பாட்டியும் நாகப் பாம்பும் 

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வெயில் நிறைந்த மதியம் ஒன்றில், எனது பாட்டி யசோதாம்மா, தன் வீட்டுக் கொல்லைப்புறத்தில் நாகப்பாம்பொன்றைப் பார்த்தார். இந்திய மாநிலம் கர்நாடகாவின் ஷிமோகா மாவட்டத்தில், மேற்குத் தொடர்ச்சி மலைக்கிராமம் ஹம்ச்சாவில் தனியாக வசித்து வருபவர் அவர். பாட்டி அங்கில்லாத ஓரிரு மாதங்களில், ஆள் நடமாட்டமில்லாத அவள் கொல்லைப்புறத்தை அது தனது வீடாக்கிக் கொண்டது போலும். இந்தவகை நாகம் மிகவும் விஷத்தன்மை கொண்டது. இந்தியாவில் அதிகளவு பாம்புக்கடி மரணங்கள் நிகழக் காரணமான நான்குரகப் பாம்புகளில் இதுவும் ஒன்று. ஆனால் எதிர்பார்த்தபடி எனது பாட்டி அப்பாம்பைக் கண்டு பயப்படவில்லை. தன் முன்னே தோன்றியதற்காக அதற்கு நன்றி கூறி, யாரையும் துன்புறுத்தாமல் இருக்கும்படி வேண்டிக்கொண்டார். இந்துமதப் பண்பாட்டில் நாகப்பாம்பை நாகராஜா என வணங்குவது அனைவரும் அறிந்ததே.

அது வீட்டுக்குள் வராதபடி  பின்னர் கவனமுடன் இருந்தார்.  மாலை நான்கு மணியளவில் அது சாலையைக் கடந்து அயல்வீட்டை நோக்கி ஊர்ந்து சென்றது. அங்கு ஒரு குழிக்குள் பதுங்கிய அதன் வால் மட்டும் வெளியே தெரிவது பாட்டியின்  பார்வையில் பட்டது. ஆர்வமிகுதியில் அதைத் தொடர்ந்து கவனித்தபடி இருந்தார். சுமார் ஒரு மணி நேரத்திற்குப் பிறகு அதன் வால் விசித்திரமாக ஆடத் தொடங்கியது. ஒரு சில நிமிடங்களில் அது குழிக்குள்ளிருந்து உப்பிய உடலுடன் வெளியே வந்தது. ஏதோ பெரிய இரையொன்றை விழுங்கிவிட்டு அது சிரமப்படுவது போலிருந்தது. இன்னும் சில நிமிடங்களில் அது மிகுந்த வலியில் துடிப்பதைக் கண்டார். இந்நேரத்திற்குள் அப்பாம்பு மீண்டும் பாட்டி வீட்டு முற்றத்தை எட்டியிருந்தது. விழுங்கிய எலியொன்றை திடீரென வாந்தியெடுத்தது. ஆயினும் இன்னும் பெரிய ஏதோ ஒன்று வயிற்றுக்குள் கிடக்க அது வலியில் துடித்தபடி இருந்தது. 

பாம்பின் வலியறிந்த பாட்டி  பதைபதைத்தார். பாம்பு பிடிப்பவர்கள் எவரையும் அவர் அழைக்க விரும்பவில்லை. அவர்கள் அதைப் பிடித்து ஏதேனும் ஒரு காட்டுப்பகுதியில் விட, அது மேலும் வலியில் துடிக்கக் கூடுமெனப் பயந்தார். அதனருகே ஒரு கிண்ணத்தில் நீர் வைத்தும் பயனின்றிப் போனது. மாலை ஏழு மணியளவில் அவர் முற்றத்தில் பிளந்த வாயுடன் அது மரித்துப் போனது. தன் வீட்டில் மரணம் நிகழ்ந்ததைப் போன்று பாட்டி அழுதார், அயல்வீட்டாரை அறிவித்தார், பின் பூசாரி ஒருவரை அழைத்து அதற்கு அந்திக்கர்மங்கள் செய்யச் சொன்னார். அதன் இறப்பிற்கான காரணம் எவருக்கும் தெரியவில்லை. விஷம்வைத்துக் கொல்லப்பட்ட எலிகளிரண்டை அது விழுங்கியதே காரணமென பாட்டி நம்பினார். 

பல்லுயிர்களுடன் பொருந்தி வாழும் இந்தியப் பண்பாட்டிற்கு இந்நிகழ்வு ஓர் எடுத்துக்காட்டு. அவையில் சில மனிதர்க்குத் தீங்கு விளைவிக்கும் உயிர்களாய் இருப்பினும் கூட. இப்பண்பாட்டில், குறிப்பாக கிராமப்புறங்களில் உள்ளுறைந்திருக்கும் நம்பிக்கைகளும் விழுமியங்களும், மக்கள்தொகை மிகுந்த இந்நாட்டில் வனவிலங்குகளும் பாதுகாக்கப்பட வழிவகுக்கின்றன. குறிப்பாக பஞ்சபூதங்கள் அனைத்தும் இங்கு வணங்கப்படுகின்றன. யானை விநாயகனாக, ஆமை விஷ்ணுவாக, காட்டுப்பன்றி வராஹமாக, காவிரி நதி தாயாக வணங்கப்படும் வழக்கங்களையும்  காண்கிறோம். இயற்கை மற்றும் சுற்றுச்சூழல் குறித்த புரிதலொன்று தினசரி வாழ்வில் பிணைந்திருப்பதைப் பார்க்கிறோம். பல பண்டிகைகளும் அதைப் பிரதிபலிக்கின்றன. 

விஷம் நிறைந்த நாகப்பாம்போடு வாழுமிடம் பகிர்வதைப் பாட்டி அறிந்திருந்தார்.  அதைப்பிடித்து வெகுதூரக் காட்டுக்குள் விடுவது அதைத் துன்புறுத்தும் என்ற புரிதல் அவருக்கு இருந்தது. உணவுச்சங்கிலியின் முக்கியத்துவத்தையும் எலிகளை விஷம் வைத்துக் கொல்வதின் சிக்கல்களையும் அவர் உணர்ந்திருந்தார். இவையனைத்தையும் இன்றைய தலைமுறைக்கு பள்ளிகளிலும் பல்கலைக்கழகங்களிலும் கற்றுக்கொடுக்க வேண்டியிருக்கிறது. பாம்பின் மறைவிற்கு மூன்று நாட்கள் துக்கம் அனுசரித்துவிட்டு, நான்காவது நாள் இந்நிகழ்வை எனது அம்மாவிற்கு விவரிக்கும் போது பாட்டி மிகவும் உணர்ச்சிவசப்பட்டிருந்தார். பாம்போடு அவருக்கிருந்த தொடர்பு அறிவியலும் உணர்வும் கலந்த ஒன்று. 

இயற்கையோடும் வனவிலங்குகளோடும் மனிதர்க்குள்ள தொடர்பானது மத நம்பிக்கைகள், பண்பாடு மற்றும் வாழ்க்கை முறை சார்ந்தது. நகரமயமாதலும் வணிகமயமாதலும் பெருகப்பெருக இயற்கையோடும் பண்பாட்டோடும் ஒருவர்க்குள்ள தொடர்பு துண்டிக்கப்படுகிறது. வனவிலங்குகளோடுள்ள பண்பாட்டுத் தொடர்பு பாட்டியின் தலைமுறையோடு மறைய, வழக்கங்கள் பலதும் அதன் மூலக்காரணத்தையும் பொருளையும் இழந்து நிற்கின்றன. இந்துமதவழிபாடு கோவிலுக்குள் அடைபட்ட சிலைகளோடு நின்றுவிட, நாகராஜாக்கள் வாகனங்களில் அடிபட்டுச் சாகின்றனர், விநாயகரும் வராஹங்களும் மின்சாரம் பாய்ந்து மரிக்கின்றனர், திருமால்  கடத்தப்படுகிறார், வாயுதேவனும் காவிரித்தாயும் மாசுபாட்டுக்கு உள்ளாகின்றனர், அவர்களனைவரின் வசிப்பிடங்களும் அழிக்கப்படுகின்றன. பாதுகாக்கப்பட்ட பகுதிகளுக்கு வெளியே மிக அதிக அளவில் வனவிலங்குகள் வசிக்கும் இந்தியாவில், அவற்றின் நீடித்த இருப்பு நமக்கு அவையோடுள்ள பண்பாட்டுத் தொடர்பைச் சார்ந்துள்ளது. உணர்வும் பண்பாட்டு விழுமியங்களும் இல்லாமல் வனவிலங்குகளைப் பாதுகாத்தல் இயலாதெனும் எனது நம்பிக்கையைப் பாட்டியின் அனுபவம் உறுதி செய்தாலும், அந்நிகழ்வு என்னுள் பெரும் கேள்விகளை விதைத்தது. நமது பண்பாட்டின் முக்கியப் பகுதியாக வனவிலங்குகள் பாதுகாப்பை எப்படி மீண்டும் கொண்டு வருவது? அவ்வாறு கொணர்தல் கல்வி நிறுவனங்களின் வேலை மட்டுமா, இல்லை குடும்பங்களுக்கும் சமூகத்திற்கும் அதில் பொறுப்புள்ளதா? அடிப்படையில், மனிதவாழ்வு பண்பாட்டு வழக்கங்களால் வடிவமைக்கப்படுகிறது. அப்பண்பாட்டிலுள்ள உண்மைச் சாரங்களை மீட்டெடுத்து நீட்டித்தல் இப்போதைய சுற்றுச்சூழல் பாதுகாப்புப் பணிகளில் மிகவும் முக்கியம்.

எழுத்து: ம்ருண்மயி அமர்நாத் 

புகைப்படங்கள்: சந்தோஷ் தாகலே மற்றும் V. புஷ்கர் (Creative Common Licence வழியாக)

Majestic Mangroves: The Blessings of the Coasts

“Dad, what time will our taxi arrive?” asked little Aadi.     

“At five in the morning,” replied his father.      

“Go to bed,” his mother chimed in, “We have to leave early tomorrow.” 

Aadi went to the bedroom but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sleep. He was just too excited! He was visiting his native place in Kerala for the first time in seven years.

His grandparents lived in a picturesque little village in Kannur. The town had a lot to explore: from ponds to estuaries to beaches, from little herbs to gigantic trees, the village had it all! His grandparents’ house was right beside a river, and one could see its mesmerising beauty and elegance just by peeking out of their window. Aadi had been fascinated by this when he was younger and now that he was visiting again, he couldn’t help but feel eager. After a lot of tossing and turning, Aadi somehow managed to fall asleep. 

The next morning, Aadi and his parents left for the airport. Although Aadi got a window seat and despite it being a beautiful day, he was too drowsy to enjoy the view and slept soundly throughout the flight. He woke up as the plane landed and they went to collect their luggage. Upon exiting the airport, they found Grandpa and Grandma waiting for them, along with his Uncle Ajith. Aadi jumped with excitement and all of them bundled into a car and drove home happily. 

That night, Aadi’s grandfather told him stories about spirits, magical lakes, forests and many more nature-related stories.      

The next morning was beautiful: birds chirped, the sun shone brightly, and the river shimmered and made for a breathtaking view. The weather was warm and hazy. After a traditional lunch made up of a variety of different curries, papad, and pickles along with payasam, everyone turned lazy and refused to move. Grandpa had proposed a tour of the mangrove theme park in Valapattanam, as it was only seven kilometres away from their home. 

They reached it after a half-hour drive in Uncle Ajith’s car. Grandpa was an expert on mangroves, so no guides were needed on this trip. The family toured the park and asked him about the plants, the insects, the birds and the fascinating mangrove roots that stuck up from the soil. Aadi looked and listened intently.

After some time, he asked Grandpa why the park was made. 

Grandpa replied, “This park was made so that the mangrove forest could be turned into a site of tourism. This was done so that it could attract more people wanting to learn about the natural history and heritage of the area. This helps increase the number of people wanting to conserve this precious resource.” 

Aadi was intrigued, and wondered why the mangrove forests needed to be conserved. They looked like wasteland with wet squelchy soil, plus they were smelly and difficult to walk in. When Aadi said this aloud, Grandpa patiently explained:        

“Mangroves help our environment in so many different ways. They provide shelter to various birds, deer and insects along with many endemic species. These mangroves also help your uncle earn his living. You know that he is the manager of Nimraa Fish and Fish Products Exporters and his company exports a variety of fish, right? Well, approximately a third of these products are from the areas of mangrove forests. These forests also help protect the seashore from oncoming disasters. Imagine there is a giant tsunami forming near the estuaries. The dense growth of mangroves wouldn’t let it form completely and turn disastrous and the waves would eventually die down. They even absorb the excess moisture and rainwater during heavy rains, thus preventing flooding.”    

“Wow! Looks like mangroves play an important role in the environment,” replied Aadi. “But how can we help conserve these mangroves?” 

“Raising awareness about the depletion of mangroves is the first step towards their conservation. Restoration will also help conserve this resource along with decreasing the clearing of land for shrimp farming, agriculture, development of coastal areas and cities and setting up of industries, can work wonders in this field.  Even children can contribute by creating awareness among their friends and schoolmates regarding the plight of mangroves. As my father used to say, ‘You are never too young or too old to protect the things you love.’”

“Wow, there’s so much I can do, but where do I start?”asked Aadi, looking determined.

“There was an exceptionally aware and active mangrove conservation activist named Kallen Pokkudan. He was a widely known and well-respected figure who was regarded by many to be ‘The Father of the Environment’ in Kerala. His articles and books opened the eyes of many and created a lot of young mangrove activists. I have his biography, Pokkudan Ezhuthatha Aathmakatha: The Autobiography Pokkudan Couldn’t Write, somewhere in our private library. I can lend it to you if you want,” was Grandpa’s answer. 

Aadi felt inspired. This visit had truly opened his eyes to the plight of such a precious and fast-depleting resource. He had seen the natural disasters that had happened in Kerala in the past few years. Now, he regarded them as nature’s payback to humans for destroying these beautiful gifts.

A week later, Aadi was at the airport to return home. He was sad to be leaving, but at the same time, excited to see his friends, for he had pledged to tell everyone he could about mangroves, their plight, and how to save them.

Water in a Crisis: A Chain of Mishaps, but the Change Starts with us

It was a bright sunny day, and I was patiently listening to my science teacher talk about the importance of water. During the discussion, he mentioned that 71 percent of the earth is covered with water, but only one percent of this water is available as freshwater! I was shocked. Is this all? Only one percent!

Later that day I discussed it with my parents. I had several questions. Over the weekend, they took me to a lake, a few kilometres away from my house in Delhi. What I thought was going to be another family excursion turned into a learning opportunity that opened my eyes. 

As we reached the lake, I noticed the sadness in my mother’s eyes. When I asked her about this, she responded that the lake during her childhood had been much larger in size. Disappointed by this, my parents took me to the banks of the river Yamuna which flows through our city. I was instantly welcomed by a foul smell. My vision was not spared of the grotesque state of the river, either. I saw polythene bags floating on the surface of the river, and the colour of the water was a dirty brown. 

I felt disheartened. I had learnt about the mighty Yamuna in Geography: how it originates in the mountains and tumbles down to meet the Ganga. The picturesque image I had in mind of rivers—crystal clear water, animals playing in the water—was shattered. I decided to discuss this with my science teacher. 

The next day, I bombarded him with my questions. He explained that several factors, including extreme heat, inefficient use for irrigation, deforestation, and pollution have contributed to the sorry state of the water bodies that quench our thirst. He added that people recklessly throw away garbage, polluting our rivers without thinking of the long-term consequences. Furthermore, industries discharge untreated sewage into rivers, posing a risk to both the biodiversity of the river and us. He asked me to remember the contribution of trees to the water cycle, and think about how deforestation might impact the water level in freshwater bodies. 

I was filled with despair, realising that an important resource is suffering such a painful death. My friends and I decided to find solutions to this problem. With my teacher’s help, we shortlisted a few ideas. First, by minimising plastic waste and recycling plastic instead of dumping it in the rivers, we as citizens can contribute to solving the problem of plastic pollution. Second, we should install rainwater harvesting systems in our houses to prevent water loss. Third, while irrigating, farmers should use the drip irrigation method as it is very efficient and there is no wastage of water. Fourth, the government should ban industries from releasing untreated waste directly into rivers. We should also promote activities such as afforestation and reforestation in affected regions. It is also important to raise public awareness about water pollution and depletion. 

While some of these might not be easily achieved, I have started to be more aware of the choices I make and resources I use in daily life. I also try to advocate for environmentally friendly practices among my friends and family. While my contribution will seem tiny in the greater picture, I believe it is as essential as a drop of water that contributes to forming an ocean. 

Image: Anvi Sharma

Markhor Goat: the Serpent Killer of Islamabad

Without even saying good morning first, Yurie rushed into school and asked her friend Juliet if she had watched the National Geographic Channel show the night before.

“No, I was watching KBC,” replied Juliet. “Why do you ask?”

“You missed learning about the strangest animal I have ever seen—and I have watched every show on National Geographic!”

“What strange animal?” asked Juliet. “What makes this animal so unique?”  

Both friends started surfing the internet to gather more information about the peculiar animal that had been featured and noted down their findings. A couple of hours later, they exchanged their notes to quench their inquisitive minds’ thirst for knowledge.

Yurie stated that she first came to know about this animal—the markhor goat—from a New Year’s greetings card sent by a cousin living in Islamabad, Pakistan. She could not identify it at first glance. Upon enquiring, she was told by her cousin that it was Pakistan’s national animal. Yurie was astonished to hear this because she had not previously been aware of it. 

She discovered that the markhor goat weighs anywhere between 32 and 110kg. Measuring 132–186cm in length and 65–115cm in height at the shoulder, it has the highest maximum shoulder height of all species in the genus Capra (goats), and is only surpassed in length and weight by the Siberian ibex. 

Its coat is grizzled, light brown to black, smooth and short in summer, but growing longer and thicker in winter. Physical features can be used to distinguish between genders. Males have longer hair on the chin, throat, chest, and shanks, whereas females are redder in colour, with shorter hair, a short black beard, and no mane.

Juliet shared her findings on the habitat and ecology of the animal. The markhor goat is adapted to living in mountainous terrain at an elevation of 600–3600m. It typically inhabits scrub forests made up primarily of oak, pine, and junipers. Its diet shifts seasonally: in the spring and summer it grazes, but turns to browsing trees in winter, sometimes standing on its hind legs to reach the high branches.

During the British colonial era, the markhor goat was considered to be among the most challenging game species because of the danger involved in stalking and pursuing it in the high mountainous terrain. In The Rifle in Cashmere, Arthur Brinckman wrote that “a man who is a good walker will never wish for any finer sport than ibex and markhor shooting”. In India, it is illegal to hunt markhor, nevertheless, they are poached for their meat and horns, which are thought to have medicinal properties.

Both Yurie and Juliet wanted to make their report public in the forthcoming school journal, but felt that their findings would be of little interest unless they included some fascinating facts about the animal. Here is what they collected from different sources:

“The name ‘markhor’ is thought to be derived from the Persian language,” said Yurie, “where ‘mar-’ stands for ‘snake, serpent’ and the suffix ‘-khor’ means ‘eater’. This is interpreted to represent the animal’s alleged ability to kill snakes, even though there is no direct evidence of it.”

“Like cows, markhors are often found chewing their cud after eating,” added Yurie. “In the process of chewing, the cud often falls out of their mouth and onto the ground. Locals insist that this partially chewed cud helps treat snake bites and other wounds, so it’s popular among people who prefer natural remedies.” 

According to at least one scientist from the 1850s, male markhors have an unpleasant smell that’s even worse than that of a typical domestic goat. This sort of adaptation could help ward off predators or mark their territory and it could also help other individuals detect them from a distance.

Female markhors provide nourishment (milk) and protection to their kids, with male markhors playing a minimal role in parenting. The young are weaned at 5–6 months, but some kids will remain with their mothers for a considerably longer period if they are not ready to venture out on their own.

Although hunting markhors is mostly illegal, the government of Pakistan does issue four permits to hunt each of the three subspecies of markhor every year. Hence, a total of 12 markhor hunting licences are sold annually in open auctions. The proceeds are supposedly used to fund the conservation of the animal.

Yurie and Juliet were thrilled that they could gather such interesting information about an animal they had never heard of before, the national animal of another country, and enjoyed sharing it with their peers at school.

Image: Wikimedia commons

Tried and tested: The role of evidence-based practices in sea turtle conservation

Drive along the Ratnagiri coast in western India in the early months of any year, and you are sure to come across a fenced-off enclosure on many of its beaches. The inside of the enclosure is usually dotted with small, evenly-spaced placards, while outside a fluttering banner or a wooden board declares it to be a sea turtle hatchery. Hatcheries, in general, are synonymous with sea turtle conservation the world over. But the efficacy of these structures in protecting sea turtle eggs and hatchlings (baby turtles) depends on whether the hatcheries follow best practices. As a conservation technique, freshly laid nests that are moved from their original locations on exposed beaches to protected hatcheries should—in theory produce more hatchlings than nests that are left unprotected. With fewer resources available and an increasing urgency for conservation actions to succeed, how do we know if the conservation strategy works?

Evidence-based conservation

For those of us familiar with the crime genre, evidence is a term used mainly in legal proceedings that eventually leads to a person being implicated (or not!) in some wrongdoing. Similarly, evidence plays a crucial role in many other action-based disciplines, including medicine, education, social work, and biodiversity conservation. The concept of evidence-based practice originated back in 1981 when a group of epidemiologists, led by Dr. David Sackett, suggested using evidence in medical sciences to choose the best treatment for their patients. They recommended that physician decisions needed to be informed by a well-rounded, systematic evaluation of available medical literature. Later, it came to be known as evidence-based medicine, a phrase coined by Dr. Gordon Guyatt and his team, and the practice served as a tool for physicians to determine the best course of action to reduce patient ailments. In the past few years, there has been an expansion in the use of evidence-based practices to aid in decisions for biodiversity protection and management.

Like medicine, conservation can be considered a ‘crisis discipline’ in which decisions must be made in a short time period and, sometimes, with limited information.

In 2001, Pullin and Knight first suggested the use of evidence to inform conservation actions, backed by scientific studies and not merely based on prior experience or instinct. The following years saw a rise in the number of reviews that were conducted to evaluate conservation strategies and determine their efficacy. Just like for medicine, it was called evidence-based conservation or EBC, and was adopted by prominent research groups, giving rise to online repositories like Conservation Evidence that compile evidence summaries from scientific studies to determine the success of conservation strategies for different taxa or ecosystems. Such repositories provide a source of validated information for quick access by conservationists and managers. The main intention is to identify the factors that lead to conservation success, which can then be used to promote its effective usage and target funding towards it. Examples for evidence-based practices in conservation include the evaluation of spatial strategies like the creation of protected areas, celebrity endorsement in marketing conservation, and the success of techniques used in sea turtle hatchery management!

