of forest conservation in climate mitigation. Mechanisms such as REDD and REDD+ have been arrived at through global negotiations where forests can be valued in the carbon trade market on the basis of their carbon sequestration potential. Such a contention has trapped forests, making them readily available for trade not just nationally but across borders. The global climate change negotiations and decisions allow for financial flow into countries which encourage the maintenance of such units of forests.
Forests have been a contested field for many years now, and the site around which immense mobilisation for cultural identity and political recognition has taken place. Issues of loss of access and forest related livelihoods have animated the movements for economic rights. This new turn, fueled by global climate concerns, to manage forests as carbon stocks as they are the basis of all other environmental services, begs us to investigate knowledge that reduces and abstracts forests into fungible units performing certain secular and universal functions that are prioritised above all else. The description of such forests is underscored by quantitative values and even though place, context and relationships may be mentioned, they seem irrelevant to the science of valuation. The forest in government records, is hardly an entity with multiple meanings that are bestowed upon it by our occasions of experience with it. It is without history, ecology or story. Instead, it is transformed into a forest of numbers.
There are innumerable examples to illustrate the effect of regulation based on such forest ‘facts’. A few years ago, the Chairman of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) was heard making a case for the large dam projects in the Northeastern states of India being awarded carbon credits because it would submerge old growth forests and recreate growing forests that supposedly had a much higher capacity for carbon sequestration. It is not easy to ignore this as bad science because that would merely ‘fix’ the same forest for its role as carbon stock. We need a new epistemology for environmental governance that rescues forests from the stock vs sequestration debate, or rather from the discourse of fungible environmental services.
The impulse to create an asset out of forests, hardly new to us, so that it will pay for its own management, conservation and governance is now premised on absurd abstractions. Such ‘rituals’ of commensuration, that are at the core of the idea of Green Capital have legitimised the siting of mines, dams and industrial projects in forests. Rather than methods of abstraction that separate forests from their ecological contexts and divest them of their social meanings, we need a form of governance that will allow forests to thrive for the many things they allow us to be.
Suggested readings Kohli, K., M.Menon, V.Samdariya, and S.Guptabhaya. 2011. Pocketful of Forests: Legal debates on valuating and compensating forest loss. Kalpavriksh & WWF-India, New Delhi. McElwee, Pamela. 2011. Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?, Geoforum. Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 412–426 Sukhdev, Pawan. 2011. Putting a Price on Nature: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, Solutions, Volume 1, Issue 6, January 2011 pp: 34-43
How does the depiction of wildlife news by media affect what people perceive
With the increasing human population worldwide encroaching upon forest lands, there is a good chance that the morning paper has an article or an image of a trapped ‘man-eater’ leopard or crop-damaging elephants. These incidents graduate to a two minute news update on the local news channel only if they are extremely serious and unfortunately fatal. There are more than 100 endangered panthers in south western Florida, where they are known to kill livestock and there is public concern.
Susan Jacobson and colleagues from the University of Florida sifted through newspaper articles, editorials and letters in papers with local and state-wide circulation. Not surprisingly, local papers published significantly more on panthers than state-wide papers, although the latter had twice the number of graphic photographs than the local papers. While local news was more episodic, focusing on attacks on people and livestock, statewide articles reported more on panther biology.
Despite these differences, people in and outside of core panther habitat perceived low risk from panthers. This could be because the chances of seeing a panther are in fact very low. Many local news articles mentioned panthers in a land development and urban growth context, thus providing insights into carnivore management strategies and policy planning. It looks like the paparazzi might have positive effects on the recovery of Florida panther populations.
Further reading: Jacobson SK, Langin C, Carlton JS, & LL Kaid. (2012). Content analysis of newspaper coverage of the Florida panther. Conservation Biology, 26: 171–179. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2011.01750.x
PES is often touted as win-win with both environmental gains and poverty alleviation. But REDD+ does not neccesarily translate into forest conservation or benefit local communities.
Q: How viable is trading of carbon credits as a mitigation measure? A: They work well in certain systems, but then, is it for everyone? I believe that our textbook thinking is pretty bad here… (Excerpt from interview of Elinor Ostrom in Financial Express, 5 Feb 2012) In the past decade, the idea of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has caught the attention of many donors, policy makers and researchers. It is now being touted as the solution for multiple problems: water scarcity, biodiversity loss and global warming. The powerful attraction of the idea is because it sounds non-coercive (communities may only do things that they perceive are in their economic interest) and win-win (poverty alleviation with environmental gains). The debate appears to have almost shifted away from ‘Is PES a good idea?’ to ‘How do we implement PES?’