Sea turtle life: On land and in the sea

As marine reptiles, sea turtles spend the better part of their lives feeding and resting in the sea. Their experience on land is short—limited to the time after they emerge from their sandy, underground nests as hatchlings and scramble across the beach to enter the water. Male turtles rarely ever return to land once they have left as hatchlings, but adult female turtles make the journey back to the natal region where they hatched, to lay eggs of their own. Despite the limited amount of time sea turtles spend on land, it is easier for us to protect the eggs laid on our beaches than to reduce threats to turtles at sea.

Sea turtle hatcheries: A conservation tool

Hatcheries are a popular ex-situ (i.e., away from the natural location) conservation strategy widely used across the world. A hatchery is usually a secure enclosure on or close to the nesting beach where at-risk sea turtle nests are relocated (i.e., moved from one location to another). Mainly used to combat threats to sea turtle eggs, including depredation by animals, poaching, and beach erosion, hatcheries are also a great resource to raise awareness about sea turtles and generate tourism, thus boosting the local economy by providing a source of income for many coastal communities. Based on its purpose, local materials, and the number of clutches of eggs that need to be protected, the enclosures come in all shapes and sizes.

A hatchery used only for conservation purposes is most likely to be a simply designed temporary arena constructed from wooden poles and mesh, with space to incubate relocated turtle eggs. Hatcheries that operate with additional objectives of ecotourism or to create awareness may expand their enclosures to include small information centres, tanks to retain hatchlings or hold injured or disabled turtles for viewing, and tend to be permanent structures.

Hatcheries operate on the core principle of protecting relocated eggs. But while moving these eggs from point A to point B may sound easy, it is a long process involving multiple steps that starts with locating a natural nest, removing the eggs, carrying them to the hatchery, constructing an artificial nest, and monitoring the number of hatchlings produced. Even the construction of a hatchery requires several considerations, the first and foremost being whether it is even required in the first place! After that, most of the steps in relocating eggs require decisions on when and how to conduct and/ or complete a particular activity. These decisions are driven by the various biological processes behind the development of turtle embryos in the eggs, which have been studied extensively and have helped experts in determining the basic dos and don’ts when employing hatcheries. Guided by these practices, practitioners and managers have used hatcheries to protect and improve their local sea turtle populations.

However, simply employing a hatchery does not guarantee a victory for conservation. The real measure of success lies in the number of eggs that hatch and the number of hatchlings that then enter the sea—all of which are influenced by the decisions made and the precision with which the best hatchery practices are followed. So, where does India stand when it comes to sea turtle hatcheries and their success?

Assessment of hatcheries in India

Three years ago, we began a study on hatchery practices in India. Considering India’s 7,500-km long coastline, we knew there would be a lot of hatchery managers and workers to reach out to for information. The main objective was to compare the best practices described in guidelines for hatcheries with real-life practices in collection, transportation, and incubation of eggs as well as the holding and release of hatchlings. With a few misses but mostly hits, representatives from 36 hatcheries agreed to participate in our survey and provided considerable information that improved our understanding of hatchery practices in India.

Responses revealed that some of the techniques used by the hatcheries did not align with practices recommended by experts and supported by scientific evidence. We found that most hatcheries were temporary structures, set up to mainly protect sea turtle eggs from predators, and which were moved annually so that relocated eggs were buried in clean sand. Other than protecting the eggs, some hatcheries were also used for ecotourism and to spread awareness about sea turtles and their conservation among local communities. The hatchery nests were spaced as recommended (no more
than one nest per square metre) to ensure that the heat and respiratory gases generated by one clutch of eggs did not affect another. However, a lot of nests were moved to the hatcheries just within or outside the accepted time limit for moving eggs (six hours), which potentially affected their chances of survival.

The depth of nests in some of the hatcheries was also different from the average nest depth for that particular species. Depths can influence the temperatures within the nest, and shallower or deeper relocated nests will affect the percentage of eggs that survive and the sex of hatchlings during the development stage. The most concerning finding, however, was that the percentage of eggs that successfully hatched out of the relocated clutches was no different from those left unprotected on the beach. This was observed to be true not only for hatcheries in India, but also for those in other countries in the northern Indian Ocean region. Further, our results also highlighted a lack of regular training in hatchery techniques for managers and workers, including an explanation of the scientific logic behind every practice, and limited resources that restricted the capabilities of the hatcheries to always follow best practices, thus minimising the conservation outcomes.

Based on our findings, we recommend that hatcheries must alter their practices depending on the requirement to protect nests in that particular region. This includes reducing the time between when eggs are laid and reburied in a hatchery, decreasing nest density within the hatchery, and ensuring suitable nest depths. There is also a need to periodically train hatchery workers to refresh their knowledge and to emphasise proper record-keeping of details such as hatching success and hatchling emergence. Finally but most importantly, conservationists and hatchery managers must consider in-situ protection of eggs, i.e., leaving eggs in their original location and/or using additional strategies like building small fences around individual nests. The material of the fences can be modified depending on the type of prevalent threats, thereby reducing the need for extra manpower and resources in moving eggs to a large hatchery.

Conclusion
In response to global biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, conservation activities around the world have increased to reduce threats, improve wild populations of plants and animals, and preserve our natural resources.

However, despite this urgency, there are limited resources for conservationists and managers, who struggle to achieve the double aim of conserving biodiversity and safeguarding the welfare and livelihoods of people living in the area. In this context, there is very little margin of error and resources have to be smartly used on strategies that will ensure a high likelihood of success. And this is where evidence-based practices in conservation or simply evidence-based conservation come in handy.

Knowledge of evidence-based conservation, combined with experiential learning, will help us make informed decisions and assure maximum success in our work. Practitioners are already advocating for the inclusion of evidence-based practices in curricula, to train future generations of conservationists and natural resource managers in critical analysis early on. Many conservation funders now include ‘Monitoring and Evaluation’ as a reporting requirement for projects that receive their funding. As the call for further conservation actions gathers momentum, it is important that conservationists and managers not only assess the effectiveness of their own activities, but also examine the best use of their efforts and resources to ensure that every action contributes to protecting biodiversity.

Further Reading

Phillott, A. D., N. Kale and A. Unhale. 2021. Are sea turtle hatcheries in India following best practices? Herpetological conservation and biology 16(3): 652–670.

Downey, H., T. Amano, M. Cadotte, C. N. Cook, S. J. Cooke, N. R. Haddaway, J. P. G. Jones et al. 2021. Training future generations to deliver evidence-based conservation and ecosystem management. Ecological solutions and evidence 2(1): e12032.

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Trailblazing women in East Africa’s marine conservation space

The role of women in marine conservation in East Africa is critical, as they are disproportionately affected by the impacts of environmental degradation, and their contributions to marine conservation efforts are often overlooked. Female leadership is especially important in this context because women bring unique perspectives, experiences, and skills that are essential for the success of marine conservation initiatives. Women often have a deep knowledge of the natural resources in their local areas, which can be used to develop effec tive conservation strategies. They are also often skilled communicators and negotiators, which can be valuable in engaging local communities in conservation efforts and in advocating for policy change.

Here, we profile women who play various roles in marine conservation across East Africa, paving the way for impactful, transformative leadership.

Dr Fiona Wanjiku Moejes, CEO, Mawazo Institute, Kenya

The Mawazo Institute is a women-led African organisation based in Nairobi, Kenya supporting early career African women researchers as they work to find soluti ons to local and global development challenges. Member of the African Marine Conservation Leadership Programme, is a Women for the Environment Africa Fellow and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Applied Phycology.

Prior to joining Mawazo, I served as both a senior marine research scientist (with a focus on applied microalgae and seaweed research) and a marine programme manager. During my time as programme manager at Dahari, I had the opportunity to lead community-led, research-based marine conservation efforts in the Comoros, where environmental degradation has had negative impacts on both the ecosystem and the communities that depend on it. Despite the limited resources available in the small East African island nation, ourteam at Dahari worked with the local fisher communities to support them in the management of their marine resources. One of my highlights was working with a fisherwomen’s association who were so passionate about protecting their natural resources and quickly became changemakers and leaders in their communities, helping them to live more sustainably with their marine ecosystem.

I see my role at Mawazo being complementary and a continuation to my previous work in the marine research and conservation space. I am building on my own experience and supporting the growth of the next generation of African women researchers, including those working in conservation.

African women researchers lack access to funding, mentorship and networks, and have to contend with gender-insensitive university policies, unequal domestic responsibilities and outright discrimination; all impacting their mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. This has led to the exclusion of African women and their authentic perspectives and voice in academia, research and development spaces— places where key decisions affecting Africa’s development are made. As a leader in this space, I am supporting the inclusion of the ideas and perspectives of African women in conservation and beyond, leading to the implementation of innovative, holistic and homegrown solutions for Africa.

Julitha Mwangamilo, Programme Manager at Sea Sense, Tanzania

Sea Sense works closely with coastal communi ties in Tanzania to safeguard and preserve threatened marine wildlife, such as sea turtles, dugongs, whales, dolphins, and whale sharks. Member of the African Marine Conservation Leadership Programme.

Two decades ago, I began my career in marine conservation as a researcher with a focus on fish species. However, my current role as a Programme Manager at Sea Sense is particularly rewarding as it enables me to develop the skills and capacities of my team and community leaders, including women in fishing communities.

My work with communities is centred on improving their ability to manage their marine resources, as well as developing alternative livelihoods and enterprise opportunities. One project involved collaborating with mothers in a local community to create alternative income streams, which helped support their children’s secondary education. I see myself as a bridge between conservation and community needs, with a particular emphasis on the female perspective.

In addition, I have worked to strengthen community capacity for fisheries co-management, particularly in terms of governance, leadership skills, and securing alternative livelihoods to reduce fishing pressure on marine resources. Through mentoring and guiding my team, women leaders in small-scale fishing, and fishers involved in managing fisheries resources, I have helped to build their leadership skills, resulting in empowered community leaders who are now implementing and running their own programs.

I am a firm believer that good leaders never stop learning, which is why I joined the African Marine Conservation Leadership Programme to enhance my skills. This leadership training has equipped me with valuable insights that have influenced my leadership style, enabling me to continue to mentor and guide my team effectively and work alongside the community to achieve our conservation goals.

Lorna Slade, Technical Advisor and co-founder, Mwambao, Tanzania

Mwambao facilitates a learning network linking coastal communities and other partner stakeholders that builds community resilience, and implements improved sustainable coastal resource management and livelihoods. Member of the African Marine Conservation Leadership Programme.

My colleague Ali Thani and I founded Mwambao in 2010 after we realised that there was a need for a coordinated effort to address important issues affecting the coastal communities of Tanzania and the ocean on which they depend. Mwambao is today a network of more than 50 communities working together to support the sustainable management of natural resources in coastal areas. The network’s approach is based on the principles of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), which emphasises the importance of centering communities in the decision-making process, and empowering them to be wise stewards of their natural resources.

Since Mwambao’s launch, we have been able to bring together a diverse range of stakeholders, including fishermen, women’s groups, youth organisations, and local government officials to work towards shared goals.

The network has helped to build the capacity of these groups through training and mentoring, and has supported the development of community-led initiatives such as local marine protected areas, eco-compliance loans, and sustainable fishing practices. Being part of this movement is a source of pride for me, and I aspire to inspire other women to assume leadership positions in conservation, particularly in the marine sector.

Jane Muteti, Programme Coordinator, COMRED, Kenya

Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED) focuses on building resilient coastal communities and environments in the Western Indian Ocean region, supporting livelihoods and marine conservation. I am a Program Coordinator at COMRED. I hold an MSc in Marine and Lacustrine Science and Management from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a BSc degree in Coastal and Marine Resource Management from Kenyatta University.
I’m passionate about my role, and I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to use my knowledge and skills to provide valuable contributions to marine conservation early on in my career. As a coordinator, I’m involved in the implementation of projects and partnerships, and I’m dedicated to ensuring that these projects are successful. I work closely with stakeholders to identify and address the challenges facing marine life and environment, and identify solutions. Although it can be intimidating, I am passionate and excited to be a young female leader in marine conservation. Every day my strength and experience is growing, and I strive to make a positive and meaningful contribution to the environment and the people that rely on it. I am learning how to use my unique perspective to bring value to the sector, and am determined to make a lasting impact.

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Samundar ka guru¹: An account of Kalumangothi’s life and wisdom on the ocean

On a late sunny afternoon back in April 2019, I was talking to Shamsudheen, or Shamsu bhai as we call him. We were standing outside the Dak Bungalow on Minicoy, an island in the Lakshadweep archipelago off the coast of Kerala, India. Shamsu bhai is the President of Maliku Masveringe Jamaath—a traditional body that decides the rules and practices for managing Minicoy’s pole and line tuna fishery. Being the island from where the pole and line tuna fishery was transferred to other Lakshadweep Islands, I was seeking to document Minicoy’s traditional fisheries management systems.

After a not-so-successful field trip in March, I was back on the island looking for potential interviewees. Shamsudheen, being busy with official duties, was suggesting the names of other knowledgeable fishers on the island. That’s when Mohammed Kalumangothi, fondly known on the island as Kalumaan, appeared on his black Yamaha RX100. Sitting on his motorbike, wearing a broad smile, he asked Shamsu bhai what was happening. In response, Shamsu bhai looked at me and said, “Here’s the answer to all your questions.” And that was the first time that I, Abel, met Kalumaan.

Kalumaan, a knowledgeable fisherman and the lone communist on the island, has an interesting personality. He started fishing when he was 14, and now in his early 50s, he already has decades of fishing experience. Being the skillful and likeable person that he is, he has been one of the most popular kelus (boat captains) in Minicoy. Padmini, Agartala, Bahrain, Kamyaab are just some of the many boats that Kalumaan has captained across the 11 villages on the island.

Each year during the month of Ramadan, after the Eshah prayer in the evening, the island that is still and calm during the day comes to life. People go shopping, and are seen conversing over tea by the beach or taking walks, while some women are busy preparing special Ramadan delicacies. And this is when our work begins as well.

Post dinner at Hotel Aboo & Sons each night, I take an auto rickshaw and head to Kalumaan’s place. As I near Falessery village, in the distance, I always see Kalumaan eagerly waiting for me. He then takes me to his wife’s house where he resides at night as per Minicoy’s matrilocal system. “Baa aadyam chaaya kudikkaam,” he says and serves me kattan chaaya (black tea) along with bodu appam and riha appam, Minicoy’s favourite evening snacks.

On our way to the seashore, where Kalumaan loves to spend his evenings, he opens his chellam (a tiny box) and takes out a few karambus (cloves) to chew on. At the sandy beach, under the starry sky, he spreads a cloth for us to sit on. Boats with blinking red lights on top are anchored close to shore. Crabs are milling around, and the cool sea breeze carries a fishy, salty scent.

“Enthoru haramaanu?” He asks if this much fun can be experienced anywhere on the mainland. Only once the above routine is completed is Kalumaan ready to answer questions about Chaala and Choora. Baitfish, locally known as Chaala, is one of the critical factors for Lakshadweep’s pole and line tuna fishing. Pole and line is a sustainable fishing method owing to its selective, non-invasive, and small-scale approach. This technique has its origin in the Maldives from where it spread to Minicoy. A comprehensive system of traditional fisheries management that covers the spatial and temporal aspects of resource management has evolved in Minicoy over time. However, while transferring pole and line from Minicoy to the other Lakshadweep islands in the 1960s, these systems were left behind.

Kalumaan’s in-depth knowledge about every species he interacts with during his fishing ventures is remarkable. Whether it’s baitfish or coral ecology, or the behaviour of turtles, sting rays and octopuses or the catching techniques of vembolu, metti or chammelli, Kalumaan knows it all. From the 2019 field season alone, we have over 8.5 hours of recorded interviews with him. And this was excluding the countless informal monologues of his that were packed with useful information. It was Kalumaan, with his enthusiasm and cheerfulness, who made the strenuous documentation exercise engaging for us. Our ongoing work attempts to document this knowledge so that other similar coastal systems can also learn from Minicoy’s traditional resource management systems. Having said that, this knowledge is also key to Minicoy’s existence, as the island is heavily dependent on natural resources and its systems are vulnerable to unsustainable transitions.

Kalumaan’s wisdom is not restricted to individual species or their ecosystems, but extends to the ocean at large. Sea salinity, current patterns, fishing grounds, underwater terrain, navigation based on the Nakaiy calendar (an indigenous Maldivian calendar system) and astronomical knowledge—these are some of the many aspects he is well-versed in. All of this is knowledge he has gathered through observation over the years. “Suppose we already caught a thousand tuna, and another boat is trying to catch from the same school the easy way, without using a single baitfish, which is against the Jamaath’s norm, then, dip a steel glass in the water and all the tuna will flee, leaving nothing for anyone to fish.”

It isn’t only his technical know-how or skills that make Kalumaan unique. He motivated two men with disabilities to join his fishing crew when nobody else was keen on taking them on. An old colleague of ours, having merely transcribed the recorded interviews of Kalumaan, was intrigued by his compassionate tales and engaging conversations. Keen on meeting him, she made it to Minicoy in the next field season, and made friends with Kalumaan. He is also a local celebrity. Young boys on motorbikes, men lounging in beach shacks and women carrying headloads of filleted tuna to village kitchens all greet him as “sakhave” (comrade) or “Kalumaan kaaka” as they pass. “Allah! What can I say, it’s full of acquaintances here, that’s the problem,” Kalumaan turns to us and says with a grin on his face.

Fast forward to March 2023, I am still in awe of the hospitality, warmth and trust that he extends to us. Even Diya, who was carrying out fieldwork on the island for the first time and a total stranger to Kalumaan, was received with a tour of his entire village and an invitation to attend a family wedding. Always welcoming, never averse to being asked questions—what more can a researcher ask from someone in the community that they work with? It is people like Kalumaan who make our work possible on the island. And that comes with the responsibility to not feel entitled to all the support we have been given.

Although he always appears jovial, Kalumaan has faced his fair share of hardships. Over the past two decades, he has lost three boats—two to cyclones and one during peak monsoon in 2004, while rescuing the crew onboard MT Indira after their engine failed. To date, he hasn’t received any compensation for the boats he lost, even after filing several applications. But that never stopped him from lending a hand to those in need. A migrant worker we met recently at the Minicoy jetty, was telling us how Kalumaan helped all of them who were stranded on the island during the COVID-19 lockdown by giving them fish for free and making sure they all had a decent meal every day. At times, Kalumaan also gives money to a person with a mental illness so that he doesn’t have to go hungry. And in his unique fashion, Kalumaan invited the entire island, including non-islanders, to his daughter’s wedding by posting an invitation on the local television channel!

Kalumaan hasn’t changed in the few years that we have known him, but things have changed for him. The man who spent most of his life at sea is now seen only on the shore, having become paralysed along his right side at the beginning of 2022. He was airlifted to the mainland, where he underwent surgery and prolonged treatment. He is now back on the islands almost a year later but continues to be on medication and physiotherapy. Still, just yesterday before writing this account, we were there once again sitting on the shore with Kalumaan, laughing at his hilarious accounts of crabs having tussles with rats, and listening to his revolutionary ideas about replacing diesel power generators with wave energy projects so that the daylong power cuts on the island due to diesel shortages can be a thing of the past.


¹ Samundar ka guru means the guru of the sea in Hindi. We came across some Hindi-speaking seamen in Minicoy referring to Kalumaan as such during our fieldwork on the island earlier this year.

Further Reading

Abraham, A. J. and A. Sridhar. 2021. Plural islands of Lakshadweep: Insider-outsider narratives of Minicoy. Le thinnai Revi. https://medium.com/thinnairevi/pluralislands-of-lakshadweep-insider-outsider-narratives ofminicoy-by-abel-job-abraham-and-de8b03715fd. Accessed on April 20, 2023.

Khot, I., M. Khan, P. Gawde, A. J. Abraham, A. Raj, R. Sen and N. Namboothri. 2023. Fish for the Future: Creating participatory and sustainable fisheries governance pathways in the Lakshadweep Islands — A 10-year report. Bengaluru: Dakshin Foundation.

Namboothri N., I. Khot and A. J. Abraham. 2022. Small islands, big lessons: Critical insights into sustainable fisheries from India’s coral atolls. In: Conservation through sustainable use: Lessons from India. (eds. Varghese A., M. A. Oommen, M. M. Paul and S. Nath). 1st edition. Pp. 27–40. London: Routledge India. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003343493

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Rhinos of the sea

We have all heard of sharks. When you imagine one, the typical picture that might come to your mind is a large, grey-white fish with pointed fins and sharp, deadly teeth. Now imagine something like a shark, but with a flattened head and torso, pointed snout and brown body, and you get a rhino ray, the strange-looking and ancient relatives of sharks. Named because their pointed snouts apparently resemble rhino horns, these species are cartilaginous fish that evolved from sharks and form a link between sharks and rays. Rhino rays are made up of different families, including guitarfish (Glaucostegidae), wedgefish (Rhinidae) and sawfish (Pristidae). Their flattened bodies are an adaptation for life on the seafloor—they are often found swimming close to the bottom, or resting in the seabed, concealed and camouflaged in sediment.

On the edge of extinction
Rhino rays have been increasingly in the spotlight in recent years, and not for good reasons. Sadly, research has found they are currently one of the most threatened groups of species in the world. All but one species of guitarfish, wedgefish and sawfish are Endangered or Critically Endangered. These species are found in shallow coastal waters, overlapping with some of the most intense coastal fisheries in the world. Their fins are highly valuable, fetching at least twice the price of shark fins, which drives fishers to target and catch them.

In other cases, they are caught accidentally as ‘bycatch’ and then retained by fishers to sell or consume. These factors have pushed rhino rays to the edge of extinction, even more so than other rays and sharks. Rhino rays are ‘bioturbators’, excavating and modifying the ocean sediments and habitats. As meso predators, they also form important links between species at the top and bottom of the food web. These essential ecological functions could be lost if rhino rays disappear.

Despite the risks they face, rhino rays remain a data-limited species, which means we know very little about them, especially in countries such as Indonesia and India where they are the most fished. Studying any marine species is challenging, but rhino rays can be particularly elusive despite being found in shallow waters. They were also overlooked for a long time, with their more charismatic cousins— sharks receiving most of the attention from research and conservation.

Despite the risks they face, rhino rays remain a data-limited species, which means we know very little about them, especially in countries such as Indonesia and India where they are the most fished. Studying any marine species is challenging, but rhino rays can be particularly elusive despite being found in shallow waters. They were also overlooked for a long time, with their more charismatic cousins—sharks receiving most of the attention from research and conservation.

The guitarfish of Goa
“It’s a super rare fish, but you can see it on the shore. If you see it on the shore, it means your stars are aligned and you are very lucky,” says a gillnet fisher in Goa.