Nevertheless, many concerns and criticisms remain unaddressed. Understanding the concept, its applicability and its limitations requires us to first clarify our own normative position towards conservation and development issues. We then need to examine the assumptions and theory underpinning claims about how, in what sense and to what extent PES might deliver win-win outcomes as it promises. REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation-Plus), a concept that involves payments for avoiding deforestation and for improvements in forest quality/quantity and which has reached pilot stage in many countries, provides a good case for such examination.
NORMATIVE STANCE
The proponents and critics of PES schemes do not always differ on empirical claims. They often care about very different things. For instance, those worried about biodiversity criticise REDD+ because they fear that it may lead to the replacement of slow growing (diverse) natural forests with fast-growing monoculture plantations. But clearly REDD+ is not about biodiversity conservation—it is about reducing emissions. So is one holding it up to a wrong standard? But what is the right standard against which one evaluates any such proposal? I would argue that all such proposals must be examined on multiple dimensions: long-term environmental benefits, livelihood gains, equity, and democratising potential. This is because the ultimate societal goal, especially in developing countries, is not just environmental conservation but sustainable and equitable development.
THE THEORY OF PES
The idea of payments for ecosystem services as a way to solve environmental problems involves a sequential set of claims:
that society as a whole cares about certain environmental impacts caused by the actions of a few,
that this caring can (and should) be translated into a willingness-to-pay of society at large to those few;
that this willingness can be translated into actual and adequate payments that will reach those few;
that individual actions of forest users in response to such incentives will in fact add up to gains in forest cover and in carbon sequestration;
that monitoring systems can be set up such that if actions are not forthcoming in proportion to the payments, they can be easily detected and payments withheld and
that such market-based arrangements are the most ‘efficient’ ways of meeting environmental goals and in many cases will also meet poverty alleviation goals.
Let us see whether and to what extent these claims are tenable, specifically in the context of REDD+.
WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY, WILLINGNESS-TO-FIX
Climate change is a global problem, and the bulk of it has been created by the burning of fossil fuels primarily by developed countries over the past 200 years. Does global society care enough about climate change? As of now, there is little evidence of it—witness the pointless accords in Copenhagen and Durban. If we cared enough, there would have been tight caps on emissions, and then, since currently some trading is allowed, this would have automatically led to a huge demand for carbon offsets. But the bottom has fallen out of the carbon offsets market, with the price hovering around US$5/tC. Clearly, the biggest problem is not the absence of one more mechanism to offset carbon emissions, but the unwillingness of the emitters to take responsibility for emissions in the first place.
FIXING BY PAYING OFF? OR PAYING FOR NOT DAMAGING?
Should a willingness to fix be converted into a willingness to pay off someone else? The position of many economists notwithstanding, there is an inalienable ethical content to this question. This is because all individual actions that impinge on societal welfare (which are virtually all individual actions!) have ethical implications. People’s ability to make such payments is not an ahistorical random phenomenon, but the outcome of historically high levels of exploitation of natural resources by their predecessors. Buying one’s way out of the problem one created seems morally inappropriate. Similarly, the idea of paying for avoided deforestation (paying for not damaging) seems somewhat problematic: it makes a blanket assumption that those who deforest have the right to do so, whereas most societies have put some limits on these rights.
WHO WILL GET HOW MUCH?
What does a price of US$5/tC mean? Under reasonable assumptions, this would translate into a measly few hundred Indian rupees per household per year in a village of 100 households that dramatically regenerates a barren piece of 50 hectares over 20 years. It would also assume that this land was otherwise lying useless. Clearly, if the recipient is a forest-dwelling Indian household, this payment, even if it reached them, would be meaningless. Even ten times this amount would be hardly significant in the battle against poverty. But will, in fact, this payment even reach them? In any market, payment goes to the owner of the produce. But do forest-dwellers own the carbon in the forest they use? Perhaps in some countries in Latin America, where individuals own significant areas of forested land, the answer is ‘yes’. But in much of South and Southeast Asia and Africa, this is hardly the case. Forest departments are the owners, and villagers are tolerated on sufferance, if at all. Forest departments would be the first ones to lay claim to the carbon money, and for them, even $5/tC translates into a significant addition to their budgets (several thousand rupees per hectare per year). This would make them even more intolerant of villager presence in and use of the forests, which would be a further setback to the already faltering attempts to bring about the democratic decentralisation of forest governance in many such countries.