Goa, on the west coast of India, is known for its beautiful beaches, blue waters, tourism and seafood. Rhino rays might be the last thing on your mind if you travelled there—indeed, most tourists who visit have probably never heard of them. But species such as the widenose guitarfish (Glaucostegus obtusus) and sharpnose guitarfish (Glaucostegus granulatus) are found along Goa’s coastline, sometimes inhabiting waters that are only ankle-deep!

I have been working in the field of fisheries and shark research since 2018 and have surveyed hundreds of dead rhino rays captured in fishing vessels. It was in Goa that I had my first live sighting of one species the widenose guitarfish. I was on a quiet beach at sunset, when a number of them came into the shallow waters, moving in and out with the waves. Seeing these Critically Endangered species swimming at my feet was an experience I’ll never forget. These encounters led me to study rhino rays, especially guitarfish, in Goa for part of my PhD research.

Given that scientists know almost nothing about these species in this region, fishing communities can be the best source of information. The lives of fisherfolk are intertwined with the sea, and they hold a wealth of knowledge accumulated over generations. Our study has documented the local ecological knowledge (LEK) that fishers in Goa hold about rhino rays, to better understand their habitat use and seasonality, the kind of threats they face and how people can conserve them. We also looked into their interaction with fisheries—how they were fished, how they were used, and what kind of value they have for fishing communities. We plan to use these insights and knowledge on rhino rays to understand how to conserve them.

It’s a super rare fish, but you can see it on the shore. If you see it on the shore, it means your stars are aligned and you are very lucky” – A gillnet fisher in Goa

A day in the research life
With my degree in marine biology, people often assume that I spend most of my time underwater exploring the frontiers of the ocean. The reality is very different; most of my fieldwork involves spending time in fishing centres, monitoring catch, and engaging with local communities. For this research on guitarfish, a typical day in the field involved visiting one or multiple fishing sites and interviewing local fishers about guitarfish, sharks, and issues about marine sustainability. In total, we visited and sampled 20 different fishing villages and harbours in Goa. Some of these were tourist beaches, others were more isolated and sometimes quite challenging to get to.

Some fishers were enthusiastic to speak to us about ‘Ellaro’ or ‘Kharra’, as guitarfish are called in Konkani (the local language) and had numerous stories to share. Others couldn’t understand why we were interested in this ajeeb machli (strange-looking fish), as one fisher put it.

Conducting interviews and working with communities is not always easy; people can be suspicious and unwilling to speak, sometimes interviewees may lie (with good intentions) to give you the responses they think you want, and conversations can often take unexpected turns. But it can be a very rewarding process overall. The knowledge and experiences that some fishers have are unlike anything you could read in a textbook or scientific paper, and it can be a pleasure to document them.

Feeding time
Why do guitarfish come to such shallow waters? We suspect that many of these beaches, especially around river mouths, form nursery grounds for guitarfish, where females come to give birth to their young. Guitarfish, like many sharks and rays, are ‘viviparous’ or livebirthing, which means they give birth to a small number of young (called pups) and don’t lay eggs. Shallow, sheltered beaches near estuaries and rivers can form ideal habitats (nursery grounds) for the pups, because of the abundance of food and protection from predators.

Given their importance in the life cycle of guitarfish and other rhino rays, these habitats should be protected. However, in many parts of the world, these shallow estuarine habitats are facing severe disturbance from development, fishing, and other human activities.

In Goa, fisher knowledge has helped us identify the types of habitats and regions that guitarfish are found in (sandy seafloors near river mouths), and their seasonality (found most often during and right after the rains). Fishers also confirmed that they had seen small guitarfish feeding on crabs and molluscs in the shallow beach waters. We have broadly mapped the potential nursery sites and other essential habitats for guitarfish, and through further research, we can identify the areas that need to be prioritised and protected.

Communities and conservation
Alarmingly, fishers reported that not only sawfish but also wedgefish appear to be severely declining or even vanishing from this region. “We call this fish Anshi,” an older fisher remarked when I showed him a picture of a sawfish. His younger crewmates had not seen this species before and didn’t recognise it. “I haven’t seen this fish in at least 20 years. It’s gone from our waters”.

This isn’t the case for guitarfish, which continue to be fished in Goan seas. Fishers catch them as bycatch in all types of fishing gear, most often small-sized individuals (juveniles), which are considered to have low economic values and are used only for local consumption. In fact, more than half of interviewed fishers would discard the fish back into the water, dead or alive, if they were too small or they had caught too many.

When we spoke to them about the protection of guitarfish and other rhino rays, fishers’ attitudes seemed to support conservation.

“We don’t get them much, and don’t really sell them much, so if catching this fish is banned, it won’t make a difference to us,” a gillnet fisher told us.

All the fishers we interviewed stated that they may be willing to participate in conservation measures for rhino rays, which is a very positive finding. One young fisher explained, “If catching the guitarfish is banned, we can just release them back into the water and they will swim back to wherever they like to live. They stay alive for a long time even after we catch them, so they will be fine.”

At the time of this study, all species of guitarfish were legally permitted to be fished and were not protected. However, with recent changes in legislation, the wide nose guitarfish has been listed as protected, along with a few other rhino ray species. Our findings suggest a pathway for this legislation to be implemented in regions like Goa—where the rhino rays form low-value bycatch, live release measure through community participation would likely be more effective than top-down sanctions. Local knowledge of fishers will be essential to designing effective and fair conservation plans.

If guitarfish can be protected locally or regionally in places like Goa, then these sites could become sanctuaries for these highly threatened species. These small-scale successes could spell hope for the future and help save the guitarfish from becoming the next sawfish.

Further Reading
Kyne, P. M., R. W. Jabado, C. L. Rigby, Dharmadi, M. A. Gore, C. M. Pollock, K. B. Herman et al. 2020. The thin edge of the wedge: Extremely high extinction risk in wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes. Aquatic conservation: Marine and freshwater ecosystems 30(7): 1052–7613. doi.org/10.1002/aqc.3331.

Gupta, T., E. J. Milner-Gulland, A. Dias and D.Karnad. 2023. Drawing on local knowledge and attitudes for the conservation of critically endangered rhino rays in Goa, India. People and nature 5(2): 645–659. doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10429.

Acknowledgement:
This research was conducted by Trisha Gupta, EJ Milner Gulland, Andrew Dias, and Divya Karnad, and was supported by the Prince Bernhard Nature Fund and the Levine Family Foundation.

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

A tribute to Satish Bhaskar

Turtle walker extraordinaire – Rom Whitaker

In the early 1970s, the Madras Snake Park, located very close to the Indian Institute of Technology, was a magnet for a certain breed of student who just couldn’t bear the drudgery of a college education. Since I was of the same non-academic ilk, I encouraged them to hang out with us and help develop the Snake Park’s field activities of conservation and research. One of these stalwarts was Satish Bhaskar, a quietly intense young man from IIT, whose passion was jogging several kilometres each morning to Elliot’s Beach to have a swim in the ocean.

We had recently started nocturnal beach walks to find olive ridley sea turtle nests before the poachers got them and rebury them in a safe hatchery we had set up at the Cholamandal Artists Colony. Satish got into this routine with zest and his strength was a welcome addition when we had to carry heavy bags of eggs back to the hatchery. The rest of us at the Snake Park were hung up on snakes and crocodiles and it was Satish’s dedicated single-mindedness that made me suggest to him that India needs a Mr. Sea Turtle and he would be the ideal man for the job.

He obviously took this idea to heart and, starting with the meagre resources the Snake Park provided him, he began his sea turtle surveys. His intrepid trips covering both the beaches of mainland India and eventually the Lakshadweep, Andaman and Nicobar Islands were made possible by the World Wildlife Fund and other donors, and resulted in close to 50 reports, notes and papers. But it was his entertaining letters that grabbed us the most. Writing from the Nicobar Islands, he described the torture of sand flies during the day and by mosquitoes at night. One night on a remote Nicobar beach, he bedded down on the mat with mosquito net stitched to it (an invention we made). Very early next morning, he was awakened by a shuffling sound and he opened one eye to watch a saltwater crocodile walk past him and slide into the surf ten metres away. Surveying those beaches, he had to swim across frequent small estuaries, always keeping an eye out for crocodiles. In a remarkable nine-month trip in 1979, he covered almost all the islands in the archipelago and then returned several times in the 1980s to visit the others.

After his first trip to the Lakshadweep in 1977, he told us that he would love to stay and study the green sea turtle nesting beach on Suhelipara, one of the uninhabited islands. He said the only problem was that they nested during the monsoon and there was no boat traffic then as the seas were too rough. “I’ll have to maroon myself on the island for the whole monsoon,” he said with a smile. We started going over all the things that could go wrong, anything from a bad toothache to malaria or an upset tummy could put a real damper on this idea, but he was adamant and did maroon himself on the island between June and September 1982. Famously, his letter in a bottle floated to Sri Lanka and reached his wife just 24 days after he had thrown it into the surf at the edge of the lagoon. The boat that was due to pick him was just one month late!! But not much fazed Satish in the field.

Satish really kick-started interest in sea turtle conservation in India and I’m proud that I had a role in it.

Satish with Dhruvajyoti Basu, Rom Whitaker and Allen Vaughan and their haul of lobsters, caught while snorkelling off the coast at Mahabalipuram
Being inspired by the turtle man Kartik Shanker

When I met Satish in the late 1980s, he had just returned from his surveys in West Papua, Indonesia, that WWF had supported. The beaches were remote and accessible only by a boat that passed once in a few weeks. He was the first outsider that the Papuans in Wermon had ever met, and he communicated with the world by swimming out to said boat and giving them letters to post. He counted over 13,000 leatherback nests and tagged 700 turtles almost single-handedly. Over the next decade, the leatherback populations declined and the locals decided that Satish was the cause—that he had tagged the turtles with metal tags so he could steal them later with a giant magnet.

A dangerous garland on South Reef Island! Fortunately for Satish, sea kraits, though highly venomous, seem to be totally inoffensive. Note: Don’t try this!

In Chennai, we had just started the turtle walks through the Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network. As youngsters, we were all in awe of all the things that he had done, which of course we heard about from Rom Whitaker, Harry Andrews and others. Satish was too self-effacing to tell the stories, other than in a completely matter-of-fact way. His knowledge of sea turtles was vast and his attention to detail was exceptional, but his generosity outdid all of that. He shared his knowledge and his collection of papers and slides freely with us, including the first edition of Biology and Conservation of Sea Turtles, a collection of articles that emerged from the first ever global conference on sea turtles that was a bible for many years for the community. Satish’s article in the collection is the first comprehensive account of sea turtle nesting across India.

A few years later, Satish returned to the islands to survey Great Nicobar Island along with Manjula Tiwari and then decided to initiate a monitoring programme for hawksbill turtles on South Reef Island. He would camp out on this tiny island (just 700m long and a little over 100m wide) with his assistant Saw Emway and swim to Interview Island to get water. On one of those trips, they were chased by one of Interview’s feral elephants, and Satish threw his shirt off to distract it. He later retrieved the shredded shirt and posted it to his wife, Brenda.

Two integral people in the early Croc Bank days – Satish, our Field Officer and his wife Brenda, our Secretary. Image source: Madras Crocodile Bank Trust/Centre for Herpetology, Facebook, October 2022

In the early 1990s, Satish and Brenda, on a whim, decided to move to Goa, and he had little contact with his colleagues for several years afterwards. Aaron Lobo, an eager 12-yearold naturalist, happened to meet Satish in Benaulim, Goa, by complete chance. Satish’s children studied French with Aaron’s aunt, whom he would visit. From then on, he started visiting Satish regularly and they wandered about on the beaches and the scrub around Satish’s house, looking for snakes and other critters.

After completing his Masters at the Wildlife Institute of India, Aaron talked to Satish about an upcoming trip to the Gulf of Mannar to document sea snakes in the region. Since Satish had conducted his first field survey there, he decided to accompany Aaron and spend a few months with him. There were many interesting experiences and sightings, but most eventfully, they were at sea on a trawler on 24 December 2004, when the tsunami struck. Fortunately, the wave passed safely under their boat while they were sleeping. During this time, they travelled together to several parts of the Gulf of Mannar coast, snorkelling in the shallows. Over two decades earlier, Satish had seen giant spider conches numbering in their hundreds, but they had dwindled to just a few. During the night, they combed the beaches for sea kraits—sea snakes that came ashore to lay their eggs and digest their prey. Satish had encountered these frequently in the Andaman islands, but Aaron never found any in the Gulf of Mannar.

The rest of us had little contact with Satish in the intervening years. In 2010, we conducted the International Sea Turtle Society’s Annual Symposium in Goa. We honoured Satish with the Sea Turtle Champion’s Award. Though the who’s who of the global community were present, Satish declined to collect the award and I had to deliver it to him at home. But he did sneak into town to meet his old Karen friends who were attending the conference.

In 2018, filmmaker Taira Malaney and her team decided to make a film on Satish’s life. When we heard that they had convinced him to return to ANET and South Reef Island, the turtle fanatics Muralidharan, Adhith Swaminathan and I decided that we would just have to go along. We landed in Mayabunder and Satish had a touching reunion with Saw Uncle Paung, who had accompanied him on many of his early surveys.

A friendly forest officer offered to take Satish back to South Reef once he heard about Satish’s seminal surveys there. After a long boat ride, we reached Interview Island, where to our considerable surprise, we found Saw Emway, who had been Satish’s field assistant in the 1990s. We proceeded to South Reef Island, but the boat could no longer land there due to changes in topography after the tsunami. Satish, who until then had looked like the 72-year old he was, threw off his clothes, donned his fins, slipped into the water and started swimming to the island. Emway, the film crew and I quickly followed suit. On the island, Satish was rejuvenated as he walked around the island remembering where hawksbills had nested when he was there two decades earlier.

I’ve spent the last 25 years studying sea turtles across India. Everywhere I’ve been, from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Lakshadweep to Papua, Satish has been there before and left his mark. It’s easy to get obsessed with sea turtles, but even easier when you’ve had Satish Bhaskar as your mentor and inspiration. After recurring bouts of ill health, Brenda passed away in October 2022 and Satish a few months later in March 2023. He is survived by his children, Nyla, Kyle, and Sandhya.

There are many, many more Satish stories. Read about his adventures here:
https://www.seaturtlesofindia.org/talking-turtles/satish-bhaskar/
https://www.iotn.org/iotn12-07-special-profile-satish-bhaskar/

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Unfettered and undeterred: Anne Theo’s tryst with marine biology

Unfettered and undeterred. Those words best describe the young woman who came into my lab and life in Anne Theo would get into the Ph.D. programme at the Indian Institute of Science the following year, but she spent her first months tinkering with some secondary data and helping me organize an international sea turtle conference in Goa. It was very clear from the beginning that she was fearless, both in her ideas and the things she did.

But one story captures her spirit and personality best. On our very first dive together in the Lakshadweep Islands, Anne got separated from us. Her fellow researchers and I surfaced after the mandatory search and became increasingly worried as there was no sign of her.

The sea was getting choppy and we were running out of options. Anne surfaced seconds later, about 10 metres away, looked at us and said “Where were you guys?”

Anne was never lost, the rest of the world was!

Anne had not considered in-water research when she began her PhD. In fact, she was not even a particularly good swimmer at the time. But we chanced upon mixed-species groups of reef fish based on a remark by Umesh Srinivasan, who was doing similar research for his PhD on birds. Anne latched on to the idea, and trained herself rapidly in the Institute’s swimming pool and got her dive certification as well. However, a larger problem loomed. Many marine biologists she consulted were not enthusiastic about her plan to study mixed species groups (MSGs) in reefs—they thought that reef fish MSGs were too ephemeral and might not be interesting.

Anne was undeterred. She spent her first field season in the Lakshadweep Islands gathering evidence that MSGs were common, could be video-graphed and that there were a host of interesting ecological questions that one could address about them. She gathered a massive dataset across four years, and made significant contributions to our understanding of fish MSG group types. Her work, which emphasised the fundamental ecological and behavioural differences between shoaling and attendant fish groups, would inform theoretical frameworks that were developed for a global review.

Bina, one of her closest friends from childhood, remembers how much she loved the ocean and how keen she was to share the joy with others through her encouragement and swimming lessons, that she imparted with ‘gentle and obsessive persistence’. Even in the field, Anne had a long history of friendships and partnerships. Over a period of several years, her buddies—on land and in the water —included researchers from multiple different institutions. She started her field work in 2011 with Rucha Karkarey from the Nature Conservation Foundation. Diving during the day, playing the guitar and writing songs in the evening (including classics such as Harami Gourami), the two livened up the Kadmat field station. She was also paired with her fellow student, Bharti, who was scoping a project on green sea turtles. She then worked for several seasons with Mahima Jaini of Dakshin Foundation; Mahima helped Anne with her dives, Anne helped Mahima with Malayalam.

Anne, Mahima and I made a memorable trip to Suheli Island in Lakshadweep in 2015. Uninhabited other than a police camp, fishers visit periodically during the fair season. Suheli is legendary because the late Satish Bhaskar, doyen of sea turtle surveys in India, spent five solitary months there during the monsoons in the 1970s to count and monitor green turtle nesting. We left before dawn, walking down narrow lanes to the beach; while the rest of us had perfunctory field backpacks, Anne had her large pink stroller suitcase that she took everywhere. We had hired two tuna boats to ferry us there, and caught tuna and other fish along the way. The diving was spectacular; at one point, Anne and I turned to see two eagle rays gliding effortlessly through the water. They swum languidly in an arc towards us, realized we were there and veered away with barely a wobble in their trajectory. A moment of surreal beauty that we remembered many times after. And then, later on the dive, work completed, she did a goofy dance underwater and we took some memorable comic photographs with Mahima.

On that trip, I met Jafer, who took our team out on his boat for their dive surveys in Agati and Bangaram. Jafer’s daughter, Nihla Fatima, then three years old was very fond of Anne and Mahima, and endeared herself greatly to all of us. The people I met and the spectacular diving there led to Moonlight in the Sea, an illustrated story about a little girl from the Lakshadweep who learns to snorkel and falls in love with marine life. One day, her boat gets swept away in a storm and she ends up stranded in Suheli, where she learns to fend for herself. When my illustrator was working on the book, she commented that the little girl was far too nonchalant for a 10-year-old stuck on a remote island. It struck me later that Anne had wormed her way into the young protagonist’s personality.

Later that year, when we got advanced dive training at Havelock Island in the Andamans, Anne was on hand to try and convince Priti Bangal, a new student and novice diver, to work on reef fish. Priti ended up working on birds, but Anne would get another opportunity to impart her vast knowledge of reef fish when she helped Bharat Ahuja with his field work in 2021.

We joked that Bharat had the most qualified field assistant that any student had ever had. From getting lost to leading dives, Anne had come a long way. Despite significant struggles with her health during her PhD, she never gave up her passion for science and fieldwork. She mentored a host of junior students doing marine ecology in both analysis and fieldwork, including identifying surgeonfish and parrotfish species that only she could tell apart. She escorted Meenakshi Poti to Lakshasdweep and helped her get started on her project on green turtles. She worked with Ajay Venkatraman on an analysis of her data during the COVID-19 lockdown, when Ajay was stuck in India waiting for the Australian borders to open so he could start his PhD.

She loved the ocean and fieldwork, but she was a whizz at R, and taught courses and workshops in statistics. In the summer of 2022, she was my (vastly overqualified again) teaching assistant for a quantitative ecology course at the department, one that I was teaching for the first time. Having Anne to talk to about my struggle to relearn equations was a relief in no small measure.

In the last year, she also played a key role in developing and proposing a special issue on mixed species groups in the prestigious journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, working closely with her co-editors Todd Freeberg, Nora Carlson and Eben Goodale. The last paper she worked on is included in the theme issue, which is dedicated to her.

Anne’s plans for the world were unfettered. She was innately caring and carefree, but she also wanted to stomp on things that she found unfair, illogical or senseless. She wanted to create a science cooperative that transcended the politics and pitfalls of academia. She wanted to end patriarchy and capitalism. Tragically, before she could do any of those things, Anne passed away on February 6, 2023. She leaves behind a vast community of close friends, colleagues and family who will miss both her fierce arguments and easy affection. She is survived by her husband and fellow ecologist, Guillaume Demare, her brother, Dennis, and her mother, Mary. The lasting impression she made on people and the legacy of her research will live on.

Anne, so long and thanks for all the fish stories!

Anne Heloise Theo (August 28, 1985 – February 6, 2023)

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Linking eco-credits and livelihoods with marine conservation in coastal East Africa

Mwandazi Kassim Shee runs a small successful retail shop, selling items such as soap, tea, bread, milk, flour, and vegetables. But things were not always like this; very much like other people in her area, cassava and coconut were her only source of subsistence, and every day was a struggle to survive. Mwandazi is a resident of Majoreni, a small town in Kwale county, along Kenya’s southern coast. In coastal Kenya, many women cultivate coconut trees and cassava plants and sell the surplus. But with excess supply from all the farmers, the demand has not increased, which means the profits barely help make ends meet. Kwale county is one of the poorest in Kenya, with a poverty rate of nearly 42 percent compared to a national average of 12.2 percent.

But things are changing for the better for Mwandazi. She is a member of the Shangani self-help group and one of the beneficiaries of an eco-credit scheme spearheaded by the NGO Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED). COMRED works with communities to preserve marine resources in coastal Kenya for the benefit of nature and people, and the eco-credit scheme, through ‘grants’, is giving the community groups an incentive for conservation as they boost members’ livelihoods.

Majoreni and similar eco-credit groups are under no obligation to reimburse COMRED, but there is a condition attached: members must actively engage in conservation initiatives to be eligiblefor the ‘grant’. In this way, the grant transforms into a self-sustaining fund, with group members providing loans to one another while maintaining their involvement in conservation efforts. The range of environmental conservation activities is extensive and typically involves activities such as cleaning up beaches to remove plastic waste, planting mangroves, conducting patrols of fisheries and mangrove forests, as well as educating other community members on environmental issues.

“I’m now able to pay school fees for my kids, compared to before when it was a struggle. And in Majoreni, we now understand better why it’s important to protect the environment. For example, fish get a place to breed in the mangroves, and they also get food. So we must help to stop mangrove degradation. Our economy as a people is based on the ocean,” Mwandazi says.

How it started

Kwale’s coast stretches approximately 250km and is divided into 22 local fisheries management associations known as Beach Management Units (BMUs). These BMUs are responsible for looking after fishers and fisheries activities. Many coastal community members are low-income fishers, small-scale fish processors (98% women) or traders who don’t have access to formal and reliable financial services and struggle to save and get loans. To try to help people and solve the ocean’s challenges simultaneously, COMRED introduced this eco-credit system that provides people in coastal communities with loans tied to carrying out marine conservation activities.