Similarly, forest-dwelling communities are not homogeneous or uniformly poor. Gains from REDD+ could easily be pocketed by the rural elite: it has already happened in many donor-funded forestry projects in the past, including Joint Forest Management in India. Indeed, in many such cases, the rural elite collaborate actively with state agencies to ‘deliver’ (at least in the short run) the desired environmental outcomes, even while imposing negative impacts on poorer households. This is particularly true in tree planting and conservation programmes such as REDD+, which effectively shut out other uses of the landscape such as grazing and firewood collection that are the needs of the poorest households. In other words, given that REDD+ is about saving forests on public/community lands and not planting trees in people’s backyards, collective action will be essential and such collective action can easily turn coercive for some, especially given the current dispensation, negating the whole idea of win-win that is the key selling point of PES schemes.
WATCHING THE CARBON
Related to this is the issue of transaction costs. Markets ‘work’, i.e., deliver most benefits to the producers and consumers when transaction costs are low, such as with goods that can be easily sold across counters and whose quality is transparent. But in the case of carbon sequestration, credits are being sold by remote villagers to international buyers, and whether these credits translate into real sequestration has be to be monitored year after year—all implying a huge intermediary presence and lots of room for fraud and exploitation. We see that even where forest-dwellers are trying to sell tangible forest products such as wild honey or beedi leaves, the structure of government controls and market conditions is such that they barely get a subsistence wage. What would be the case in an international market for a much less tangible commodity like forest carbon? Middlemen would have a field day.
LIVELIHOOD NEEDS OR OTHER FACTORS?
Ultimately, REDD+ assumes that increasing the value of standing forest will translate into forest conservation. The success of REDD+ depends upon this diagnosis of the deforestation problem. But is that really so? Are forests disappearing simply because forest-dwellers find it more profitable to cut them down? Or because forest departments are short of funds? All the research on tropical forests over the past several decades points to a much more complex array of factors, including unclear and centralized forest rights, corruption and mismanagement, pressures of mining, roads and other external developmental activities, and so on.
FORESTS ARE NOT ONLY ABOUT CARBON
Climate change has sometimes been called the ‘mother of all environmental problems’, but it is clear that not all climate-friendly acts are necessarily environment-friendly in other ways. Just as the building of nuclear reactors or hydro-power dams in the name of avoiding emissions has other impacts, fast-growing monocultures that are great at carbon sequestration could lead to biodiversity loss and increased transpiration losses of scarce water resources.
WHAT ROLE THEN FOR ECONOMIC INSTRUMENTS?
It seems that the assumptions on which PES is based do not hold in the case of forests and REDD+. Forest carbon is something over which property rights are unclear in many parts of the world, and over which state forest agencies, and perhaps village elite, rather than poor forest-dwelling households, are most likely to lay claim. Forest carbon sequestration is not like a commodity that can be traded across a counter—it has to be constantly monitored across large scales, imposing huge transaction costs. And all this when it is not even clear that there is any serious global interest in mitigating climate change, nor an ethical consensus on who should bear how much of the mitigation burden and how much ‘trading’ if any should be permitted. REDD+ exemplifies, perhaps in an acute form, the problems involved in blindly promoting market-based approaches such as PES to achieve environmental goals. How much and what kind of environmental conservation we should aim for, at whose expense and how this may be reconciled against livelihood needs of the poor and consumption wants of the rich is a deeply ethical question, that society at large is far from even confronting, let alone answering.
At the same time, people also think in economic terms and respond to economic incentives, and there is surely a rationale for using economic instruments such as carbon taxes on ‘commodified’ environmental goods such as petroleum for which markets are already well formed. But forests and many other environmental ‘goods’ are not so easily commodified—they have multiple ramifications and require collective action at various levels for their conservation. Given what the history and current structure of forest governance in most developing countries has been, financial incentives flowing from the top (whether from international markets or from national governments themselves) are hardly the solution to the problem of deforestation or degradation. And the real challenge may lie in changing people’s attitudes so that they ‘demand’ (in a broader political sense, rather than narrow economic one) societal action for sustainable and equitable development. Some financial mechanisms may serve to lubricate the wheels of change, but the driver of change has to lie elsewhere.
Different survival strategies for solitary and group living animals
Animals in the wild have to constantly watch their backs in order to survive, even if it means compromising on feeding time. They have evolved to exhibit variations of this vigilance behavior, depending on their surroundings, the number of group or family members with them, etc. Is one strategy better than another? Do some species have a better chance of survival because their strategy is more efficient than that of others?
Aliza le Roux and colleagues tested this by following two different species—the yellow mongoose which forages alone or in small groups of two to seven members, and the social meerkat that moves in groups of up to 18 members. They observed the animals for 2 years and recorded their births and deaths, nearest refuges and plant cover. They found that the presence of group members did not affect vigilance patterns in either species, but they showed different overall strategies. While the meerkats spent more time looking down and foraging, mongooses were alert more often.