COMRED launched the Kwale Community Eco-Credit Fund in April 2022 with seed money of Ksh 800,000/ USD 6,400 and gave the first 10 savings groups Ksh 80,000 (around USD 700) each. Each group then develops a marine conservation action plan, such as planting and protecting mangrove forests, providing community services, and doing beach cleanups. The conservation action plans address issues that are part of a wider problem in a national context.

Coastal communities in Kwale, like in all other coastal Kenyan communities, face various challenges affecting their livelihoods and environments, such as marine and coastal degradation, population pressure and climate change. This has led to the overuse of marine resources and a subsequent decrease in productivity, forcing these dependent communities into poverty. This becomes a vicious cycle, where poverty increases dependence on limited natural resources and exacerbates competition between nature and human survival, especially in the face of climate change. Therefore, communities often have to face the trade-off between pursuing livelihoods for subsistence and conserving marine resources by dedicating time and setting aside some habitats for conservation purposes. This is where the eco-credit scheme incentivises communities to participate in conservation while providing financial support to improve their livelihoods.

Members can access credit, grow the fund, and make it sustainable. Savings grow the seed capital, making more credit available to new and existing members. Community data monitors are trained to record conservation activities, such as the number of beach clean-ups conducted and mangrove planting carried out, as well as recording financial transactions, tracking each group’s progress, and sharing the data with the project team through a mobile application called ODK Collect. This means the community members can monitor their progress per the goals they set, not just for their conservation work but for their finances, giving them greater ownership and sustainability for the conservation work.

Getting inspired by others in the marine space: The Mwambao story

The eco-credit system, designed in consultation with the community and conservation micro-credit company GreenFi, has also seen strong community engagement in neighbouring Tanzania. The project was initiated by one of Maliasili’s partners, a marine conservation organisation, Mwambao. The eco-credit system known as ‘Mkuba – the fund to care for the sea’ has been running since July 2018.

The model’s effectiveness is apparent from its impressive results; not only is it delivering financial but environmental benefits as well. It has facilitated almost 370 community-managed loans to 213 beneficiaries across five groups. Over 50 percent of these beneficiaries are women, with the total value of loans exceeding USD 27,000, and the community has ensured that legal fishing gears have been adhered to, over 20,000 mangrove seedlings have been planted, and patrols and security of octopus closures have significantly increased, leading to increases in octopus landings and improved fisher incomes.

While on a field visit with our East Africa portfolio team, I had the opportunity to personally meet with one of the groups on Tumbatu Island, located off the coast of Zanzibar. The island is home to a vibrant and closeknit community, with around 13,000 residents who primarily rely on fishing and seaweed farming as their main economic activities. The rich marine environment around Tumbatu Island and along the northeast coast of Zanzibar is a traditional fishing ground for people from the entire region. The newly established marine conservation area also contains Zanzibar’s third largest mangrove stand.

Fishing has long been a traditional way of life for the people of Tumbatu Island, but much like other East African coastal communities, they have been facing challenges from overfishing by illegal fishers from other areas, which has led to the depletion of fish stocks as well as damage to the marine ecosystem through the illegal harvesting of mangrove forests. The island’s residents also have limited access to healthcare, education, and basic infrastructure. During this meeting, I heard directly from the group members about the impact of the eco-credit scheme and how it’s improving their quality of life as well as the marine environment by giving the communities support to improve their livelihoods and an obligation to protect their environment.

Paving the way for innovative financing in marine conservation

These innovative blue loans projects provide coastal communities with much-needed access to credit to help them improve their lives and the environment around them. Communities have greater ownership and responsibility for the management of their environments.

The appetite and growing community interest in these eco-credit schemes open the door for the potential of broader implementation, not only in Kenya and Tanzania but around the world. With the ‘Ocean Decade’ and 30 by 30 all set to actualise in 2030, eco-credit schemes and blue loans provide an opportunity for coastal communities to gain some direct economic benefit from marine conservation. This motivates them to protect biodiversity, and the additional income also improves their financial well-being.

This article is from issue

17.2

2023 Jun

Wild tulips fight to survive in their ancestral home 

Tulips are one of the world’s most well-known spring flowers. Like all other garden plants, they have natural ancestors, and surprisingly these do not grow in the Netherlands—the country that exports the majority of horticultural tulips. In fact, most wild tulips can be found in the steppes, semi-deserts, and mountains of Central Asia, where over half of all known species of wild tulip grow. The number of wild tulips is dwarfed by the tens of thousands of horticultural varieties, yet the large number of species found in Central Asia makes this region a diversity hotspot for this plant group.

These wild tulip species harbour genetic resources that may be crucial for future breeding efforts, especially with respect to disease resistance and tolerance to climate change. They also act as indicators of overall ecosystem health, i.e. they provide an important signal if their habitat is being damaged. The flowers provide important resources and homes for insects, most notably supporting the insect populations that may also pollinate crop plants. Furthermore, wild tulips hold significant cultural value in this region, with local communities often possessing knowledge about where they occur close to their settlements. Therefore, they are a valuable asset, especially to local communities. However, limited understanding of natural diversity, the impact of climate change, and the effects of environmental disturbance have made it challenging to develop a solid conservation plan for these plants.

Many flowers of Tulipa dasystemon blooming after the snow melt in a mountainous meadow area in northern Kyrgyzstan. This species is considered Least Concern.

Since 2018, a team led by Fauna & Flora International has been proactively working on solving some of these issues. Specifically, I—Brett Wilson, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Sam Brockington the Curator of Cambridge University Botanic Garden—have been part of a research team that focuses on using technical knowledge and local expertise shared across organisations, to tackle these challenges. Sam and I have been working most closely with Bioresurs—a Kyrgyz conservation NGO, the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic, and the Gareev Botanical Garden in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Additionally, we have also developed collaborations across the region, including in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. This includes a range of botanic gardens where we have actively expanded tulip collections, not only for public viewing but also for both scientific and conservation purposes—an often-overlooked role of global botanic garden plant collections.

The team from the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic led by Professors Kairykul Shalpykov and Georgy Lazkov with Brett in Sary-Chelek Biosphere Reserve.

The first task for our team was to improve our knowledge of tulip taxonomy. Without this fundamental information, conservationists struggle to appropriately target and obtain funding as well as carry out mitigation and management. In recent decades, it has become easier and cheaper to sequence DNA, and to use this information to infer whether the target plants are distinct species, and how these species are related to one another. Simultaneously, there has also been an increase in sources of tulip material, especially across the global botanic garden network.

Over the past four years, our team has collected and sequenced DNA from leaf material sourced from: an array of wild tulip populations in Central Asia, the living collections of several botanic gardens, and herbarium material—some of which was collected nearly a century ago. This allowed us to survey over 86 percent of all currently recognised species, as well as many plants collected under old names that are no longer recognised as species. Through this huge effort, we discovered the existence of a new subgenus, and reorganised many sections to simplify these groupings. Based on the data, we were able to reinstate several species, declassify some that are no longer considered separate species, and we also discovered a new species which we formally described in the summer of 20221.

Tulipa korolkowii, pink form, found growing in the Batken region of southern Kyrgyzstan. This species is now recognised as Near Threatened.

Genetic data can be used to explore the evolutionary history of a plant group across millions of years. Understanding the history of tulips is important as it can allow us to identify the geographic origin of this plant, as well as begin to understand where, when, and why it diversified. In turn, this can help us pinpoint the areas of distribution that are most important for conservation as well as specify which species are the most genetically unique. We were able to show that wild tulips originated in the broader Central Asia region with the most recent common ancestor estimated to have existed here around 23 million years ago. In addition, we discovered that this part of the world was crucial for the diversification of wild tulips throughout their history. The explosion of different tulip species in Central Asia could be linked to aridification, development of large mountain ranges, and global cooling. Strikingly, we were also able to show that tulips most likely moved out of the region through the Kazakh and Russian steppes into the Caucasus, from where they spread into the Middle East, Mediterranean, eastern Europe, and Iran. Very few species seem to have made it south out of Central Asia due to historical barriers such as deserts and seas. Crucially, all this work demonstrated that Central Asia is both historically and currently important for tulips, emphasising the need to conserve these flowers and their habitats in the region. 

Tulipa anisophylla growing in the Darvoz mountains of Tajikistan with the Hindu-Kush mountains of Afghanistan in the background. This species is considered Vulnerable.

Central Asia has seen several decades of instability, with the collapse of the Soviet Union leading to economic issues, border disagreements, and political uncertainty. Thus, Central Asian countries often struggle to collaborate on policy and management approaches. This is a major problem for biodiversity, which doesn’t abide by borders or nationality. Although individual countries (e.g., Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) have undertaken national assessments of tulip diversity, few studies have looked at the region as a whole. 

It is important to work at a larger scale in order to predict and protect wild tulips from the effects of global threats such as climate change. We used a large dataset comprising the location points of tulip populations to predict the impact of different climate change scenarios. Our findings pointed to vast reductions of suitable tulip habitat by 2050, including inside designated reserves. Our study predicted that most species would only survive at higher altitudes. Overall, not only did this work highlight the threat of climate change to biodiversity in the region, but it also provided important information to help policymakers and conservationists take action to protect tulip diversity. This will hopefully act as a rallying call for greater regional collaboration on this and other conservation efforts—especially those related to large-scale threats, such as climate change. 

Tulipa ostrowskiana growing on the edge of a steep slope in the northern Kyrgyz region of Chuy. This species is now recognised as Near Threatened.

We felt that a good starting point to promote regional cooperation would be making use of the IUCN Red List. The online resource aids in raising awareness and catalysing action by indicating the conservation status of specific species. In order to add wild tulips to the Red List, we created a network of experts from across Central Asia. This ensured better communication, sharing of data, and collaboration—linking up a wealth of country-specific information—so that researchers could conduct a more cohesive, border-spanning assessment of tulip populations. This process took place in several stages: writing initial draft reports for each species, obtaining inputs from regional experts (at a workshop held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), asking an expert to review the reports, and finally, ensuring the reports met IUCN’s standard. These efforts led to collated information about the species’ population sizes, locations, threats, habitat, and required conservation action. 

After around two years of hard work, we were able to ensure that reports for 53 species of wild tulips from Central Asia will be published in December 2022. The reports show that approximately 51 percent of all assessed Central Asian species are Threatened: six are Critically Endangered, six are Endangered, and 15 are Vulnerable species, with 14 other species considered Near Threatened. They highlight the precarious situation of wild tulips in Central Asia, especially as a result of livestock overgrazing and climate change. It is clear that urgent conservation attention is required, but we hope that the collaborations to date have brought together the people and information which will be fundamental in stopping the decline of these species. 

Tulipa tetraphylla growing in heavily grazed pastureland in Kyrgyzstan. Grazing is a significant threat to many tulip species. This species is considered Least Concern.

At the moment, wild tulips continue to bloom in the Central Asian landscape every spring, yet our work shows that this may not always be the case. Although new species continue to be found in this mountainous haven, we may still be losing tulip diversity overall, potentially including many undescribed species. A stable taxonomic framework has now been established, which can hopefully underpin a wave of more effective research and conservation. Our partners have simultaneously been working on expanding botanic garden collections of wild tulips and promoting better management of pastures where they grow. We hope that our work will help preserve this beautiful flower in its native home, so that when spring rolls around once again, we will see the meadows, grasslands, and deserts alive with the colours of flowering tulips. 

Tulipa maximowiczii found growing in the grassy hills of southern Tajikistan. This species is still considered to be a form of Tulipa linifolia and so has not been Red Listed, although this may change in the future if more evidence of its uniqueness is found.

Reference:

1https://www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/dna-techniques-reveal-new-tulip-species/

Reflections from the field: What a week by the sea taught me

I slowly lifted myself to a sitting position on the small boat floating off the Gulf of Mexico in Bahía de los Ángeles. It was the final day that my peers and I were attempting to catch our first glimpse of a whale shark. I started to feel a bit nauseous, as I had been in a wetsuit on the boat for over four hours. I touched my motion sickness patch for the hundredth time to make sure it was still there. I thought to myself: how does someone prone to seasickness end up in marine conservation? It was early in the fish spawning season, so the chances of seeing a whale shark were slim. As we waited, I reflected on the other experiences during my brief time in Mexico.

It was June 2019, and I was there with Miami University’s Project Dragonfly for the Earth Expeditions course. Setting out from San Diego, a 10-hour van ride turned into 13 hours after multiple flat tires. We eventually arrived at Rafa Galvan’s family ranch, Rancho San Gregorio. The Galvan family hosts a few student trips every year from Miami University that visit to learn about desert ecology. The ranch exists in a desert biodiversity hotspot with natural springs flowing to it, and it is home to many endangered species. I thought an oasis was mainly the stuff of movies, but when I saw the palm trees surrounded by cacti, my first thought was, “THIS is an oasis.” 

I live in Alberta, Canada, the land of cold prairies where the temperature rarely creeps higher than 30°C. I was enthralled by desert temperatures and a sense of isolation. On the ranch, my fellow students and I learned introductory field data collection methods, statistics, and the process of inquiry-based science learning. This was my first course for graduate school; my main goals at the time were to learn about statistical analysis and how to advance my career through this degree. However, what I witnessed through this trip of a lifetime was so much more than what I had bargained for. 

The entire 10 days, we slept on cots under the stars. It sounds cliché, but I had never seen so many stars in my entire life. I remember the first night I woke to the sound of sand shuffling underneath my cot. It was the Galvan’s family dog, Lola. She jumped up onto my cot and laid with me for a long while before hopping off and doing the same with another human. As a full-time animal caretaker at a zoological institution, I have always felt a strong connection to animals. Lola knew how to make people feel at home. Lying awake and looking at the stars, I thought of my peers. We all lived different lives and came from around the world, but found ourselves here for the pursuit of knowledge. We were instructed to go outside and simply ask comparative questions. This is known as inquiry learning, where asking simple questions may lead to scientific observation and discoveries. This is another special part of fieldwork that not many consider, the meeting and collaborating with new people. These field trips open networking opportunities for future research projects.

After a few nights, we drove two hours to the Vermilion Sea Institute, operated by Meghann McDonald. The Institute is a research facility right off the water in Bahía de los Ángeles, where students, researchers, and community members are welcome. I participated in a nighttime snorkel and observed octopi, saw a pod of cetaceans, and even a harem (group of females with one male) of California sea lions. I work with California sea lions, but swimming with wild sea lions in the ocean is an entirely different experience. There were two rafts (a group of sea lions with heads out of water) calling to each other. I remember looking underwater and seeing all the females swimming past. They looked at me with big brown eyes, especially interested in my bright yellow fins. I remember seeing the male sea lion giving me a side-eye look, which meant it was time to go. It was such a special moment because rarely do you observe an animal that also observes you. I had been to the Gulf of Mexico when I was young, but I had never seen ocean wildlife like this. It filled me with a strong desire to protect it. And to me, that right there is the most important aspect of field research. Witnessing firsthand the place and fauna or flora that we are researching, and gaining the connection to continue work in restoring habitats or conservation management practices.

Suddenly, I was snapped out of my reflection when the boat operator got a call—one male shark was spotted close to us. I jumped up and yanked the zipper of my wetsuit. I looked over to another boat, where my new friends and fellow students were cheering as they came out of the water after seeing it. Now it was my turn. I got a quick overview of instructions: no touching, don’t get too far away from the boat. Then I was over the side and in the water. Where was it, where was it? Did it already swim out of my reach? I frantically turned my head from side to side. Then I saw it coming from behind me on my right and swimming directly under me. I took off as fast as I could, and I couldn’t help squealing into my snorkel with pure elation. A whale shark! It was longer than the vessel I was on, and completely ignoring us, with some fish swimming under the pectoral fins tagging along. I swam and swam, it felt like I was next to him for an eternity and no time at all. I had gotten a big mouthful of water accidentally due to focusing too much on propelling myself and not on staying surface level. I had to stop and re-surface. We all hugged and cheered in elation for being fortunate enough to witness such an amazing wildlife phenomenon. To this day, I still remember that experience as if it just happened. 

The last night of the trip I remember staying up late on purpose to watch the night sky over the water, and I found myself overflowing with emotion. Not from fatigue of the hot days or homesickness, but from experiencing life here and how these families that hosted my cohort were working so successfully and happily in their community towards a goal of conservation action and education. I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about how I wanted to have that same kind of impact on people. I wanted to emphasise the importance of focussing conservation efforts on local communities, branching out to international efforts. Often this aspect of conservation is missed in the big picture. Every difference matters, no matter how big or small we think it may be. Helping local communities with conservation practices, while also doing the same for tourists, and boosting the local economy? That sounds like conservation action I can get behind.

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank everyone at the Vermilion Sea Institute that contributed to this amazing experience. This work was conducted as a part of graduate work through Project Dragonfly at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. 

Searching for Seals

Southern California, USA: It’s midday in July. Looking down at Children’s Pool Beach in San Diego, I begin my daily count: 98 humans, 1 off-leash dog, and one harbour seal. Fortunately, the dog keeps its distance, but the humans do not, creeping close to take photos of the solitary seal.


This is the only seal I see all month.


Harbour seals are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which prohibits disturbance. Hunting of marine mammals has drastically declined since the passing of the act in 1972, but other sources of significant human disturbance, such as ecotourism, persist.


Human disturbances can be quite detrimental to harbour seal populations, interrupting natural behavioural patterns. One of these behaviours is hauling-out: essentially just leaving the water for the land. Like all pinnipeds, harbour seals haul-out, and they do this year-round to reproduce, rest, avoid predators, and regulate body temperatures.

In California, the harbour seal’s behavioural need to haul-out on land year-round can become a catalyst for human-wildlife conflict over shoreline usage. One striking example of this is Children’s Pool beach in San Diego, California. This is an artificial beach that was constructed in the 1930s as a safe, sheltered area for children to swim in the ocean. By the 1990s, rebounding harbour seal populations began to use the sheltered beach as a rookery and haul-out area. Since then, Children’s Pool has become a significant source of conflict surrounding who should be allowed to use the space: humans, harbour seals, or both.


Rules and regulations surrounding Children’s Pool have changed over the years, but currently, the beach is closed to the public during the pupping season from 15th December to 15th May, and is open to the public the rest of the year. While this is a significant step in protecting harbour seals from disturbance during the winter and spring, Children’s Pool is used as a haul-out site year-round. The Seal Conservancy, a local nonprofit, has monthly counts of seals in the past nine years listed as high as 285 in May 2016, and as low as zero during some summer months in certain years. As part of my graduate studies, I wanted to learn more about how human presence impacted harbour seal haul-out behaviour.


Growing up in San Diego, I would see harbour seals at Children’s Pool Beach every time I visited. But while researching human impacts on these seals, I found almost none. I tried conducting observations at different times of day, different tides, different air temperatures and weather, but had little success.


Were the seals shifting their schedules to avoid humans entirely? Harbour seals in Washington state have been shown to shift their haul-out times to nighttime in June and July, since the beach is most crowded with humans during the daytime in those months. San Diego, California, is a major tourist destination, and July is by far our busiest month. Were the seals off foraging elsewhere, hauling out nearby instead of their usual spot? Was the human presence on the beach so overwhelming that it was too late to study its small-scale impacts on individual seals? After all these years, why do people insist on using this beach when there are so many other options? I left the beach with more questions than answers.


Just this year, a seasonal beach closure has been initiated for a nearby beach, Point La Jolla, which serves as an important pupping site for another marine mammal: the California sea lion. For the next seven years, this beach will be closed to the public from 1 st May to 31 st October, which is when California sea lions raise their pups on shore. In both cases, the MMPA has outlawed disturbance for decades, but a lack of enforcement has led to a lack of compliance. I hope that in the coming years, someone such as a park ranger could be stationed at these beaches to encourage guests to give seals and sea lions space, even when the beach is open.


This winter, the seals returned. With the beach closed to the public, they congregated to haul-out and care for the year’s pups. On May 15th , the ropes will come down and beachgoers will be back to sunbathe, swim, and take photos of seals, hopefully with no loose dogs in tow. I’ll be back too, ready to study the animals that eluded me last year.

Green peafowl can coexist with livestock grazing

Establishing nature reserves and prohibiting all major human activities is widely believed to be an effective strategy to protect biodiversity. However, it is challenging for policymakers to trade-off between the needs of local communities and conservation, especially when there is a conflict between wildlife and humans. For example, livestock grazing, which comprises an important part of the local people’s income in less developed areas, is regarded to have a major impact on native biodiversity across the world. Here I review a recent article that showed that complete prohibition of livestock grazing may not be necessary.

The subject of the article is the green peafowl (Pavo muticus), the largest extant pheasant (Phasianidae) species in the world and the only peafowl species native to China. The species was once common in China, but its population has declined substantially due to hunting and habitat loss. Currently, green peafowl in China is only distributed in Yunnan Province, and it is thought there are less than 600 individuals in the area. The remaining habitats of green peafowl are strongly influenced by anthropogenic disturbances, including infrastructure, agriculture, and livestock grazing. Thus, there seems to be an intractable conflict between local people’s livelihoods and the species’ persistence across the green peafowl’s range, especially in China.

Gu et al (2022) investigated the spatial-temporal response of green peafowl to free-ranging livestock in Yubaiding Nature Reserve, one of the main green peafowl habitats in Yunnan. They used camera traps to study peafowl distribution and their diel activity (the time of day when the species was most active) from 2020 to 2021. They produced a huge dataset of 13507 camera days, which is a way of measuring the cumulative sampling effort of a camera trap study, representing the number of cameras multiplied by the number of days each camera was used. In this sample, there were 130 independent detections of green peafowl.

The researchers found that green peafowl prefer dry pine forests with dense understorey shrubs, and they show significant avoidance of human residential areas and roads. However, surprisingly there was a positive association between green peafowl occurrence and the abundance of free-ranging domestic cattle and goats. Moreover, they found that green peafowl did not alter their behavior to avoid free-ranging livestock or human presence. Their findings suggested that large infrastructures are the main threat to green peafowl, rather than livestock grazing.

As livestock grazing comprises up to 60–70 percent of the gross household income of the local people, the authors suggest that prohibiting grazing in this part of China is neither practical nor necessary. To protect green peafowl, the forestry authorities should pay more attention to the highways and hydropower stations that are planned for development in this region. The authors also recommended that policymakers should take conservation objectives, ecosystem types, and the needs of local communities into consideration in grazing management. Indeed, policy based on the local conditions and the requirements and responses of specific species may help to ensure a sustainable future. 

Further Reading:
Gu, B., Y. Weng, Y. Diao, Q. Zhao, Z. Zhang, S. Tian, L. Bai et al. 2022. Is livestock grazing compatible with green peafowl (Pavo muticus) conservation? Potential chance of peafowl-human coexistence. Biological conservation 275: 109772. doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109772

Images: Wikimedia commons

Can freezing frog sperm help with conservation efforts?

Many frogs all over the world are in danger of extinction, but scientists have strategies to try and prevent mass extinctions. Conservation translocation—movement of animals from one place to another—is one such strategy. For instance, animals bred in captivity can be released into the wild to repopulate areas where they have gone extinct. In addition, technologies such as cryopreservation that are often used in in vitro fertilization in human reproduction, can also be employed for conservation.

Translocation can potentially be combined with cryopreservation strategies involving frog sperm. Sperm or eggs can be frozen, stored for long periods of time, and thawed when needed to create new offspring. This method can be used to preserve valuable genetic material from threatened species.

However, there is no information on whether this method works in the wild for frogs. A group of us from the Memphis Zoo and Oregon State University set out to answer the question: can frogs produced from cryopreserved sperm be used to create new and healthy populations in the wild?

We conducted the first part of the research project in a laboratory. We captured and bred Fowler’s toads (a species of frog that lives in the United States) either naturally or through in vitro fertilization using cryopreserved sperm. Both groups of tadpoles, ‘natural-bred’ and ‘cryo-bred’, were hatched in the lab.

We then moved our study to a natural pond. We released tadpoles into enclosures within the pond and monitored them every few days by measuring their length to track how fast they were growing. These repeated measurements allowed us to compare growth and body size for the natural-bred and cryo-bred tadpoles.

For the final part of the study, we used mathematical modeling to make predictions about population growth. In real life, it is difficult or impossible to follow millions of tadpoles into their adulthood and determine whether they can produce healthy populations in the wild. This would take decades of research. Instead, mathematical models can take the difference in tadpole sizes between natural-bred and cryo-bred frogs and estimate what could happen to the population several decades into the future. 

After completing this project and analysis, we first found out that tadpoles that hatch by cryopreservation do not grow as quickly as naturally bred tadpoles. This finding means that some aspects of the freezing and thawing process created tadpoles that grow slower than natural-bred tadpoles, which then results in smaller juvenile frogs. Being too small is not ideal for any frog and its future offspring. Smaller frogs do not survive as well in the wild. They are more likely to be eaten by predators and grow more slowly in their adult lives. They also produce fewer offspring for future generations. 

One thing we were unsure of, was if the smaller toad sizes would be passed onto the offspring or if it is simply a result of the cryopreservation. Using our mathematical model, we could compare what happens to populations of translocated frogs if they are cryo-bred and the small size is passed on to its offspring, cryo-bred but the small size is not passed on, or natural-bred with no change in size. We found that if the small size caused by cryopreservation is passed on to future generations, then the smaller frogs cannot create a stable population in the wild and may go extinct. However, if the effects of cryopreservation are not passed down, the population can sustain itself, but will have a smaller population size as compared to the natural-bred frogs. This is a silver lining! From our study, we can suggest that conservation projects using cryopreservation may offset the smaller population size by simply translocating a higher number of tadpoles to begin with.

Cryopreservation is a promising tool, but we still have lots of work to do to make this work in the wild. Understanding exactly how cryopreservation impacts the growth of the species we are trying to save from extinction will be essential to making those efforts more successful.

Further reading:

Poo, S., A. Bogisich, M. Mack, B. K. Lynn and A. Devan-Song. 2022. Post-release comparisons of amphibian growth reveal challenges with sperm cryopreservation as a conservation tool. Conservation science and practice 4(1): e572.

Invasion to Recovery: A Saga of the Grasslands

The sub-Himalayan grasslands, as the name suggests, occur in the region where the Himalayan foothills converge on the plains. At the regional scale, these grasslands provide crucial wildlife habitat to a multitude of species and safeguard human well-being by ensuring water availability. At the global scale, grasslands play a critical role in mitigating the effect of climate change through carbon sequestration. Conversion of these grasslands into human-use areas has led to their rapid disappearance and fragmentation. The vast swathes of grasslands that once existed are now merely confined to a few Protected Areas in the country.

Manas National Park in Assam, India, still boasts of luxuriant grasslands chiefly composed of tall grass species. However, here too, the habitat is under threat. Biological invasion in the form of invasive alien plants (IAPs) is a prime cause of grassland degradation in Manas. An IAP refers to any plant that is not native to the area or region, and is capable of causing ecological damage by outcompeting native vegetation, subsequently leading to loss of habitat. In Manas, one can expect IAPs to inevitably push several rare and threatened habitat specialist species a step closer to extinction. While they have long been recognised as a threat in Manas, limited scientific evidence or data is available to make informed conservation decisions, especially with regard to IAP management. 

Invasive plants

We undertook a study in Manas National Park to understand the distribution pattern of IAPs and identify the drivers of invasion. We found that the grasslands in Manas are primarily invaded by two species: Chromolaena odorata and Mikania micrantha, which cover approximately 30 percent of the existing grassland habitat. Furthermore, using a technique called species distribution modelling, we predicted that in the absence of any management intervention, the entire grassland habitat is prone to invasion. 

Our study also focussed on developing measures to manage these IAPs and aid in recovery of native grasslands. We tested the efficacy of different methods to manage C. odorata and found that manual uprooting works best to control the species. The experimental plot that was subjected to the manual uprooting treatment had increased native species richness, density and cover as compared to the other two treatments (cut, and cut & burned) tested during the study. Additionally, the density and cover of C. odorata decreased significantly in this plot. 

Local youth engaged in removing invasive plants

Uprooting C. odorata before the flowering season for at least three to five years has proved to be an ecologically effective strategy, which can restore the entire native grass community. Although no supplemental grass plantation was carried out during the experiment, we suggest planting native grass slips after IAP removal for better results. In our efforts to address invasion, we engaged the local communities from the forest fringe areas. Being a part of the restoration process supplemented their livelihood and inculcated conservation-sensitive behaviour. 

For the last two decades, the park management authority has been working in tandem with conservation organisations and local communities to revive Manas. Although conservation efforts in the past have mostly been directed towards securing high profile species (such as the one-horned rhinoceros and Bengal tiger) and strengthening law enforcement, of late there has been a renewed interest in reviving the degraded grasslands. 

The grasslands in Manas National Park are sandwiched between the hilly terrain that is contiguous with Royal Manas National Park in Bhutan in the north and human-use areas along the southern boundary, allowing very little scope for their expansion. Besides, these grasslands are successional and in the absence of floods, there are no other natural factors that can rejuvenate and replenish the ecosystem. Proactive management interventions, such as arresting encroachment by trees like Bombax ceiba and Dillenia pentagyna, preventing invasion by invasive alien plants by the in invasive alien plants, systematic burning of grasses, and reducing unwanted human pressure are imperative for ensuring long-term conservation of the ecosystem and its dependent fauna.

Grasslands revived after three years of continuous intervention

Further reading: 

Nath, A., A. Sinha, B. P. Lahkar and N Brahma. 2019. In search of aliens: Factors influencing the distribution of Chromolaena odorata L. and Mikania micrantha Kunth in the Terai grasslands of Manas National Park, India. Ecological Engineering 131: 16–26.

Sinha, A., A. Nath, B. P. Lahkar, N. Brahma, H.K. Sarma and A. Swargowari. 2022.  Understanding the efficacy of different techniques to manage Chromolaena odorata L., an invasive alien plant in the sub-Himalayan tall grasslands: Toward grassland recovery. Ecological Engineering 179: 106618.

Understanding how experts classify species as extinct

Extinction risk refers to how likely a species is to go extinct. The criteria laid out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List are the gold standard by which the extinction risk of a species is assessed. Species are grouped into categories ranging from Least Concern to Extinct in the Wild. However, unlike all other categories, Extinct lacks a quantitative framework for assigning this category. Whether a species is extinct or not sounds fairly simple: if there are no individuals of a species left, then it is extinct. However, it is rarely so straightforward.

Why is certainty around extinction declaration important? If a species is not listed as extinct, the current rates of biodiversity loss can be underestimated, and misuse of already limited conservation resources may result. If we cannot provide rates of extinction, the margins of error can be quite large when we are speaking about thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of species that could be going extinct.

In a recent paper, in Conservation Biology we sought to better understand what information experts value when making the call of whether a species is extinct. If we can build a consensus for what assessors rely on to declare extinction, the most reliable or common choices can form the foundation for these criteria. We sought to shed some light on what pieces of information assessors value the most to make an accurate decision on whether extinction has occurred, by using a survey-based method to assess the choice patterns of expert assessors who work for the IUCN SSC (the species survival commission). These are the people who are relied on to make decisions for extinction.

How do we come up with standards to assess if a plant, a fungus, or an antelope are extinct, using the same methods? The population of a species could be hard to calculate because where it lives is inaccessible, or it’s hard to find, it’s active during the night or it doesn’t make sounds that humans can detect. Thus, given the existing difficulties in assessing certain species, we explored what information expert assessors working on a diversity of species groups used when declaring a species as extinct. We used a choice experiment approach—a marketing method that presents participants with multiple scenarios and asks them to choose. Using this approach, we explored attributes or factors that are important when inferring extinction. 

The factors that were the most important were data availability, time from last sighting and population decline. These were decided as important attributes favoured by assessors when inferring extinction. In terms of interactions between these factors, by far the most significant was between data availability and the assessor’s Red Listing experience. This result has important consequences, and it points to the fact that the amount of data on species and time on the job influence decisions on extinction more than previously thought. Some of these results were also unexpected, for example, habitat availability had a negative estimate, meaning that it was not favoured by assessors. Although several of these attributes were significant in the decisions of assessors, there was a clear hierarchy of preference for certain attributes.

We hope that the results of our research knowledge can be included in the creation of extinction-specific criteria in the IUCN Red List. This would help conservationists be more certain when declarations of extinction are made and harness more information to design effective, evidence-based conservation plans for threatened or data-poor species.

Further Reading:

Roberts, D. L., A. Hinsley, S. Fiennes and D. Veríssimo. 2023. Understanding the drivers of expert opinion when classifying species as extinct. Conservation biology 37(1): e13968. doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14001

दिबांग खोऱ्यातली एक गोष्ट: अक्रूची शिंगे वाकडी का असतात? 

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जिहा राहात असलेल्या एटाबे गावात सगळं शांत होतं. दिवसभराची कामे आटोपून गावातल्या कुटुंबातील सगळे जण निवांत होते. जिहाची दिवसभरातील ही आवडीची वेळ. तो आपल्या आजीबरोबर शेकोटीजवळ बसला होता. बाकीचेही काही जण आजूबाजूला बसले होते. “नाया, आज रात्री तू मला कोणती गोष्ट सांगशील?” जिहाने आपल्या आजीला विचारले. नाया सांगते त्या गोष्टी  जिहाला खूप आवडतात. तिच्या गोष्टी म्हणजे पिढ्यानपिढ्या चालत आलेल्या इदू मिश्मी लोकांच्या गोष्टी. आपल्या छोट्याशा गावाच्या, बाजूच्या जंगलाच्या आणि डोंगर-दऱ्यात राहणाऱ्या प्राण्यांच्या गोष्टी ऐकायला जिहाला आवडतं.

शेकोटीच्या प्रकाशात नायाचा चेहरा उजळला होता. “आज मी तुला अक्रूची गोष्ट सांगेन,” ती विचार करून म्हणाली.

“अक्रू म्हणजे कोण गं नाया?”

“बकरी आणि हरणासारखा दिसणारा प्राणी म्हणजे अक्रू. तो उंच डोंगरात राहतो. जाड मानेचा आणि धिप्पाड दिसणाऱ्या अक्रूचे संपूर्ण अंग केसाळ असतं आणि खांदे वाकलेले. पण त्याचे पाय आणि शेपटी मात्र लहान असते. अक्रूचे नाक तर सुजलेल्या काळ्या गोळ्याप्रमाणे विचित्र दिसतं.”

जिहाने डोळे मिटले आणि नायाने वर्णन केलेल्या अक्रूचे चित्र आपल्या मनात उभं केलं. “नाया, त्याला माको (सांबर) किंवा माय(सेरो)सारखी शिंगे असतात? 

“नाही,” नाया म्हणाली. “अक्रूची शिंगे त्यांच्यासारखी नाहीत.” समोर बांबूच्या फळ्यावर मांडलेल्या प्राण्यांच्या कवट्यां आणि त्यावरच्या वाकलेल्या शिंगांकडे नायाने बोट दाखवले. “अक्रूची शिंगे आधी अशी वाकलेली नसायची. ती लांब आणि सरळ असायची.”

जिहाचे डोळे विस्फारले. “मग शिंगे वाकडी कशी झाली, नाया?”

बाजूला बसलेला एक तरुण म्हणाला, “हा तर वेगवेगळ्या प्राण्यांच्या वेगवेगळ्या अवयवांपासून बनलेला एक वेगळाच प्राणी वाटतो!” यावर सगळे जण हसले.

बाजूला बसलेला म्हातारा म्हणाला, “अक्रूची चेष्टा करू नकोस. नाहीतर तो नगोलो – डोंगररांगांत राहणारा आत्मा रागावेल. सगळे अक्रू त्याचे आहेत”. 

“नाही-नाही ! अक्रू आपले आहेत,” इतर बोलले.

“मग पुढे  काय झाले नाया?” जिहाने आजीच्या मांडीवर डोके टेकवत उत्सुकतेने विचारले.

“मग काय! तर मग, नगोलो आणि इदू मिश्मी या दोघांनीही अक्रूवर आपला हक्क सांगितला. बराच काळ असेच चालू राहिले. पण अक्रू कुणाचा हा निर्णय काही होईना. अखेरीस, अक्रूवर कुणाचा हक्क हे ठरविण्यासाठी नगोलो आणि इदू मिश्मी यांच्यात रस्सीखेचीची स्पर्धा जाहीर केली गेली. जे जिंकतील त्यांचा अक्रू. इदू लोकांनी दिबांग खोऱ्यातील सर्वांना या स्पर्धेत सहभागी होण्यासाठी आमंत्रित केले. स्पर्धेचा दिवस उजाडला. त्या दिवशी सकाळी, नगोलो आणि इदू लोक एका मोकळ्या मैदानात जमा झाले आणि अक्रू मैदानाच्या बरोबर मध्ये उभा राहिला.

इदू लोकांनी अक्रूच्या शेपटीच्या बाजूची जागा घेतली आणि त्यांच्यातल्या सगळ्यांत दणकट असणाऱ्या शिकाऱ्याने अक्रूची शेपटी घट्ट पकडली. त्यांच्याकडचे बाकीचे सगळे शिकाऱ्याच्या मागे, त्याच्या कंबरेला घट्ट पकडून एकामागोमाग उभे राहिले. 

डोंगररांगांचा आत्मा मानले जाणारे नगोलो मोठ्या धाडसाने अक्रूसमोर उभे राहिले. त्यांच्यातल्या एका बलवान माणसाने आपल्या दोन्ही हातात अक्रूची सरळ आणि लांब शिंगे पकडली. त्याच्या मागोमाग नगोलो लोक मोठ्या ताकदीने उभे राहिले. 

मग, नगोलो आणि इदू- दोघांनीही दोन्ही बाजूंनी अक्रूला आपल्याकडे खेचायला सुरुवात केली. अक्रूही एकदम दणकट आणि पिळदार होता. दोन्ही बाजुंनी त्याला खेचले जात असले तरी त्याने मात्र आपल्या पायाने जमीन घट्ट धरून ठेवली होती. नगोलो आणि इदू यांच्यातली ही स्पर्धा अटीतटीची चालली  होती. 

शिंगांना धरून पुढे ओढणाऱ्यांना दाद न देता अक्रू आपले डोके मागे खेचत होता. इदू मिश्मी लोक अक्रूला पाठीमागून पूर्ण ताकदीनिशी खेचत होते. नगोलोंनी शिंगांवर आपली पकड कायम ठेवली होती. ते अक्रूला जसजसे खेचत होते तसतशी त्याची मजबूत शिंगे हळूहळू मागे आणि वरच्या दिशेने वळू लागली होती.

इदू लोक अक्रूला शेपटीकडून ओढण्यासाठी सर्वशक्तीने झगडत होते. पण, बलशाली नगोलोशी त्यांची बरोबरी होऊ शकली नाही. अक्रूची शिंगे ओढून ओढून अर्धी वाकडी होत हातात व्यवस्थित पकडता येत होती. तर, इदू लोकांच्या हातातून शेपटी निसटत चालली होती. असे करता करता एका झटक्यात शेपटीचा बराचसा मोठा पुंजका इदूंच्या हातात निसटून आला. अक्रूच्या पाठीमागे फक्त एक खुंटीवजा शेपूट शिल्लक राहिले! इदूंना मागे खेचायला काही राहिले नाही. सरतेशेवटी, नगोलोनी ही स्पर्धा जिंकली आणि तेव्हापासून त्यांनी अक्रू आपलाच असल्याचा दावाही केला.            

गोष्ट संपत आली तसे नायाने सर्वाना विचारले, “तर कळलं अक्रूची शिंगे वाकडी, पाठ कललेली, आणि त्याची शेपूट लहान का  झाली आहे ते?”

“नाया, तू कधी अक्रूला पाहिलयस?” जिहाने विचारले.

“खरंतर, फारच कमी लोकांनी अक्रूला बघितलंय. असं म्हणतात की, जिथे जमिनीवर फक्त बर्फच दिसते तिथे- त्या उंचीवर जाऊन शिकार करणारे अक्रूबद्दल सांगू शकतात. काही जण असंही म्हणतात की अक्रू अगदी तीनशेच्या संख्येने कळपा-कळपात फिरतात! यातलं किती खरं आणि किती खोटं हे मला माहिती नाही. मी तर कधीच अक्रूना पाहिलेले नाही,” नाया म्हणाली.

सगळं ऐकल्यावर, जिहाला आता अक्रूला पाहण्याची खूप उत्सुकता लागली. मनातल्या मनात त्याने ठरवले की मोठा झाल्यावर एक दिवस तो आपल्या वडिलांबरोबर दिबांग पर्वतावर चढून जाईल आणि त्याला एखादा अक्रू दिसेल! पर्वतरांगांवरच्या अक्रूची स्वप्ने पाहत जिहा  नायाच्या मांडीवर झोपी गेला. 

***

इदू मिश्मी लोकांकडे अशा वेगवेगळ्या गोष्टीं असतात. त्यापैकी ही एक अक्रूची गोष्ट. इदूंच्या गोष्टी लिखित नसतात तर त्या मौखिक परंपरेद्वारे त्या पिढ्यानपिढ्या चालत येतात. अक्रूसारख्या इतर प्राणी, पक्षी, कीटक, बेडुक अशा कितीतरी प्राण्यांच्या लोककथा इदू मिश्मी परंपरेत प्रचलित आहेत. अशा गोष्टींमधून आजूबाजूचा निसर्ग आणि  भूप्रदेशाबद्दल बरेच काही आपल्याला समजते.

अरुणाचल प्रदेशातील सव्वीस प्रमुख आदिवासी समाजातील मिश्मीच्या तीन उपगटांपैकी इदू मिश्मी हा एक गट आहे. बहुतेक इदू मिश्मी अरुणाचल प्रदेशतील दिबांग खोरे आणि लोअर दिबांग खोरे जिल्ह्यात राहतात. सियांग जिल्ह्यात त्यांची लोकसंख्या कमी आहे. सुमारे १४ हजार इदू मिश्मी राहत असलेला दिबांग खोरे जिल्हा हा भारतातील सर्वांत कमी लोकसंख्या असलेला जिल्हा. समृद्ध वन्यजीव, सुंदर बर्फाच्छादित पर्वतरांगा आणि उंचावरील पाणथळ जागांसाठी ओळखला जाणारा हा प्रदेश. इदू मिश्मी प्रामुख्याने कोरडवाहू शेती आणि वनउत्पादनांवर अवलंबून असतात. खडतर भूप्रदेश, कडक हवामान, चीन-भारत आंतरराष्ट्रीय सीमा असलेला हा उंच पर्वतारांगांवरील प्रदेश दररोजचे मानवी जीवन जगायला कठीण मानला जातो. प्राणी आणि मानव तिथल्या संस्कृतीचा आणि जीवनाचा अविभाज्य घटक आहेत.

मूळ इंग्रजी लेखिका – अंबिका ऐैयादुराई आणि ममता पांड्या 

अनुवादक – राघवेंद्र वंजारी 

चित्रे – श्रोबोंतिका दासगुप्ता 

The Marathi version of the article was first published in Hākārā Journal

Introduction

It is now widely recognised that conservation is as much about people as it is about the rest of life on Earth. Writing earlier this year, Inger Andersen, Executive Secretary of the UN Environment Program, said: “The conservation of biological diversity is, at heart, a social issue, cutting across the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres of human life.” If conservation is a social issue, it follows that the social sciences can play a valuable role in helping us understand the dynamics of how humans interact with, and seek to conserve, non-human life. Indeed, the last few decades have seen the emergence and gradual coalescence of the new field of ‘conservation social science’. The quote from Andersen above is taken from the foreword to a new book by that name.

Bennet and colleagues, writing in 2017, identified multiple different ways in which the social sciences, ranging from economics to anthropology, can add value to conservation: for example, by helping us to diagnose the aspects that create challenges as well as contribute to successes, stimulating periodic reflection on how and why conservation occurs, assisting in the planning and management of current programmes and so on. In other words, the social sciences can provide a multidimensional understanding of conservation by serving different functions. Through these various contributions, social science can be ‘for’ conservation in support of its normative aims, but also ‘on’ conservation, helping to understand conservation practice (and practitioners) as a social phenomenon.

Until the end of the 20th century, social scientists working on and/or for conservation were few and far between. However, as the recognition of the need for conservation social science scholarship has grown, so too have the number of researchers taking up the challenge. Various specialist degree programmes have sprung up, and conservation organisations are increasingly looking to hire trained social scientists. As a result, there has been a recent wave of early career social science professionals studying conservation issues and often working to implement conservation practice.

Bringing together these two trends, this issue of Current Conservation seeks to highlight the important role of scholarship on the human dimensions of conservation, with a particular emphasis on showcasing the work of early career authors who are conducting critical social science research on conservation. The articles in the issue represent a wide range of different approaches to studying the social tensions and relations that influence conservation discourse and practice. However, they are united in their willingness to ask difficult questions and to engage with the political dimensions of conservation, rather than adopting the ‘apolitical’ stance usually found in scientific studies of biodiversity loss, protected area effectiveness and so on.

Opening the issue, Rogelio Luque Lora makes a fresh attempt to answer a fundamental question: What is conservation? His approach seeks to identify what distinguishes conservation from related concerns such as the welfare of individual animals, and how conservation is concerned with maintaining life forms over particular time scales. On the other hand, Diana Vela-Almeida and Teklehaymanot Weldemichel remind us of the well-established reservations about protectionism even as we mull over the newly agreed Convention on Biological Diversity 30×30 target. More fine-grained accounts are presented by the rest of our contributors: Revati Pandya describes why local women engage with tourism projects around the Corbett Tiger Reserve, which is one of the most well-known protected areas in India. While conservationists may believe (eco)tourism is all about saving the tiger, local women confess that their personal reasons vary from finding relief from wage labour to retaining connections to ancestral land and a desire to sidestep patriarchy. Ramya Ravi continues the theme of diverse perspectives within communities in her article on the Maldhari voices in the Banni—in reality they are not one but 21 pastoral communities! Different governance regimes operate simultaneously in this landscape and Ramya shares an overview of how the different sections of Maldharis negotiate for access and rights to resources. Next, Trishant Simlai and colleagues direct our attention to the difference between popular portrayals of forest guards as singular heroes or villains versus the social complexity and inequity such frontline workers themselves contend with as they labour to implement conservation policies.