The latter were found closer to safety more often than meerkats and also spent more time under complete cover. Like many other small mammals, both species remained close to cover and refuge, the mongooses more so because they did not have as many other eyes scanning the area. Despite these differences in their behavior, both species showed similar chances of survival, indicating that both strategies were efficient in helping them avoid their predators.
Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are always found in groups. While most members of the group search for food, there is always one on guard watching for predators.
Further reading:
le Roux A, Cherry IM, Gygax L and MB Manser. 2009. Vigilance behaviour and fitness consequences: comparing a solitary foraging and an obligate group-foraging mammal. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 63(8):1097-1107.
Understanding an invasive predator to better predict its impacts on the ecosystem
Mayflies are native to Ireland, in some parts where a species of amphipod crustacean, nicknamed Gamma (because its real name, Gammarus pulex, is clearly too long), has recently earned the reputation of a ruthless invader. Scientists know that adult Gamma feed on the young of mayflies, nymphs. But do young Gamma also feed on nymphs? If they do, it might be bad news for the mayflies, a ‘double whammy’, as the authors of this study put it.
Jaimie Dick and colleagues from Queen’s University, Ireland, collected small, medium and large (young, juvenile and adult) Gamma and examined gut content. Much to their surprise the scientists found that all Gammas ate mayfly nymphs, providing no time for the latter’s growth and development. The largest Gamma ate the smallest nymph even. Another ominous fact, Gamma can occur in great densities, up to 3000 per square metre, when compared to declining numbers of the mayfly.
The effects of a predator, especially a non-native one, on the community of animals and plants it interacts with, have been long studied. However, it is usually restricted to adult predators. In order to understand and predict an impact before it occurs, one must know a predator’s behaviour throughout its lifetime. This study highlights the possibility of larger effects of a predator and calls for looking at other known potential invaders, from this angle too.
Mayflies or shadflies are aquatic insects that belong to the order Ephemeroptera (in Greek ephemeros means short-lived and pteron means wing). Adults have a very short lifespan ranging from few minutes to few days while the immature stage, called nymphs, can last upto a year in fresh water.
Further reading:
Dick, Jaimie; Alexander, M.E.; MacNeil, C. Natural Born Killers: an invasive amphipod is predatory throughout its life-history. / Biological Invasions, Vol. 15, 2013, p. 309-313.
Scientists preempt a potentially harmful invasion in Australia, thanks to enthusiastic citizens
Slowly, yet steadily, invasions are taking place across the world. Plants and animals, sometimes by accident, end up in new territory and try their best to survive, even if it is at the cost of harming native species in that region. Whether it is the worldwide spread of Prosopis juliflora (mesquite), or the water hyacinth that is clogging waterways almost everywhere, we hear of the adverse effects they can have on native systems and how no measure of control and eradication seems to be effective. In Australia, already known for many invasions gone haywire, scientists have found recent introduction of a species of bee, Halictus smaragdulus. In order to gauge the extent of its probable distribution, the authors of this study used a multi-pronged approach, which included involving members of the general public, in addition to bioclimatic envelope modelling and observing habitat preferences.
Climate matching (fancifully called bioclimatic envelope modelling) techniques predict possible locations of a species using climate information from known locations of the species. However, this method is not very reliable —what if the species adapted to a new location with climatic features different from known locations? One could also search for the bees in areas around known locations but again, what if some bees flew further away from detection? Apart from these methods, the scientists also enrolled people from the general community to collect bees from their backyard. These citizens were sent a trapping kit with instructions, specimen jars, a training video, etc., and they could ask questions on an interactive blog.
From all these approaches, the scientists found that the bees had indeed extended their range, now occupying an area of approximately 46,800 square kilometres. This could lead to increased competition with native bee species for flower resources, spread of diseases and introduced weeds, etc. Most importantly, this study has once again shown that citizen science can help provide large amounts of data and save costs among other advantages, even though in this particular study volunteers only captured one specimen of the species!
Ashcroft MB, Gollan JR, & M Batley (2012). Combining citizen science, bioclimatic envelope models and observed habitat preferences to determine the distribution of an inconspicuous, recently detected introduced bee (Halictus smaragdulus Vachal Hymenoptera: Halictidae) in Australia.
Forests are now being quantified and monetised so that they can be traded like other commodities.
Talk of a Green Economy is everywhere. As climate related anxieties take hold of the psyche of large numbers of people living across the globe, several governments have responded by way of initiatives that evaluate and monetise the services performed by ecosystems under threat such as forests and fresh water. Economists, ecologists and policy makers are trying to incorporate into national economies what might have earlier been considered ‘free’ and commonly accessible goods. By this, the rhetoric of state or market control over land, water and forests has been virtually extended to genes and carbon—the units by which we have come to measure diversity and conservation.