Together these articles showcase how the social sciences deepen our conceptual and empirical understanding of what it means to engage in conservation. They remind us that as much as we speak about biological diversity, we need to remain conscious of social diversity along with all the richness and tensions that brings to the table.

Finally, and in contrast to the early career contributors, we hear the perspectives of Bill Adams, a founding father of political ecology research on conservation, captured in an interview by Hari Sridhar. As Bill observes, “The world remains a strange and complex place—wonderful, mismanaged, and unjust.[…]. You need to go well beyond ecological science, to learn how people think and how societies and institutions work, if you want to understand how nature is exploited, why conservation is needed, and why it succeeds and fails.” He goes on to build a thoughtful case for why we need to do political ecology in particular, although he admits, “it is a bit like Banksy’s art—we know what it is when we see it, but we don’t know who is doing it.”

We hope this special issue of Current Conservation gives readers a glimpse of some of the fresh voices in this field and their attempt to go beyond simplistic narratives of conservation.

Further Reading

Bennett, N. J., R. Roth, S. C. Klain., K. Chan, P. Christie, D. A. Clark, G. Cullman et al. 2017. Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation. Biological conservation 205: 93–108. doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.10.006

Miller, D. C., I. R. Scales and M. B. Mascia. 2023. Conservation social science: Understanding people, conserving biodiversity. 1st edition. West Sussex, UK: Wiley.

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

What is conservation? The struggle over boundaries and definitions

Why conserve? How to conserve?

The last decade saw heated disputes about the proper goals of conservation. Many conservationists have placed increasing emphasis on the value of nature for human beings, framing the benefits provided by nature in terms of ecosystem services and natural capital. For others, this amounts to a betrayal of nature’s ‘intrinsic value’: its value for itself, regardless of its contributions to (or detractions from) human interests.

Other controversies have focused on how conservationists should relate to changing ecological conditions, particularly changes brought about by human activities. Should conservation try to arrest anthropogenic change, by trying to keep ecosystems in as close a state as possible to a supposed pre-human baseline? Or should they embrace these changes and promote whatever resulting values they produce, such as novel ecosystems and the potential to adapt to climate change?

Even more recently, advocates of so-called ‘compassionate conservation’ have helped foreground the tension between conserving ecological wholes (such as species and ecosystems) and protecting the wellbeing of individual animals. The core controversy here relates to the suffering and death brought to individual animals by certain conservation interventions, such as predator control and the eradication of non-native species.

All these debates have been underlain by the more basic question of what conservation is, and indeed who can be considered a conservationist. But so far, definitions of conservation have either been exclusively narrow or excessively broad.

Historically, narrow understandings of conservation as proper hunting ethics (in the times of the British Empire) or the preservation of biological entities and processes (in recent times) have served to exclude those who do not view the living world and their relations with it on those terms. On the other hand, attempts to broaden our understanding of what conservation is in the interest of inclusivity have sometimes cast the net too wide, and thereby not allowed us to distinguish conservation from other ways of relating to the natural world, such as human development and the protection of animal wellbeing.

What is needed is a conceptualisation that is sufficiently wide to accommodate diverse forms of conservation, but also sufficiently contained to delimit conservation from altogether different ways of relating to the living world. What follows is my attempt to build such a conceptualisation.

Conservation in extended human time

Even if many conservationists disagree about why the living world is valuable (whether it is valuable owing to its contributions to human wellbeing, or valuable independently of those contributions), all conservationists agree that something of value exists in the living world. In other words, all conservationists agree that the living world is valuable, despite their disagreements over what this value consists of. This is the first step in building the definition I propose.

The second step has to do with the kind of harm to valuable things that most concerns conservationists. Conservationists have frequently disagreed about which harms are most important. While many have blamed the activities that directly harm wildlife, such as agricultural expansion and unsustainable hunting, political ecologists have typically pointed their fingers at the underlying political and economic structures that support those harms.

But what distinguishes conservationists from other groups is their overarching concern with irrecoverable loss rather than with temporary harm. As I view it, conservation is centrally preoccupied with the avoidance of extinction and other forms of permanent damage. This is why I think conservation is about promoting the continued existence of valuable things, rather than just their temporary states.

The third and last step in my proposed definition seeks to identify the right timescale for conserving valuable things. Attempts to conserve individual animals and plants (except extraordinarily long-lived ones) is generally futile from the human point of view: individual beings are born and destroyed too quickly for it to make sense to conserve them. But ecological wholes, such as species and ecosystems, can far outlive human generations, and so their conservation—from the human standpoint—is feasible, at least in principle. As Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, concludes his assessment of the sustainability of 19th century whaling practices:‘We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.’

On the other end of the spectrum, though, even the conservation of species and ecosystems is futile. On geological timescales, ecological wholes also come and go on a continuous basis. On these scales of time, even their conservation is finally futile. This is why I propose that the right timescale for conservation is ‘extended human time’: stretches of time longer than a single human generation, but short enough that humans with whom we can identify still exist (humans who might be able to understand, perhaps even share, some of our ethical motivations and aspired relations with the living world). It is at this temporal scale that humans are able to find meaning in their endeavours, and it is at this scale that conservation is intelligible.

Taken together, these three steps allow me to propose that conservation is the promotion of the continued existence of valuable things in the living world in extended human time.

Conservation, ecological change, and the wellbeing of nonhuman beings

Viewing conservation as unfolding in extended human time helps shed light on the tensions between conserving ecological wholes, on the one hand, and caring about the welfare of individual plants and animals, on the other. The fact that, as Ishmael perceived, species can outlive the individuals that compose them, is why I think that conservation has mostly focused on ensuring the continued existence of ecological wholes rather than individual beings. In and of itself, concern with the welfare of individual animals is not, I think, conservation.

By disentangling conservation goals from the protection of animal welfare, we can gain a better understanding of the relationship between the two.

At times this relationship is positive. In my experience, both in the field (mostly in Chile) and in the office, many conservationists care sincerely about the goods and evils experienced by sentient beings. On many occasions, protecting individual animals can advance conservation goals: for instance, protecting individual whales generally benefits whale species as a whole. In turn, protecting habitats and ecosystems often benefits the individual plants and animals who make those places their homes.

At other times, harming or culling individual beings is necessary to ensure the continued survival of certain species (think of the eradication of rodents on oceanic islands to save the seabirds on whose chicks the rodents predate). In this context, viewing the welfare of those beings as conceptually separate from conservation can also help clarify our aims. Where this harm is truly inevitable, and where it is gauged that saving a species justifies the harm involved, conservationists should strive to inflict that harm with a heavy heart, aware of the tragic choices they face. At times, they may even decide to forsake conservation goals in the interest of not causing widespread damage to individual animals and plants.

Seeing conservation as primarily concerned with promoting the continued existence of valuable things can also clarify the relationship between conservation and the adaptation to, or even embrace of, ecological change. In many cases, embracing change is a good strategy to boost the chances of certain ecological entities to survive broader changes, such as those to do with land use and climate. Assisted migration is a good example of this: rather than trying to keep everything as it is, helping species relocate to more favourable habitats can help avoid their extinction.

Another way of seeing the embrace of ecological change as enhancing the continued existence of valuable things is to focus less on ecological entities (such as species and ecosystems) and more on ecological processes (such as evolution and nutrient cycling). Embracing some forms of ecological change can help promote the continued existence of these valuable ecological processes. For example, changing biological and climatic conditions create new evolutionary pressures that can—eventually—result in the appearance of new species.

There are important limitations to my proposed definition of conservation. For one thing, I have elaborated it by drawing largely from Western debates about what matters in conservation, and by using concepts, such as ‘the living world’ and ‘human time’, that are grounded in a Western view of the world. In this sense, my definition can rightly be challenged by those who do not view conservation and the living world on the same terms as me.

For this reason, the definition I have proposed can never pretend—and should never pretend—to be universal. Rather, the main political motivation behind my retracing the boundaries of conservation has been to bring at once openness and clarity to the question of what conservation is and what it is not.

This is a bold and ambitious task, but I hope that by proposing that conservation is chiefly concerned with avoiding permanent loss rather than reversible damage, and by arguing that conservation unfolds in timescales longer than a single human generation, but shorter than geological time, my proposed new definition can help shed light on what conservation is and what it is for.

Further Reading

Luque-Lora, R. 2023. What conservation is: a contemporary inquiry. Conservation and society 21(1): 73–82.

Sandbrook, C. 2015. What is conservation? Oryx 49(4): 565–566.

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

Whose grassland is it anyway?

“A rainbow has seven colors, no one color is the same. A hand has five fingers, they’re all different. That’s the way of things. Banni is no different. No one monsoon is the same, no one year is the same, not every Maldhari is the same. Even the landscape changes all the time, it’s dynamic. That’s its way, Banni’s way. Our way.” – a Maldhari elder

I have spent a large part of the last decade studying Banni grassland for my doctoral work. It is a landscape that I have come to love for its veiled beauty, dynamism, and complexity. An arid grassland system, Banni is an important wildlife habitat spread across 3857 sq. kilometres in the Kutch district of Gujarat, India. The grassland has a unique community of 40 species of salt and drought-tolerant grasses. The landscape supports an array of Palearctic and Central Asian flyway birds—upto 273 resident and migratory bird species—serving as important foraging, roosting, nesting, staging and wintering grounds. Meanwhile, the grassland is among the few in the country where all four species of wild canids found in India co-occur. Banni is, therefore, ecologically quite significant.

The grassland is also home to centuries-old traditional pastoralist communities, the Maldharis (Maal = livestock, Dhari = owners). Known for their animal husbandry, the Maldharis have specially bred the Banni buffalo and Kankrej cattle that are drought tolerant, and are highly productive despite climatic vagaries. The Maldharis’ lives, identity, and economy is intricately tied to these vagaries. A good rain can boost the milk economy of these communities, and an above normal rainfall can lead to floods, displacing people and animals alike. A single drought can affect income for the year, whereas a prolonged drought can force members of this now semi-sedentarised pastoralist community to sell their livestock, migrate, and have lasting effects on the wellbeing of poorer pastoralists. These challenges, however, are not unknown to pastoralist cultures that are built around scarcity. A major reason why pastoralism has persisted for as many centuries, lies in the ability of pastoralists to adapt and sustain diverse environmental and social challenges. The Maldharis are no exception to this. Nonetheless, Maldharis are quite vulnerable—as are the grasslands they depend on.

“Banni is now changing, has changed. It changed when things around us changed. The land changed. The people changed. Our traditions have also changed. As pastoralists, we’ve changed. Is change negative or positive? We’ll know, probably. It will depend on how close or far we are from that point.”

Despite its resilience, the Maldhari way and the grassland is showing signs of wear and tear. Colonial regime, market forces, and privatisation, along with extreme climatic conditions (that are typical to this arid system) intermingled with climate change, have heightened a sense of vulnerability in this deeply entwined human and natural system.

How exactly, you may wonder that the ghost of colonialism haunts conservation management approaches of grasslands, and by extension, its people—the pastoralists.

Let’s rewind back to circa 1860 when the Indian Forest Department was created, to address concerns for the denuded state of Indian forests from overharvesting of timber, and leading to the introduction of scientific forest management across the British Raj. With revenue generation as the principal goal of this department, forest resources began to be ‘conserved and protected’. Forests provided timber, and timber was a valuable resource that drove colonial expansion. Meanwhile, grasslands, devoid of timber, were categorised as ‘wastelands’.

Common to forests and grasslands, however, was the exclusion and criminalisation of forest-dependent communities and pastoralists from these landscapes. This categorisation was also a reflection of the colonial viewpoint of pastoralism as a pre-agricultural, primitive way of life that needed to be sedentarised and integrated with agriculture.

Colonial records describe the province of Kutch as a ‘bare country’ with no trees. The rulers of Kutch, who were completely aligned with colonial power, remedied this situation. They created forests with drought-resistant trees, existing forests were heavily guarded, and grasslands, locally called rakhals, were closed off to prevent grazing, taxes were imposed to regulate grazing and livestock impounded. Partly used as game reserves, rakhals were used as grass farms that fed the royal stables, and were sites of extensive reforestation policies.

The new policies saw a permanent change in pastoralists’ relationship with natural resources. Villagers and pastoralists resented these new policies, and several Indian papers of the time were reported to have criticised the Maharao for prioritising his ‘passion for wildlife over people’s needs’. Over time, these policies were normalised, but this new normal also presented new problems. The protection offered to the animals within these ‘artificially preserved’ spaces led to complaints and accusations from people and local leaders that ‘panthers, wild pigs, and deer’ were steadily working their way through cattle and crops. Gaming rules were relaxed, meaning that rakhals were also thrown open to wild grazing, with the effect that indiscriminate hunting led to an alarming decrease in wildlife. This in turn led to the reinstatement of previous regulations—only tighter.

This must sound familiar, right?

After the accession of the princely rule to the Republic of India in 1948, forest management policies from the colonial era continued. Banni was primed for the same afforestation policies that were broadly considered successful in other parts of Kutch. Under independent India, pastoral communities not only had to contend with a fully ingrained wasteland discourse and related policies that barely accounted for pastoralist challenges and realities, but they also had to contend with the loss of traditional rights.

As a wasteland, the administration of Banni was under the Gujarat Revenue Department. But after being declared a Protected Area in 1955, the administration also came to be with the Gujarat Forest Department. This puzzling arrangement continues to this day. Banni is managed by both departments, which makes it a grassland, a wasteland and a protected area, all at once! And, because these are legitimate categories in government records, the battle for community rights under Section 3(1)(i) of the Indian Forest Rights Act (2006) remains unresolved to this day.

Despite the resilience of this centuries-old pastoralist system, the increasing fear of eviction has already strained the traditional patterns of resource sharing. Moreover, lingering uncertainty over the future has pushed several villages inside this grassland to privatise this commons land, raising tensions among the Maldharis. When the Maldhari elder remarked that not all fingers on a hand were the same size, he was referring to the embedded diversity of the landscape. Banni is made up of 19 panchayats and 54 villages with 21 different pastoral communities that are grouped under this one Maldhari identity. These communities are diverse in their social classes, family sizes, livestock holdings, a range of income sources, and a host of responsibilities that make up the tapestry of each household. From uneven development to unequal access to government relief measures, these 21 different communities have to contend with a diverse set of circumstances. The wear and tear is beginning to show in how the commons land is viewed in Banni now.

“Under the forest law, boundaries were drawn where none previously existed. We have no rights, we are strangers in our own land. Banni is ours. We have been here for centuries. Why should an outsider—like these private companies—occupy our land? Why should the Forest Department restrict us? If we don’t privatise it, these people will. Otherwise, we will lose it all.”

A sentiment that is widely shared by several old and young Maldharis. With the question of rights, or lack thereof, looming large over the landscape, there has been an alarming rise in privatisation of the landscape. Redirection of commons to rainfed agricultural parcels or tourist resorts (that service the annual winter festival— the White Rann festival) has affected the traditional ties that bind this heterogeneous community. This is evident from the counter claims of three panchayats that would prefer revenue rights, rejecting claims for commons.

But alas, Banni is a protected area, and non-forest activity is not permitted. So, a bid was made in 2018 to halt privatisation or ‘encroachment of forest land’ by filing a case against the encroachers with the National Green Tribunal in 2018—a Banni vs. Banni situation. The following year, the Tribunal ruled against the encroachments and ordered the immediate removal of all non-forest activity. While there was celebration that Banni is finally being recognised as a forest land and the Maldharis well on their way to get their rights, ugly scenes of conflict between the Forest Department and people were unfolding across Banni over removal of the encroachments, and revival of enclosures that would keep people out. As Karl Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

This unending sequence of events lead me to ask the question: whose grassland is this anyway? Maldharis’? Revenue Department’s? Forest Department’s? Or the wildlife?

Tellingly, conservation concerns have taken a backseat. If conservation needs to be addressed, then the locals need their rights to facilitate co-existence. But in continuing to alienate them, Banni has become another site where conservation goals remain elusive. Is there hope for the grassland, this unique yet frustratingly complex system that several of us love? Perhaps. Instead of making the sweeping generalisation that local people are always the best custodians of a landscape, I would say that they remain the best bet in the absence of more successful, cohesive and inclusive approaches.

And it’s about time we trashed that wasteland discourse!

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

Snapshots from the field: Identity and access in conservation and (eco)tourism

Identity and access are multifaceted and tied to questions of equity and justice. This piece is set in the context of wildlife conservation and (eco)tourism at Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand, India. Nature guides and labour for hotels are two common forms of (eco)tourism work for villagers. I offer two vignettes or snapshots from the field that capture the lived experiences of such villagers. They speak of the impacts of (eco)tourism, and more specifically the different people’s engagement with (eco)tourism in the context of their everyday lives that confront rural realities, identities, and conservation. Albeit snapshots, these instances are playing out in the same context and offer insights on how differential engagement or villagers’ relationship with (eco)tourism is, particularly when their identities differ.

The elephant in the village and forest

It’s dark inside the room and I hear my name being called out through the window. I open my eyes, disoriented but rapidly gaining awareness that there must be an important reason for my being woken up at what feels like the middle of the night. I’m about to open the door when I hear “elephant, elephant!”

I run out of the room and follow family members of the house where I am living in Kumer* village. We walk carefully and swiftly through the early morning fog, on a narrow path that connects their home to other homes and farms in the village. We all feel a combination of excitement and fear at the likelihood of spotting an elephant close by. I am told that we need to make sure that the haathi (elephant) doesn’t go further inside the village—it could damage more crops, property, or life. The key is to make loud sounds in the hope that the elephant can be rerouted to the forest. Not having seen any signs of the elephant in the village, we assume it has returned to the forest.

We return home and survey the damage to the paddy crop. This is a seasonal phenomenon: elephants love the paddy flowers, and annually raid the paddy fields. It is a constant challenge for the villagers to protect their crops from elephants, and other animals including nilgai, and sometimes boars.

This village, where I was living, lies close to the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) located in the northern state of Uttarakhand. In 1973, Corbett Tiger Reserve became one of the first areas designated to be set aside for tiger protection. Since then, villages around the protected area have been significantly influenced and impacted by the tiger reserve. One of the major influencing factors has been (eco) tourism. Ecotourism is promoted as a means for educating tourists about nature and wildlife, providing employment to local people, and contributing to the protection of wildlife or forests. Ecotourism is meant to be low impact and create minimal disturbance to the landscape and people. However, CTR’s proximity to the National Capital Region—which encompasses Delhi and several districts surrounding it from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan—makes it more accessible, which has also contributed to the growth of all kinds of other tourism. One of the most common forms of ecotourism at CTR is safaris.


So how is the elephant incident relevant here? For most tourists visiting this landscape, at least one jungle safari is part of their itinerary. Jeep safaris are led by a guide and a driver both of whom are generally from the nearby villages. Spotting elephants and of course tigers is a sign of a successful safari. Tourists in safari jeeps passing one another ask whether they have spotted a tiger, or any other majestic wildlife.

During peak tourist season (winter months) there can be over 200 safaris per day. And the hope—for the jeep drivers, guides, and tourists—is to spot a tiger, or at least an elephant. The guides or drivers often have their own crops damaged by elephants, yet the value of spotting an elephant or other wildlife during the safari ties into the material benefits they gain. But for the villagers outside the CTR boundaries, spotting a tiger or elephant in their villages has no benefits—it only brings crop loss, property damage or loss of life.

Women’s work and precarity

“I helped build that hotel. I would walk up two and three floors with a load on my head. Today, no one will speak up to say who built that hotel.” In conversations with women whose families are unable to own land due to disadvantaged class and caste, (eco)tourism work has a different level of precarity. Another woman who works as farm labour adds, “There is more land sold and less farm work for us. There will be more and more hotels, and villagers will go away. The villagers have their land, our daily wage often comes from farming on their lands. So, if they have sold their lands, where will we get work from?”

These are only two of the hundreds of stories of women who work as labour in the village, households, and (eco)tourism, and whose work remains invisible. As some villagers have become entrepreneurs and shifted away or reduced farming, such women have reduced access to traditional livelihood work, or they become part of the (eco)tourism economy. The face of the tourism enterprise, households and land is men, yet a significant amount of labour work is put in by women. Women who come from landowning families have been able to engage with the (eco)tourism market in the form of homestay work or administrative work in hotels. For some, (eco)tourism-based work provides marginal mobility with continued precarity. This is true of all tourism-based work.

Women continue to walk a tightrope as they try to tap into forms of agency, while navigating the realities of the patriarchy. Their involvement with the market offers an avenue to understand how culture, market values, and agency coexist and contradict each other. It is in such spaces of women’s work or guides’ decision making towards their land use, that one could locate where and how agency can be expressed and amplified.

Negotiating (eco)tourism

The Corbett landscape is notorious for the contentious use of land for tourism and infrastructure influenced by powerful actors. All these factors have contributed to changes in livelihoods and change in the physical landscape. The rural landscape around CTR has several hotels, guest houses, resorts, restaurants, shops, and tea stalls. While farming and livestock keeping have been common livelihood practices here, (eco)tourism has become a common avenue for diversifying household incomes or shifting away from traditional livelihoods.

Simultaneously, there is a common understanding of the symbolic value of land, beyond the material. Socio-economically well-off villagers have been able to set up their own enterprises and engage with tourism as owners or managers rather than labour. Despite the seasonal nature of tourism, engaging with (eco)tourism is a matter of surviving market dominance, and one way to continue to live in their homes rather than out-migrate.

This was the context for my doctoral research: examining how local people are negotiating and responding to Corbett Tiger Reserve (eco)tourism. Using a critical feminist political ecology lens, it was important to understand how and why people are engaging with (eco)tourism. This lens helped locate the complexities of peoples’ responses, which were shaped by their socio-economic identity, and the extent to which they can navigate a changing rural landscape.

The landscape is thus riddled with contradictions and shifting positionalities as villagers, over the years, have learnt to negotiate and engage with the (eco)tourism market. The benefits or losses from tourism are variable, and it is precisely this complexity that calls for more attention. The focus on identity in my research was a result of the variations in access and abilities to engage with the market or continue farming. Identity is also tied to agency, and for conservation governance, it is crucial to understand who is affected by conservation policies, why and how, if we are to work towards equity and justice.

*A pseudonym is used for the village name

Further Reading

Mazoomdar, J. (2012, May 4). Corbett. Now, On sale. Mazoomdar. https://mazoomdaar.blogspot.com/search?q=Corbett

Mishra, I. (2022, October 21). Central committee to probe ‘illegal’ felling of trees in Corbett National Park: NGT. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/central-committee-to-probe-illegal-felling-of-trees-in-corbett-national-park-ngt/article66040340.ece 

Pandya, R. 2022a Intersecting identities and altered relations: Locating the material and symbolic factors shaping local engagement with ecotourism at India’s Corbett Tiger Reserve. PhD thesis, Wageningen University. ISBN: 978-94-6447-406-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18174/577012 

Pandya, R., Dev, H.S., Rai, N.D. and R. Fletcher (2022) Rendering land touristifiable: (eco)tourism and land use change. Tourism geographies 25(4): 1068–1084. 

Pandya, R. 2022. Micro-politics and the prospects for convivial conservation: Insights from the Corbett Tiger Reserve, India. Conservation and Society (20)2: 146–155.

Pandya, R. 2022b. An intersectional approach to neoliberal environmentality: Women’s engagement with ecotourism at Corbett Tiger Reserve, India. Environment and planning E: Nature and space 6(1): 355–372. 

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

Labour perspectives on frontline conservation work

“The biggest challenge for all frontline forest staff is our 24 hours duty. No other public department has this kind of working hours, the police and even the army have shifts. We have no shifts! Our work never ends!”

The quote above was a lament by a frontline forest worker from the Corbett Tiger Reserve in north India to one of the authors during their PhD fieldwork. Such perceptions about the realities of ranger work remain invisible in popular narratives about rangers working in biodiversity conservation.

Recent conservation social science work on rangers highlights the importance of rangers as the primary actors in doing the work of conservation in protected areas. Such work thus positions rangers as both the most important as well as the most vulnerable actors in addressing wildlife crime, including but not limited to illegal hunting and poaching, illicit logging and collection of non-timber forest products. Rangers more broadly are on the ground, engaged in protecting and conserving wildlife, forests, and achieving intertwined social and ecological objectives of conservation and human development. Yet, despite the multifaceted nature of ranger work and the political economic and socio-cultural contexts they operate in, rangers and their work are often portrayed in simplistic terms.

Mainstream discourse in conservation natural sciences and policy, for example, often tends to portray rangers as heroes fighting against villainous poachers. On the other hand, some critical approaches in conservation social science, like political ecology, can be quick to point to rangers as wielders of unjust violence in pursuit of conservation objectives. While we recognise that rangers do often use violence and are also important actors in conserving biodiversity and saving particular species, any binary or simplistic portrayal of rangers and their work risks glossing over more complex realities that are important to understanding the challenges and opportunities in supporting rangers, and the broader social and ecological objectives of biodiversity conservation that their work underpins.


The social and political dimensions of conservation labour

A recent survey conducted by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Ranger Federation of Asia revealed that ‘rangers’ in Asia work in dangerous conditions with low pay, poor facilities, and spend long durations away from their families. The survey collectively refers to all frontline conservation staff as “rangers”, which includes forest guards, foresters, wildlife wardens, scouts, and watchers. However, in frontline conservation work particularly in the Global South, rangers often work under rigid social hierarchies, often shaped by caste, class, gender, and race.

For example, during our fieldwork across several national parks in India, we found that indigenous and lower caste persons were usually employed as daily wage workers with little job security. They have also been conceptualised as “vulnerable chowkidars” (see Further Reading section) as well as forest watchers working in precarious working conditions without fixed term contracts. In our research with rangers in India, we find systemic caste discrimination and exploitation in frontline forest work, where upper caste forest guards coerce lower caste daily wage forest watchers to do chores associated with their caste occupation, such as clean toilets and wash clothes.

Additionally, dominant popular conservation discourses surrounding illegal wildlife trade and poaching often draw on unhelpful, simplified, and often racialized binaries of helpless dead animals killed by “bad” people (read poachers) who are then caught and some times killed by conservation heroes (read rangers or other law enforcement or security personnel). The realities of poaching and the work of rangers to address this are often much more complex and contextually situated.

As highlighted by geographers studying labour, the social and political conditions in which work is done is fundamental to the processes that define power relations between workers (rangers, in this case) and those whom they work for. The same conditions also shape and limit the ways in which workers are able to struggle to improve the terms and conditions of their employment.

We thus need to pay close attention to power relations, social hierarchies, working conditions, and related political and social conflicts (e.g. strikes, wages, working contracts and salaries, levels of informality and insecurity). However, scientists, practitioners and policymakers invested in designing and implementing biodiversity conservation policies have still to embrace these insights, leading to a limited understanding of how people are put to work for conservation, under what conditions they work, and how conservation affects labour dynamics and related conflicts, and vice versa. Consequently, the lack of attention to labour in conservation research, practice and policy can contribute to inadequate and poorly designed conservation policies, initiatives and projects.

For example, conservation interventions in India concerning frontline labour have been limited to providing equipment, such as jackets, shoes, water filters and solar cookers, without focusing on systemic factors of labour exploitation and oppression, such as low wages and lack of social security. Most daily wage labour in protected areas across India is done in contravention to the Factories Act, 1948, which states: “No employee is supposed to work for more than 48 hours in a week and 9 hours in a day. Any employee who works for more than this period is eligible for overtime remuneration prescribed as twice the amount of ordinary wages.”

This example alone highlights a set of questions that are usually neglected in conservation research, advocacy, and policymaking: To what extent are conservation workers systematically exploited and/or overworked? And what are the consequences for them and the conservation work they do? Do labour relations in conservation exist outside of formal labour regulations, and if so, how and why? How do conservation initiatives benefit economically from, and at the same time depend on the exploitation and informalisation of workers? What are the spaces for mobilisation, organisation, and protest that exist for conservation workers and how are these spaces constrained and undermined?

The militarisation of conservation

Our own preliminary research in South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa indicates that the current militarised approach to conservation is reshaping the priorities of rangers’ work, how they are trained, and ultimately what their roles and responsibilities as frontline conservation workers are.

Militarisation of conservation, for instance, inevitably leads to the militarisation of conservation labour, affecting how rangers are trained and who does this training, along with shifts in their roles, responsibilities and daily priorities.

For example, in some conservation areas of South Africa and Mozambique, rangers have been increasingly engaging in more dangerous, narrow, paramilitary anti-poaching work with very little to no core ecological and conservation work, such as vegetation and species monitoring, landscape assessments or community engagement. Organisations supporting rangers have documented increased levels of trauma and PTSD-related mental health challenges as a result of this change in their work. This new form of labour is often supported by the use of surveillance technologies, weapons and counterinsurgency training for frontline conservation workers, and through the involvement of ex-military personnel or war veterans as part of the changing conservation labour force.

Recent research on the impacts of surveillance technologies, such as ranger-based law enforcement monitoring software, suggests that such technologies result in both empowerment and disempowerment, deskilling and upskilling, control and autonomy of labourers and the labour process. For instance, younger tech savvy forest guards in the Corbett Tiger Reserve find the introduction of smartphones and digital methods of data collection as upskilling, while older forest guards and forest watchers believe that their traditional or tacit knowledge of natural history is rapidly getting deteriorated when data collection or patrolling are done with a smartphone.

We are in a key moment for the future of biodiversity conservation. The establishment of protected areas for biodiversity conservation is set for major growth in the coming decade with the passage of 30×30 targets. This is positioned as a lynchpin of integrated and global environmental action and finance that aims to protect species, respond to climate change and achieve a ‘green’ post-pandemic economic recovery. Conservation workers will play a frontline role in implementing these highly ambitious, controversial and conflict-laden goals. Understanding who works in conservation, in what capacities, how this is changing with and responding to shifts in conservation policy and practice is vital. A stronger understanding of the changing role and nature of labour in conservation is thus crucial for advancing a theoretically relevant and socially just conservation science, design, practice and implementation. To this end, a transdisciplinary approach is necessary, combining conservation social science with labour studies from but not limited to geography, sociology and economics.

Further Reading

Runacres, A. 2021. Doing chowkidaari: Vulnerability in village-forest relations and the compulsion of forest work. Conservation and society 19(4): 271–281.

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

All nature is political: An interview with Bill Adams

William (Bill) M. Adams is a geographer who worked in the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2020. Bill got an undergraduate degree in geography and, in the course of his PhD, made the shift from being an ecologist to a social scientist. His research interests lie at the intersection of conservation and development, viewed through the lenses of political ecology and environmental history. Bill has written a number of books on these interests, of which the most recent, co-authored with Kent Redford is called Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology. In this conversation with Hari Sridhar, Bill talks about the origins of his interests in geography and conservation, the ‘political ecology turn’ in his work and thinking, and his views on what political ecology has to offer to our understanding of
questions around conservation and development.

Hari Sridhar: You did a BA in Geography and an MSc in Conservation. Looking back, how would you trace the origins of your interest in these two disciplines and their intersection?

Bill Adams: I have spent most of my adult life researching or teaching in the discipline of geography. It is an amazingly interdisciplinary subject, stretching right from the humanities through the social sciences to natural science. Its focus is the Earth, how human society and the natural world interact, and all the different patterns and outcomes of that interaction. I had an inspiring geography teacher at school, Don Pirkis, and I remember him on a field trip, standing on the chalk hills south of London and explaining how the landscape laid out below fitted together—geology, water, soils, forests and fields, settlements, roads and retail parks: places emerging, evolving and changing over time.

Geography had recently undergone a revolution, changing from a descriptive subject to an analytical one. At university, I had to study everything from glaciology to development theory—the degree required us to understand both social and physical processes, with all that implied in terms of different kinds of theory and different methods, from the analysis of historical archives to counting pollen grains in sediment cores. Since then, Geography has gone through a succession of intellectual revolutions, but it is still recognisably the same: turbulent, diverse, and restless. Geography attracts and rewards the curious. The world remains a strange and complex place—wonderful, mismanaged, and unjust.

When I finished my Geography degree, I wanted to find work in the environment or conservation (after all, this was the 1970s, the decade of Limits to Growth and the Stockholm Conference). I eventually got a place on the MSc in Conservation at University College London. Postgrad courses in the environment were few and far between in those days, and disciplines like Conservation Biology didn’t yet exist. The UCL course had its roots in ecology, but was very interdisciplinary. It seemed a natural extension of a Geography degree. I met an amazing and iconoclastic group of fellow students and staff who had the time (and inclination) to talk and argue, and a host of visiting speakers from the practical conservation world. I started to understand how the nature conservation movement had emerged, how it worked, and why it might sometimes make enemies of the people whose lives it impacted. In the 1970s, the UCL course was strongly focused on the UK, but the breadth of its approach to conservation has been just as relevant everywhere else I have worked since.

Above all, my Masters began to show me the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding conservation—one that combines an understanding of species and ecosystems with knowledge of communities, landowners, businesses and policy-makers, and the conflicts they are too often embroiled in. You need to go well beyond ecological science, to learn how people think and how societies and institutions work, if you want to understand how nature is exploited, why conservation is needed, and why it succeeds and fails.

HS: When we reached out to you about doing this interview you said political ecology is “a bit like Banksy’s art—we know what it is when we see it, but we don’t know who is doing it.” For someone who is hearing the phrase “political ecology” for the first time, could you explain this a little more? When would you say your own work started taking the “political ecology turn”?

BA: Well, that was not a thought-through comment! I think what I had in mind was that political ecology is recognisable when it is done, but it is not a tightly-regimented discipline. People come to political ecology from a lot of different homes across the natural and social sciences and the humanities: anthropology, conservation biology, ecology, geography, history, political science—the list is potentially endless. This gives the field a characteristic hybridity which is an important source of its energy. And it does not matter how people get into political ecology— what matters is what they do when they get there. As a field, political ecology is wonderfully rambunctious and diverse. It can be messy and is often passionate, but (in my opinion) rarely boring—and sadly that is not something that can be said for all academic study! Most political ecologists have no degree entitled “political ecology”, and while there are specialist journals (like the delightful Journal of Political Ecology), research gets published in a lot of different places.

Political ecology emerged as a field in the 1980s, when radical social scientists started taking environmental change seriously—political economy meeting ecology. I first came across it in work, mostly by geographers, on drought and famine in the Sahel. Between 1972 and 1974 the rains failed in the Sahel, and many people starved. The conventional explanation of the drought was neo-Malthusian, that it was the result of biogeophysical feedback caused by human population growth and overgrazing.

But scholars like Keith Hewitt showed the political dimensions of so-called ‘natural disasters’ such as famine (for example his 1983 collection Interpretations of Calamity), while Mike Watts (in Silent Violence 1983) challenged the conventional story of human ‘misuse’ of West African drylands, pointing to the history of colonial exploitation and agricultural commercialisation.

It is now conventional to observe that there is a politics to hunger, to the way land is allocated and used, and to degradation of the environment. Piers Blaikie’s 1987 book The Political Economy of Soil Erosion neatly caught the political ecologist’s argument that the state of the environment is as much the result of political processes (who owns land, who has the power to shape its management) as of variability in natural systems. The core question addressed by political ecology—how the powerless and the powerful (smallholder or corporation) interact to shape landscapes and human futures—is as important in industrial zones as drylands.

It is easy, looking back, to assume that the evolution of academic ideas is seamless, and obvious from the first. For myself, I began to use the term political ecology (as opposed to its way of thinking about society and nature) in the 1990s. I remember reading a review paper by Raymond Bryant in Political Geography in 1992 (“Political Ecology: an emerging research agenda in Third World Studies”), and thinking ‘Oh—so that’s what I do!’. Recognition of the field (for example in Liberation Ecologies, edited by Richard Peet and Michael Watts in 1996) slowly began to make the study of the environment and development more academically respectable.

Since then, the evolution of political ecology has been rapid and continuous. Political ecologists have analysed the way power is exercised to shape nature, and how that shaping intersects with questions of human justice, in many different contexts—in the industrialised as well as developing world, in cities as well as rural areas. They have also explored the ways ideas about nature, or about the categories of ‘human’ and ‘natural’, shape non-human lives and the struggles that emerge between people for justice and livelihood. Political ecologists have argued repeatedly that questions of nature are always and everywhere political.

HS: Right from the beginning, a major emphasis in your work has been around the politics of water in Africa. How did you get interested in that, and how has your work and emphasis in this area evolved over time? 

BA: I became interested in the politics of water during my PhD, which was on the downstream impacts of a dam on the Sokoto River in northern Nigeria. My original plan had been to look at impacts on natural ecosystems, but the floodplain of the Sokoto was no ‘wilderness’ in need of conservation. It was densely settled by farming communities, intensively cultivated and seasonally grazed. So, whereas I had imagined myself working as an ecologist, I quickly had to retrain as a social scientist. 

The downstream impact of dams are often underestimated by dam planners, or ignored altogether. A big reason for this is that the impacts are complex and hard to understand. They require an understanding of hydrology (rainfall, runoff, the extent and duration of flooding), soils and crop ecology (what you can grow on a floodplain depends on sediment, topography and flooding, and these can change over very short distances), and of the people who use floodplain land (in the case of the Sokoto, this included seasonal grazing by Fulani cattle keepers, as well as resident Hausa farmers). The dominant discipline involved in dam planning is engineering, and even today engineers are not trained to have this breadth of insight. It is also a problem that the impacts of a dam can be felt many miles downstream, often in remote areas. Project planning contracts rarely mandate surveys in these areas: they are out of sight and out of mind.

In the case of the Sokoto, all the water in the river arrived during the short rainy season (June-August). The Bakolori dam was designed to hold this water back for irrigation in the long dry season that followed. The dam therefore delayed and lowered downstream peak floods, leaving both less water overall for downstream farmers, and making its arrival unpredictable in timing. This had a significant negative impact on rice farming and shadoof irrigation from shallow groundwater. 

Meanwhile the dam had a range of other social impacts. The people living in the upstream floodplain, whose homes and land were flooded by the reservoir, were resettled, and promised irrigation water once the project was finished. The communities in the irrigation area itself, below the dam, had their land bulldozed as irrigation canals were put in, but had to wait until the dam and supply canal were finished before getting it back, or receiving water and starting to farm again. It was a long, hungry wait, and there were angry blockades of the dam in protest and an undocumented number of protestors were killed.

Nor were these negative impacts offset by economic benefits. The formal irrigation scheme that the dam was built to supply (like other large scale irrigation schemes developed in the1970s and 1980s in Africa) proved uneconomic, offering lower yields and rates of return than had optimistically been promised in the cost-benefit analysis of the dam planners.

The most important thing that I learned about the politics of water development projects through this experience is that the key problem is not (usually) any failure of technical competence. The Bakolori Dam was technically sound, well-built, and completed more or less on time and on budget. But it was a well-built dam to do the wrong things. The dam was the result of a flawed process of river basin planning that saw the drought of the arid north of Nigeria as a problem that needed a sweeping solution. After a decade of drought in the North, dams and irrigation schemes looked like a perfect development solution, a one-shot miracle of modernity that would transform the country. Dams are expensive and complicated projects to build, but in the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government was looking for ways to invest spiralling oil revenues. Moreover there were rich pickings, both legal and illegal, from contracts to design and build them. 

After my PhD, I worked for an engineering company on a different dam project as a resettlement planner, seeing from the inside how near-impossible it was to do anything worthwhile once a project has begun. Then I moved to a lecturing job in geography, and did research for a number of years on smaller-scale farmer-managed irrigation schemes, in the wetlands of northern Nigeria, in Kenya and Tanzania. I was looking for examples of development projects that people planned and implemented themselves, in the hope that there might be an alternative model for water resource development. I hoped that small would be beautiful.

In 1992 I pulled my thinking together in the book Wasting the Rain . This had a passionate but (in retrospect) a rather naïve argument, contrasting the imposition of development from above in large scale water projects with the ingenuity of smallholder farmers to derive livelihoods sustained by the seasonal dynamics of rain and river. Floodplain people across Africa do not build dams (at least, not large concrete ones), but they build adaptively on the opportunities offered by river, soils and rain. Dam project designers promise economic ‘development’, and in its name they completely restructure the landscape to fit their blueprint. They try to lock future development into a straightjacket of concrete, and their plans too often do not work.

Sadly, not much has changed. The World Commission on Dams, which published its report, Dams and Development in 2000, set out an approach to dam planning that could have done away with unexpected negative social and environmental impacts. But it did not find favour with government planners or dam builders, and after a short lull, dam planning and construction surged across the developing world. 

The news is not all bad. The negative impacts of dams are more widely recognised, and there are new frameworks to guide dam developers, such as the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol. There is a growing awareness of the issue of risk to those providing capital for dams.

Yet dams are still controversial, and often have significant negative impacts, especially on floodplain people. People (and natures) are treated as eggs that must be broken to make the omelette of development. Dam planners act as if the ideas and wishes of those affected by dams were irrelevant to investment decisions, believing that their needs and interests can and should be traded off against national needs, or that somehow they will benefit from national economic growth. To those planning dams, it seems that the people they affect only become important when they have to be persuaded to move quietly off their land. Their dissatisfaction, and opposition, is treated simply as a project risk that needs to be managed. Compensation for losses is treated as a costly, necessary evil, to be minimized to protect the positive balance of the cost-benefit analysis.

HS: Would a political ecologist also argue that questions of nature are always and everywhere about capitalism?

BA: Well, certainly the grip of capitalism on nature has been a key focus in political ecology. Historically, capitalism’s search for cheap material and labour, its drive to open up and transform markets, has had radical impacts. Nature has been reshaped at every scale from the global to the sub-cellular, from the release of greenhouse gases to the manipulation and patenting of crop genomes. Indeed, with private sector space exploration we might need to start wondering how capitalism will change inter-planetary natures.

So, yes, nature is everywhere entrained by the juggernaut of capitalism: crushed, transformed, made to flourish or to die. But the scale of that transformation varies from place to place. In the Southern Ocean we might see a relatively discrete range of impacts, such as the unsustainable killing of seals, whales, fish and krill, and of course, anthropogenic climate change. Urbanised or farmed landscapes might reveal more profound human transformations of nature over long timeframes, and more diverse entanglement between capitalism and nature. To me, it is the complexity of the engagements between human societies and nature (the living and non-living more-than-human world) that is so interesting about political ecology.

But not all the politics around nature is necessarily the direct outcome of the workings of capital. You can find complex arguments about access to nature at a local scale, where the broader effects of global capitalism are no more than a distant buzz. There can be significant conflicts between men and women about water rights in locally-managed irrigation systems, between neighbours in reef fisheries, or between local dog walkers and conservation managers in popular nature reserves. Like larger conflicts, these can also range from the material to the conceptual, from disagreement about where people can go and what they can do, to disagreements about what ‘nature’ is and how it works. ‘Is this a hunting ground, a delicate ecosystem or a ‘natural place’?’ Ways of framing nature code directly into conflict.

HS: If questions around nature and the environment are always political, what about the sciences that address these questions, for example Conservation Biology? I ask this because science is viewed as impartial or neutral, and therefore one would think that conservation decisions based on scientific evidence will be apolitical.

BA: Well, Conservation Biology is interesting because it makes a foundational claim that it is (and should be) ‘mission-driven’. To me, this is inherently political—evidently, not everyone will agree with the conservation ‘mission’. The discipline’s ideological heart creates an inevitable politics as conservationists engage with others. I see nothing wrong with that.

In science, a huge amount of effort goes into making sure that experiments are free from bias. But most science takes place far from the classic environment of the laboratory, and in interdisciplinary fields like conservation, a lot of tricky issues can arise. For example, there is a politics to choosing which questions get asked, and to deciding how they are framed.

The identity of the people doing research is another issue to think about. The conservation literature is still dominated by white men working in universities in the Global North. This kind of narrow social base can lead to narrowly framed questions. In medicine, it is recognised that the assumption that all people are the same can lead to failure to recognise that diseases or treatments can affect women differently from men, or people of colour differently from white people. In conservation, too, the way research questions are framed may make the ‘scientific facts’ misleading. So, for example, if you are interested in the impacts of illegal hunting on declining species, you might ask whether illegal hunting is a significant driver of population decline, whether game guards extort money from rural households, or whether children in hunting households suffer protein deficiency. It is quite possible that the answer to all these questions might be yes. So the challenge is to decide which question to ask. The question you choose will shape how the ‘conservation problem’ is defined, and in turn what might be done to address it: is the solution poverty alleviation or more guns?

The issue of how research questions are framed is particularly important when conservation biologists study social issues. There is a lot of great conservation social science being done these days, but not everybody gets it right. It is only too easy to build questions that reflect simplistic ideas about how societies work, for example assuming that ‘cultures’ or ‘communities’ are standardised and unchanging things: bias can creep in if research questions are badly framed.