The experience of the last 30 years of forest conservation in India is instructive to understand ‘neoliberal nature’ where commodities are the outcome of conservation and not production (McAlwee, 2011). Starting with the legislation of 1980 that identified loss of forests to development or broadly defined “non forest” use as a key threat, the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) set down rules and procedures for the grant of forest clearance based on assessments and evaluations when a project needed forest land. One of the main ways of offsetting this loss was to make it mandatory for project developers to pay for afforestation over an equal area of non forest land and when that is not available, twice the area of degraded forest land. Conservation, it seemed then, was based on the premise of keeping a certain percentage of land under forest. As this form of forest conservation progressed, official data shows that over 1 million hectares of forest have been put away through forest clearance since then. Of this, over 300,000 hectares were granted clearance between 2003 and 2007 alone, which was possible as procedures for clearances have been streamlined to cut down delays, grant of clearances centralised and expert groups and technical bodies established for decision making. With such ‘success’ in the clearance process, compensatory afforestation efforts were challenged both materially and morally. While the forest departments complained of funds not coming in on time, land not being available and poor monitoring of plantation sites, forest dwelling communities resisted more and more their displacement from forests, loss of access and impoverishment.
One of the most significant interventions in the arena of forest governance came from the Supreme Court in 1996. Known popularly after the name of the applicant from Tamil Nadu who is understood to have sent a post card to the court complaining of indiscriminate felling of trees, the Godavarman case (T. N. Godavarman Thirumulkpad vs Union of India and ors {WP No 202 of 1995}) has gone on since, issuing overarching orders to extending the jurisdiction of the central government and state forest department to any area or land which would attract the dictionary meaning of forests.
Through the Court’s order dated 26.09.2005 in this case, it also introduced the ‘Net Present Value’ (NPV) for the diversion of forests based on tree density and ecosystem services as a way of making forests more valuable in the process of development. NPV is understood as a value to compensate, in money terms, for the loss of tangible as well as intangible benefits flowing from forest lands due to their diversion to non-forest use. The preliminary idea was that this would either act as a deterrent to forest conversion, or as a compensation whereby the money collected could be ploughed back into conservation activities of the state forest departments. The methodology adopted ranges from charging project proponents amounts from Rs 4.38 lakh per hectare for class IV (open dense forests) to Rs 10.43 lakh per hectare for class I and II (very dense forest). The monies earned are collected by the Compensatory Afforestation Planning and Management Authority (CAMPA) and disbursed to state governments for conservation activities based on their annual plan of operations. These efforts have brought back old and much criticised ideas like Joint Forest Management and invested them with financial resources that have been collected by giving up existing forests.
Whether in the form of land, tree species or density, forests have been classified, monetised and substituted by other products of conservation such as plantations or Protected Areas (PAs). What the dual strategies of valuation and compensation that govern the mechanics of the FCA or NPV have also managed to do is convert forests into decontextualised, mobile and tradable commodities between regions. The condition of compensatory afforestation and NPV in particular meets obstacles in areas such as Kinnaur district in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. A substantial portion of the district is above the tree line and comprises high altitude cold desert areas. The forest types in this region and many alpine pasture lands of the region are not ones where high tree density can be observed. The calculation of NPV is significantly challenged in an ecosystem of this nature. During a conversation with forest officials of the region in June 2011, it was learnt that forest land is continuously being sought for the construction of border roads as well as hydro power projects, but the district does not have any land where compensatory afforestation can take place. Therefore, if any forest land is diverted in Kinnaur district, the compensatory afforestation will need to take place in another district of Himachal Pradesh, land for which is yet to be identified.
As such policy prescriptions are carried out in ritualised, bureaucratic ways, fictional forests are being reconstituted in law and policy over and over again. While this has been the scenario at the national level, the new global approach of calculating the worth of forests by the carbon they hold is antithetical to popular imaginations of forests. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has recognised the role of forest conservation in climate mitigation.
Mechanisms such as REDD and REDD+ have been arrived at through global negotiations where forests can be valued in the carbon trade market on the basis of their carbon sequestration potential. Such a contention has trapped forests, making them readily available for trade not just nationally but across borders. The global climate change negotiations and decisions allow for financial flow into countries which encourage the maintenance of such units of forests.
Forests have been a contested field for many years now, and the site around which immense mobilisation for cultural identity and political recognition has taken place. Issues of loss of access and forest related livelihoods have animated the movements for economic rights. This new turn, fuelled by global climate concerns, to manage forests as carbon stocks as they are the basis of all other environmental services, begs us to investigate knowledge that reduces and abstracts forests into fungible units performing certain secular and universal functions that are prioritised above all else. The description of such forests is underscored by quantitative values and even though place, context and relationships may be mentioned, they seem irrelevant to the science of valuation. The forest in government records is hardly an entity with multiple meanings that are bestowed upon it by our occasions of experience with it. It is without history, ecology or story. Instead, it is transformed into a forest of numbers.
There are innumerable examples to illustrate the effect of regulation based on such forest ‘facts’. A few years ago, the Chairman of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) was heard making a case for the large dam projects in the Northeastern states of India being awarded carbon credits because it would submerge old growth forests and recreate growing forests that supposedly had a much higher capacity for carbon sequestration. It is not easy to ignore this as bad science because that would merely ‘fix’ the same forest for its role as carbon stock. We need a new epistemology for environmental governance that rescues forests from the stock vs. sequestration debate, or rather from the discourse of fungible environmental services.
The impulse to create an asset out of forests, hardly new to us, so that it will pay for its own management, conservation and governance is now premised on absurd abstractions. Such ‘rituals’ of commensuration that are at the core of the idea of Green Capital have legitimised the siting of mines, dams and industrial projects in forests. Rather than methods of abstraction that separate forests from their ecological contexts and divest them of their social meanings, we need a form of governance that will allow forests to thrive for the many things they allow us to be.
Suggested readings
Kohli, K., M.Menon, V.Samdariya, and S.Guptabhaya. 2011. Pocketful of Forests: Legal debates on valuating and compensating forest loss. Kalpavriksh & WWF-India, New Delhi.
McElwee, Pamela. 2011. Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?, Geoforum. Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 412–426
Sukhdev, Pawan. 2011. Putting a Price on Nature: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, Solutions, Volume 1, Issue 6, January 2011 pp:34-43
Authors – Manju Menon is Program Director of the Environmental Justice Program at Namati, New Delhi, manjumenon1975@gmail.com, Kanchi Kohli works at Kalpvriksh Environment Group, New Delhi. kanchikohli@gmail.com
Illustrator – Kalyani Ganapathy
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A book in five parts, Of Tigers & Men by Richard Ives, gathers momentum slowly. After reading two or three chapters, just before putting the book away feeling a little let-down, there is a surprise, a finale to all that seemingly unnecessary build-up, a gentle hint of reality, of the interaction between man and tiger, and his own journey as an author, a person, naturalist and tourist. Richard Ives dons all these hats in the book with ease and provides lucid descriptions from every angle.
In the prologue, he introduces not just his subject and the striped star, but also an ‘informant’ who makes appearances in later chapters too. He writes Part One through the lens of a tourist, with vivid portrayals of the crowded dusty cities of India, conventional trips to national parks and thrilling tiger sightings. The author quickly moves away and delves into the story of meeting one of the famous ‘tiger men’, Billy Arjan Singh, at his farm in Uttar Pradesh. He draws out the unclear character of Billy as it evolves in his mind, over vague dinners and ominous trips to the jungle. Even as he slowly understands this person, he is told very matter-of-factly that there is no hope for the tigers. Shocked, he hopes still, and continues travelling. In the next part of the book, he meets his ‘informant’ again, who remains shadowy and veiled in his conversations with the author. There are chapters here that carry almost entire reprints from a manuscript that the ‘informant’ is working on at the time, clearly important to Ives, but quite a tangent from the rest of the book. And yet again, he is told the same insipid fact—there is no hope for tigers.
Writing next from Indonesia, the book takes a turn to a philosophical journey of the self. Until now, Ives expressed terribly keen interest in meeting a tiger on foot, a rather “suicidal” notion as his friend wrote him in an anxious letter. But in Indonesia, he seems more worried about dying at sea, with chicken and other passengers on a crowded boat. Ives is lost in an increasingly bleak world, with rapidly vanishing tigers and a cynical co-passenger, a fellow naturalist, but an extremely foul-mouthed and bitter man. Ives recognises in this man an ideal example of one who truly believes that humans are not superior to all else in this world and also an example of how to continue living in bitter societies filled with “city-dwelling idiots”. All signs of hostility disappear when this man sees a new or rare bird and drowns blissfully in the beauty of nature. Ives continues his exploration, even as it enters the ‘Age of Extinction’. He ends Part Four with his dream finally coming true, seeing a tiger on foot, a magical experience that has him doubting its actuality.
All these experiences seem to have left the author disturbed, sad and ‘wanting to be left alone’, almost like his crazy travel partner in Indonesia. By chapter 35, he is in Nepal and seems more unclear than before, lost and confused but still on his feet, shuffling nevertheless. The book is an odyssey, a voyage of man and tiger, of Richard Ives from being a tourist to feeling like an intruder. It builds intelligibly towards the end, giving meaning to the title. While the writing is clear and simple throughout, I couldn’t help but wonder if some entire chapters were even required; they seemed loose and without apparent purpose. But if one can look past this, it is great story-telling filled with vivid descriptions and occasional suspense, leaving you not with his view or opinion but leading you instead to your own.
The Green India Mission aims to raise carbon stocks to tap benefits from the global carbon market. But its reliance upon JFM institutions strengthens the regime of exploitation. REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and Carbon Stock Enhancement) is a critical component of the international initiative for mitigating global climate change. Recently, in favour of a comprehensive REDD+ approach, India presented an ambitious Green India Mission programme under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in 2008 to advance the objectives of the Kyoto Protocol. The Green India Mission (GIM) is one of eight National Missions under NAPCC which aims to raise carbon stocks to tap benefits from the world carbon market. Hence, the proposed Mission aims to address the issue of climate change by enhancing carbon sinks in the State’s forests while enabling forest dependent communities by providing them certain monetary incentives. In this context, I try to assess the impact of India’s REDD+ initiatives and argue that this process of enhancing carbon stock though incentivising approaches results in an ‘inclusive exploitation’ of forest peoples, leading to negative impacts on their relationship with nature and threatening their livelihoods.
WHY REDD+? REDD+ initiatives created an enormous opportunity for India to gain ‘positive incentives’ for its ‘pro-conservation approach’, guided by the World Bank and other bilateral donors. Following the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP 13) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali in December 2007, the scope of REDD was broadened to REDD+, which also provides incentives for increases in carbon stocks and emission reduction credits from a wider array of forest management practices. Improvements to logging practices, forest fire prevention, afforestation/reforestation and sustainable forest management, in addition to forest conservation, become potential credit-generating activities under REDD+. Under the REDD+ initiative, India expects to be rewarded for providing carbon service to the international community through nationwide greening programmes, such as the large scale plantations under ‘Social Forestry’ during 1970s and 1980s and National Afforestation Programme during the 2000s. One major incentive for India to design REDD+ strategy development plan has been the prospect of accessing funds from the World Bank-administered Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and, more recently, from the UN-REDD Programme. It is estimated that a REDD+ programme for India could provide capture of more than 1 billion tonnes of additional CO2 over the next 3 decades and provide more than US $3 billion as carbon service incentives under REDD+. As a part of its REDD+ strategy, India has undertaken several initiatives in recent years including a submission to UNFCCC on REDD in 2008, establishment of a Technical Group and a National REDD+ Coordinating Agency.
The most landmark initiative in this regard is the announcement of an ambitious Green India Mission programme under the National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2008 to be implemented between 2010-11 and 2019-20 by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF), Government of India. Recognising that climate change phenomena could adversely affect natural biological resources and associated livelihoods, the overarching objective of the Mission, with a budget of US $10 billion (approximately), is to increase forest/ tree cover on 5 million ha of forested and non forested land, and improve quality of forest cover on another five million ha—a total of 10 million ha. The Mission will also focus on improvement of ecosystem services, including biodiversity, hydrological services and carbon sequestration, and aim to increase forest-based livelihood incomes for three million forest dependent families. In terms of carbon sequestration, the mission aims to reach an annual CO2 sequestration of 50 to 60 million tonnes by 2020, which will increase the share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions offset by India’s forest and tree cover to around 6 percent as compared to 4.5 percent that would have been offset in the absence of the Mission. The ambitious Mission was on the verge of initiation with the allocation of Rs 200 crore in the Union Budget for the year 2011-12.
EMPOWERMENT OF INCLUSIVE EXPLOITATION? The Mission aims to strengthen decentralised forest governance by involving local community institutions, particularly forest dwelling communities, in the field level implementation of the programme. According to the draft document, decentralised forest governance would be strengthened through Gram Sabhas (Village Assembly) as overarching institutions and thematic committees such as Joint Forest Management Committees (JFMCs), Community Forest Management Groups (CFMs–a large number in Orissa), Van Panchayats (in Uttarakhand), and Village Councils (in the Northeast) and livelihood promotion groups. The Mission would facilitate the active coordination of the Forest Department with Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and other partner agencies. According to the Mission document, the spread of Joint Forest Management across states and the implementation of The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 provided a legitimate background and space for positive interventions of the community in this kind of protection, regeneration and management of the forests under the purview of GIM.
The Mission also aims to revamp the FDAs at the State and District levels and JFMCs at the village level for providing support to secured community tenure, capacity building for adaptive forest management and livelihood support activities. With all these initiatives, the Mission would contribute to empowerment of communities and reinforce decentralised local governance of forests in the overall context of climate variability and adaptation. In this context, given increasing educated unemployed youth in rural areas, the Mission would invest in the development of a cadre of ‘community-based change agents’ from amongst educated community youth, to facilitate planning, implementation and monitoring of Mission activities at the local level. This incentive-oriented model for community involvement for conservation and enhancement of the forest cover engenders the ideas of ‘Green Dividend’, ‘Green Bonus’ and ‘Trees for Credit’, at least in the form of proposals before the MoEF during public consultations on the Mission which took place in different parts of the country. However, it is evident from the Mission document that it placed primary thrust upon so–called JFM institutions like FDAs and JFMCs to involve communities. But, JFM experiences show that the so called participatory exercises of people under the programme have been merely restricted to either patrolling activities for forest protection or regeneration of forest species. Participation in decision making regarding the modes of conservation, species choice, livelihood development and above all the quantum and mechanism of benefit sharing has neither been realised nor been encouraged in any form. Community participation was used in this ‘joint’ exercise as a means of directing communities to achieve preordained project targets, and the programmes failed to secure their rights in planning and decision making. Further, in the’ joint’ management, the forest department’s agendas of timber extraction dominated the management system, with little benefit to local communities.
Therefore, the uncritical reliance of the Mission’s decentralising strategy upon the JFM framework can only strengthen further the regime of ‘inclusive’ exploitation in forest governance. I term this as ‘inclusive’ because it happens under the guise of decentralised frameworks where the projected strategy of participation is often turned into a mechanism of co-option of forest dwellers under a top down agenda of management. Though the Mission document has provided a prominent role for Gram Sabhas in this model of decentralisation, experiences of Gram Sabha functioning clearly show that either they were systematically ignored or forced to agree at gun point to give up their land to multinationals, as in Jharkhand and Orissa. Further, under GIM, the forest dwelling communities would not have any choice of species to be planted. They would not have any authority to decide the quantum of benefit or the mechanism of the said benefit sharing. There is no scope for negotiation with the forest department relating to matters of facilities and privileges to be offered to them. Rather, they would have to work for the protection and plantation of forest species as carbon storage under the terms and conditions laid down by the department to promote the agenda of carbon trading under the REDD+ mechanism.
Here, the exploitation of the ecosystem people occurs fundamentally at two concurrent levels. Primarily, there is an exploitation of the indigenous knowledge, skills and local capacities in regeneration of forests to extract market values from nature while serving the ruling interest. The involvement of forest dwellers in plantation activities through participatory mechanisms would naturally contribute to the associated processes of weeding, cleaning and burning and protection from wildlife in exchange for certain nominal financial incentives to the communities. This community incentive does nothing more than ensure the flow of uninterrupted and cheap labour while bypassing the cost of individual wages for plantation, helping free foresters from the burden of management. Further, the experience from JFM shows that there is every possibility of irregularities in realising those incentives by the communities, where the department is allegedly involved in destroying community organisations by a divide and rule strategy across class, caste and political affiliation. Most importantly, the incentives are primarily linked with benefits to the forest crop enhancing carbon sink rather than with the welfare of the communities. Hence, forest dwellers would be encouraged to plant trees even in their agricultural lands instead of growing seasonal crops, potentially affecting their food production.
POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES The market based incentive culture of neo-liberalism through raising carbon stock under GIM is likely to distort communities’ normal interaction with nature, as it would alter fundamentally their communal orientation towards subsistence in favour of an individualistic utility maximising exercise to earn more money from forests. This could not only affect their community bond but hamper their interactions with nature for livelihood. Their role in the maintenance, protection and regeneration of forests seems to be jeopardised by making them an integral part of the neoliberal web of commodifying nature. This change, though it need not mean the complete loss of harmony with nature, certainly implies a negative transformation in the attitude and orientation of forest dependent people towards natural resources.
Besides, this inclusive exploitation may lead to a complete separation of those forest dwellers from their resource base whereby they can be voluntarily displaced from their land and alienated from nature in exchange for the financial incentives provided by private companies to explore a new arena of investment under the carbon trading model of REDD+. Indeed, the Mission could facilitate the process of destroying the livelihood of millions through ongoing massive land grabs by large corporations aided and abetted by the land acquisition policies of the government. Thus, this experiment with incentivisation under a decentralised framework in the GIM is exploitative in concept and operation, cashing in on the indigenous expertise of forest people to protect and regenerate their forest resources, and ultimately facilitating the wholesale take-over of forests by multinational companies at the cost of local livelihoods.