I worry sometimes about the enthusiasm of conservation biologists for ‘speed-feeding’ their work into policy. This is often seen as an attempt to avoid ‘politics’, as if politics were simply a way of wasting time. But by trying to avoid debate, scientists are in fact being deliberately political—bypassing wider interrogation of results, for example by people who might be affected. Unfortunately, the application of scientific findings is unavoidably political. The messiness of the policy processes can be very frustrating for scientists, but wide debate allows the answers to poorly framed questions to be seen for what they are, and it allows some kind of agreement to be reached on what should be done. Politics is fundamental to human freedoms.

So, yes, science is really important in conservation, but it is definitely not apolitical.

HS: This interview is being published in Current Conservation, a magazine that aims to “tell stories from the field of conservation in a manner that engages both scientific and non-scientific audiences”. As a political ecologist, what might be the questions that come to your mind in evaluating the influence of conservation magazines, like Current Conservation, that aim to reach a non-scientific audience?

BA: Magazines like Current Conservation have excellent coverage of conservation issues. The quality of photography is extraordinary, and there is some great writing. The ease of electronic communication also makes it more possible (in theory at least) to publish voices ‘from the ground’, rather than sticking to the old ‘explorer mode’, where a metropolitan writer (classically a white journalist) travels to an exotic place to view wildlife. I suppose that, as a political ecologist, I am more interested in the possibility of articles that go beyond the celebration of charismatic species and places, and beyond simplistic narratives of threat and protection. I value writing that is truly ecological—that looks beyond cute quadrupeds to describe less obvious species (termites? fungi? grasses? the microbiome?) and the complex connectivities among them. I also think that the way conservation stories include people as part of the ecological whole is really important. So much conservation involves making trade-offs between conservation and people. Indeed, all too often, conservation imposes significant social and economic costs on somebody, usually people who are poor and lack political voice. And to many people, nature is not always lovely—lions may look great if you are a tourist, but are bad news if your children are herding your livestock. So the diversity of relations between humans and other species (love, hate, collaboration, dependence, fear) is really important, as is the political question of the negative impacts that conservation may have (and how these might be dealt with).

Above all, I think, it is important for writing about nature to talk about the real world and not some imaginary Edenic version of it. No part of planet earth is wholly ‘pristine’ (if only because of climate change), and writing about ‘precious places’ or ‘the wonders of nature’ potentially distracts attention from the actual scale of human transformation of nature. So, for me, a critical challenge for biodiversity conservation writing is to explain the unsustainability of human society (at all scales from the rural hamlet to the mega city, and from a shack to a millionaire’s pad).

Capitalism, and its patterns of production and consumption, are the fundamental drivers of global biodiversity loss. Mundane questions of consumption are therefore important conservation issues whether palm oil or soya in the cooking pot, kerosene powering the ecotourist’s jet, mined rare earths in phones, or the burgeoning ‘internet of things’.

So it is really important for conservation writing to look beyond the surviving wonders of nature, to explore and explain the world we are creating—to look at biodiversity in industrial farming landscapes, in polluted and drying rivers and the sterile concrete and grass parks of cities. Here, too—in the environments where the majority of humans live—there is nature. Here too, conservationists work their magic to allow nature to come back and thrive. There are lots of exciting stories beyond threatened
species and wild places.

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

FOR “ANYONE WHO HAS AN EYE (AND A BRAIN)”

Watching birds is an intensely absorbing and ancient activity. For instance, the tombs of the pharaohs of Egypt feature numerous paintings that could only have been painted by an earnest birder. Consider the chapel of Queen Itet: it is famous for its beautiful mural of three species collectively dubbed the ‘Meidum geese’. The mural dates back to 2575–2551 BC. Nevertheless, it is evident that some ancient artist clearly paid close attention to geese because the details are so accurate that contemporary scientists have been able to identify two out of the three species in the mural. One is the greylag goose Anser anser and the other is the greater white-fronted goose Anser albifrons. (The third does not match any species currently known to science and might well be a long-extinct one.)

In general, there were three common reasons why people watched birds earlier: to lure them into the cooking pot, to tame and add them to menageries, or to shoot and display them in personal or museum collections.

This changed in the 1600s due to the collaborative work of a pair of classmates from Cambridge—Francis Willughby and his mentor, John Ray. They built up an extensive collection of specimens, along with meticulous anatomical and field-based observations. After the former’s untimely death, Ray published their findings in 1678 under the generous title The ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton. The book was a path-breaking one because it presented systematic species descriptions. In addition, it contained a detailed classification system that laid the foundations of ornithology and inspired later scientists such as Georges Cuvier and Carl Linnaeus.

But birding as we know it today, i.e. observing birds in their natural habitat for recreational or scientific reasons, did not become a popular activity until the 1900s. In the United Kingdom, one of the pioneers of birding (I will resist early bird puns) was Harry Witherby, who from 1897 onwards, wrote a column titled ‘British Ornithological Notes’ for a magazine called Knowledge. Subsequently, in 1907, Witherby launched British Birds—an illustrated monthly journal that continues to be in print. He also went on to co-author The Handbook of British Birds in 1938, which enabled many a citizen to become an active observer of birds. Across the pond, in the United States, Edmund Selous is credited with having a similar impact with his book Bird Watching, which was published in 1901.

Selous wrote, “… the pleasure that belongs to observation and inference is, really, far greater than that which attends any kind of skill or dexterity, even when death and pain add their zest to the latter. […] Let anyone who has an eye and a brain (especially the latter), lay down the gun and take up the glasses for a week, a day, even for an hour, if he is lucky, and he will never wish to change back again.”

One could say that in this book, he made an eloquent case for watching birds and a sarcastic one for hunting them. (And therefore, managed to kill two birds with one stone?)

In the intervening decades, numerous others have written about birding, both as a simple hobby as well as a form of knowledge production that is enabled by certain configurations of class, gender, nationality, etc. For example, in Birders of Africa: History of a Network, Nancy Jacobs describes the colonial connections that enabled European ornithologists to take credit for ‘scientific documentation’ of birdlife, while the African guides and hunters on whose knowledge they heavily depended, often remained on the periphery as nameless ‘local informants’. However, one of the most hard-hitting accounts of how racial inequalities percolate birding is described in a short piece by Drew Lanham titled ‘9 rules for the black birdwatcher’. For instance, his rule number three is a terse “Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.”

If birding can provide such rich insights on social contestations of different periods, could fiction writers be far behind? There is, of course, Ian Fleming who famously named his Agent 007 after an ornithologist, James Bond, who studied Caribbean birds. Another old yet popular book is Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot, which describes the efforts of two middle schoolers who set out to save a colony of burrowing owls from a development project (their dedication to birds can be judged from the fact that the said project was the construction of a pancake house). But more recently, I came across a series by Steve Burrows which features a reclusive Canadian who is both a brilliant detective and birder. In the first novel, called A Siege of Bitterns, the clue that sets the detective on the right track is an apparent sighting of an American bittern in the marshes of Norfolk (UK). And lest you think this is a vagrant number, let me assure you that ornithological details continue to play a key role in the rest of this series (and contribute to beguiling titles such as A Foreboding of Petrels). The plots are also garnished with references to windmill farms, environmental activism, indigenous territories, carbon sequestration, eco-tourism, and all the other vectors that make conservation such a great pot-boiler of a topic.

The next book on my reading list is Stephen Alter’s Birdwatching, which despite the title is a work of fiction—the central figure is an American ornithologist who becomes a CIA agent and prowls along the Himalayas, collecting notes on birds and military intelligence (shades of Dillon Ripley spring to mind). However, I must admit the poets as always, capture the fascination and intensity of birding the best: “Among twenty snowy mountains,/The only moving thing/Was the eye of the blackbird.”

Further Reading

Birkhead, T. 2022. Birds and us: A 12,000-year history from cave art to conservation. USA: Princeton University Press.

Lanham, D. 2013. 9 rules for the black birdwatcher. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/9-
rules-for-the-black-birdwatcher/. Accessed on January 15, 2023.

Stevens, W. 1954. Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. https://poets.org/poem/thirteen-ways-looking-blackbird. Accessed on January 15, 2023.

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

How does political ecology help us understand the social implications of the 30×30 conservation initiative?

Imagine you live in a simple mud house you built with your family in a beautiful landscape that provides you with all that you need to live well. You have a small herd of livestock that you move freely depending on the season, from which you make your living. You have a few chickens that run around the yard and a small dog that plays with your children and guards the house. You have a good relationship with your community and you collectively decide grazing arrangements and manage your livestock in ways that do not deplete pasture. You lead a calm life, develop good kinship relationships with the people that live next to you and take from the land what you need to survive, while taking care of it.

One day, somebody from far away comes to tell you that you have to move from the place you have known your whole life and where you see yourself getting older. Leaving your home is mandatory, even though it is your homeland and you do not know anything else, you do not have the right to decide. They blame you for not taking good care of the wildlife that you and your ancestors have convivially shared the landscape with. They tell you that without you and your neighbours, wildlife will be better off. All your past and present connections to the land, the nature and the people are lost and they order you to reinvent a life somewhere else that you had never imagined living. If you reject this, you will be violently evicted, the government security forces will burn your house and they will threaten your life.

That was the story of Ole Sopia, a Tanzanian Maasai from Ololosokwan village near the world famous Serengeti National Park. His family along with hundreds of other families were evicted from their land by the British colonial administration in the 1950s. Six decades later, the area where Ole Sopia and his community lived is now designated as an important wildlife corridor and dispersal area of the national park. Despite ongoing violence by the Tanzanian security forces, his community continued to resist forced eviction. In August 2017, Ole Sopia was shot, his house set ablaze, and his livestock confiscated and publicly auctioned because of his relentless fight for access to their ancestral land and livelihood and for justice for pastoralists.

This was not an isolated case, there are plenty of cases of community leaders and environmental defenders being attacked, murdered and subjected to different forms of violence to protect their land. Many of these cases are consequences of global conservation initiatives that, perhaps well-intended, in reality do not contribute to further biodiversity conservation or prevent environmental degradation, but instead accumulate heavy violence and gross violations of human rights.

Why would untouched protected areas actually worsen environmental degradation, when their aim is to stop the harm? The answer lies in a kind of created separation that wedges human beings from their connection to and stewardship of a place. Conservation practice has been founded on a Eurocentric idea called ‘Cartesian nature-culture dualism’, which separated humans from the rest of nature and suggested that in order to conserve nature, we need to remove people from it. What we are not told is that there is a particular nature that gets to be conserved and there is a particular group of people that gets removed. This nature is normally located in tropical, biodiversity-rich regions and where poor, marginal and racialised communities live. These places are normally located in sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous US or Canada, the Amazon, and much of South and Southeast Asia.

For years, academics, policymakers and NGOs have labelled these communities as the drivers of environmental damage, when as a matter of fact, more and more evidence points to their role in maintaining biodiversity and nature in general. More often than not, access to land set aside for conservation is given to multinational corporations and local elites who establish high-end tourism businesses. In the process, communities that have historically lived in and protected the environment, have been dispossessed from their lands to create protected areas. This has been an ill-conceived policy idea that remains today.

The 30 by 30 conservation initiative

At the COP15 Biodiversity Conference held in Montreal, Canada, in December 2022, world governments reached an agreement to protect 30 percent of Earth’s lands, oceans, coastal areas and inland waters by 2030. This so-called 30×30 agreement is hailed as historic and is argued to secure the future of the planet’s living beings. This is not the first time that global bodies have put their conservation hopes in the creation of protected areas. The size of untouched or restricted-use conservation areas has significantly increased over the last several decades—from two percent in the early 1960s to around 17 percent today. Yet, this has been proven to fail in halting biodiversity decline.

What the agreement does not address is the ways that the expansion of protected areas to cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface will play out in practice. For the last several decades, human populations in biodiversity-rich parts of the world have paid a heavy price due to the expansion of certain forms of protected area that either led to extreme violence and forced displacements, or placed increasing restrictions on their livelihood practices. In Tanzania, where almost 40 percent of land is under some form of protection, government security forces continue to militarise conservation and forcefully evict, torture and abuse people living in areas that conservation experts and organisations suggest should be free of people in order to protect wildlife.

Another important feature of recent conservation initiatives that prioritise expansion of biodiversity spaces has been the call for increased involvement of the private sector, irrespective of their background and intentions. For example, multinational oil companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil, among others historically responsible for enormous environmental damage, have recently mobilised several millions of dollars in proposals for conservation around Nature Positive or nature-based solutions to offset the continuation of their carbon-intensive business as usual. Neither conservation organisations nor governments seem to strongly question the emergence of this private funding. The more concerning fact is that it is becoming quite common to see many conservation organisations working in close collaboration with multinational mining and fossil fuel corporations. But, can we tell whether they actually contribute to the solutions for biodiversity loss or climate change they have facilitated (if not caused) in the first place?

The 30×30 initiative reinforces mainstream efforts that blind us to work in dismantling the real causes of biodiversity loss: intensive industrial farming and large-scale extractive sectors. In other words, biodiversity loss is a consequence of greedy economic marginalisation and capital accumulation. That is why it is hard to celebrate supposed achievements that have already proven to create no meaningful change and even worse, distract us from fruitful transformative work that revolves around imposing structural limits to destructive economic growth. Other policymakers and actors would argue differently as they seem to benefit from the results. Perhaps they have major wins to celebrate as many corporations will be able to offset their environmental damages by financing the conservation of landscape patches. The solution is to be found somewhere else.

Ours is not an anti-conservation argument. There are countless areas inhabited and managed by self-governed indigenous peoples. Some communities in the Amazon, for example, use non-market oriented conservation schemes to protect their land against extractive activities. It is therefore necessary to study each policy initiative with utmost attention and each context with extreme care for the social implications of such policies for conservation.

How can political ecology contribute to conservation practice?

The contentious nature of such a global decision for conservation makes it important to focus on who decides certain actions over others or what type of social implications the 30×30 initiative or any other conservation initiatives have. Political ecology does precisely that—it helps us analyse the uneven power relations that are not necessarily proximal to the ecological symptoms, but ultimately create the ecological crises. This fundamentally helps us to challenge dominant narratives about the causes of environmental damage that tend to blame people like Ole Sopia. A political ecology lens enables us to question mainstream narratives that justify and enable land dispossession from communities to benefit a wealthy few.

For anybody that is interested in deeply thinking about the causes and solutions to the ecological crises today or in thinking about any conservation effort, the decision needs to be accompanied by a set of key questions such as: Which natures are being protected and which ones are discarded? Who can access and make decisions relating to nature? Whose ideas are recognised, who decides when, where and how, and who gets ignored? How do the affected populations put their lives, experiences, and knowledge at stake because of externally designed solutions? How are claims for environmental justice and social marginalisation articulated? And overall, who are the winners and who are the losers of any decision? These are questions political ecology offers as a way to clear the air between solutions that further social and ecological harm to people in nature and those that prioritise justice, self-determination and reparative relationships with nature.

Further Reading

Adams, W. 2017. Sleeping with the enemy? Biodiversity conservation, corporations and the green economy. Journal of political ecology 24: 243–257.

Estrada, A., P. A. Garber, S. Gouveia, Á. Fernández-Llamazares, F. Ascensão, A. Fuentes, S. T. Garnett et al. 2022. Global importance of Indigenous Peoples, their lands, and knowledge systems for saving the world’s primates from extinction. Science advances 8(32):eabn2927. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn2927

This article is from issue

17.1

2023 Mar

When international cooperation for conservation goes backwards

Feature image: Spoon-billed sandpiper

Given biodiversity does not abide by borders between countries, conservation efforts have built an international system for cooperation across political jurisdictions all over the world. Such a system has been emerging since at least the early 1900s, and while it has not been sufficient to avert biodiversity loss, it has slowed it down. Along these lines, as conservationists and researchers, we are constantly following the negotiations of international agreements, such as COP15 at which the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was approved. However, what if we stop for a second to think that international cooperation is fragile and sometimes can go backwards? 

With a few exceptions, world politics has been in a general trajectory of increased cooperation since WWII, particularly with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. This process entailed the creation of the United Nations and other intergovernmental platforms that provided the mechanisms for the development of some important international biodiversity conservation agreements, such as the Convention on Migratory Species. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War meant that some ecosystems could finally be integrated across political borders, as in the case of the Arctic through the Arctic Council and its subsidiary biodiversity working group, known as Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF).

More recently, however, the Russian invasion of Ukraine launched in 2022 has tripped conservation efforts underpinned by international cooperation, with global implications. First, because Russia harbours biodiversity with global significance, and second, because Russia plays a key role in the international system. For instance, Russia provides breeding areas for over 500 species of migratory birds, travelling from as far as South America, and holds the largest extension of forest of any country. As far as international cooperation goes, Russia is among the countries that has signed the most international environmental agreements. Hence, the war at Russian hands has affected conservation efforts by: (i) isolating Russia from the international system, (ii) halting and delaying cooperation, and (iii) changing policy priorities. 

Spoon-billed sandpiper aviary

The isolation of Russia from the international system has already impacted conservation efforts within Russia, with spillover effects. For instance, the Arctic Council, which brings together the eight Arctic Countries and their indigenous peoples, stopped all activities and meetings soon after the war broke. Subsequently, the Council has planned to resume some activities with the exclusion of Russia. This decision has affected the Arctic Migratory Bird Initiative, a project under CAFF focussed on migratory bird conservation. Furthermore, the recovery efforts of the threatened spoon-billed sandpiper, which migrates between Russia and Southeast Asia, have been affected, as the ‘head start’ breeding program in the Arctic has been halted. This program relies on international assistance that has now been suspended due to Russia’s disconnection from the SWIFT interbank system, as well as due to travel restrictions impeding the mobility of collaborators from abroad.

As Russia plays a key role in some international cooperation processes, important conservation initiatives have been delayed and halted. The conservation of habitats for migratory birds in East Asia has recently advanced through the inscription of coastal wetlands under the World Heritage Convention. However, additional efforts to expand habitat protection under this convention in this very region have been delayed because of the war. Russia was the Chair of the committee that oversees the acceptance of new sites at the time of the invasion, which resulted in a boycott by other Convention parties, who refused to operate either in Russia or under Russia’s leadership. Moreover, the conservation of migratory animals is underpinned by detailed ecological knowledge of their movements, so that habitats can be secured. The ICARUS Initiative is a large partnership that has turbocharged our understanding of animal movements, but its reliance on Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, brought it to a halt as Roscosmos stopped data sharing soon after the invasion started.

The war has also given prevalence to policy issues that are more pressing for governments than biodiversity conservation, such as food security. For instance, in the wake of food shortages in global markets, to which the invasion of Ukraine has been a contributing factor, the European Union has considered rolling back biodiversity-friendly farming policy to increase yields.

The war, being first and foremost a human tragedy, is a rapidly changing situation with no end in sight. Decades of work in diplomacy for biodiversity conservation are now at a crossroads with a country that holds globally important biodiversity and has a key role in international cooperation. For now, conservationists should hold the fort by keeping momentum on the importance of international cooperation in the rest of the world, even as relationships with Russia erode, while hoping for a Ukraine that is at peace and free.

Further reading

Gallo-Cajiao, E., Dolšak, N., A. Prakash, T. Mundkur, P. G. Harris, R. B. Mitchell, N. Davidson et al. 2023.  Implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation. Frontiers in conservation science. DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2023.989019. 

Bubo scandiacus

Change was already taking hold of the tundra. Lichens, moss, and grasses were breaking through from underneath a thick white blanket. The new growth forming patches of earthly colour across the stark landscape. New life, fresh and full of hope, unlike his own. Leaving the warmth of the timber research cabin, Osvald Mikhailo began the short trek across the snow towards the stand of dwarf willow. Nothing grows tall on the tundra, not even trees. It’s only a 100-metre walk, but the physical cost of Arctic life is high. The ache of cold air drawn in with every breath reminded Osvald that his body was not what it was when he took up this position thirty years earlier. He’d been full of hope and ambition back then—a young graduate presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. A remote research posting to study the most enigmatic owl in the world, Bubo scandiacus, the snowy owl.

He knew more about the snowy owl and this harsh habitat than any other scientist in the world. Moments of wonder blurred across decades of time and space. A snowy owl attacking a pair of Arctic wolves, a 10-foot polar bear lopping gently by, and countless fledglings barely a month old taking flight for the first time. Yet, a deep dissatisfaction had set in. This would be his last trek across the tundra. It was time to say goodbye.


Reaching the dwarfed forest stand, Osvald crawls into the hide. Through his binoculars he watches the familiar scene. There she sits ethereal and luminous guarding her precious clutch of eggs. She’s pressed firmly into a depression she scraped into the wind- swept rise only weeks earlier. Her mate flies close to the ground, gliding silently until he reaches the nest. Stopping in front of her, the male owl bows and offers his catch. With a slight head bob, she accepts the lifeless brown lemming and takes it in her beak. Care and nourishment, the drivers of all life. Unfolding his broad wings, he lifts gently back into the breeze. Last season the same pair had raised and fledged five chicks. Osvald wouldn’t see this clutch hatch; that privilege would be passed on to his replacement, who was probably, Osvald thought, travelling north on a light plane from Fort Yukon right now.

He wished he could thank the owl and the generations before her for all that they had given him. But new opportunities and a life less remote were all he’d been able to think of these past months. Noting the date and time against her leg band number on his data sheet, Osvald adds a description, male provides lemming for nesting female. Placing the sheet back inside his dry pack, Osvald lifts the binocs to his face. She swivels her head and squints toward the hide. She blinks, momentarily flashing a pair of golden eyes shining across the white space between them. Standing, Osvald turns away from her for the last time and trudges slowly back toward the cabin.

This article is from issue

CC Kids 16

2022 Dec

A parliament of owls

No, this does not refer to a house of sleep-deprived politicians at an all-night parliamentary debate. This is what a group of owls is called.

The English language has some wild and wonderful names to describe groups of animals. We use these words, referred to as collective nouns, when we talk about a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep. In school, we may be given exercises where we have to match or fill in the blanks: a____of lions, a____of fish, or a____of wolves*.

These are only a small taste of the descriptive terms used to describe groups of different kinds, the history of which can be traced back to the Middle Ages in England. The earliest known collection of terms of collective nouns, or ‘venery’ (an archaic term for ‘hunting’), is in the Book of Saint Albans, a kind of handbook for hunters first published in1486.

Included among chapters was a list of the Compaynys of Beestys and Fowlys, where many of these common terms made their first appearances—including pride of lions, flock of sheep, and herd of deer.

I have always been intrigued and fascinated by these collective nouns. I think that a gaggle of geese sounds just so appropriate, as does an army of ants (especially having once been literally attacked and badly bitten by a marching regiment of army ants).

Here are some delightful feathery ones! Imagine a parliament of owls which includes members from the following:

A murder of crows, a convocation of eagles, a deceit of lapwings, a ballet of swans, a siege of cranes, a conspiracy of ravens, a company of parrots, a murmuration of starlings, and a flamboyance of flamingos!

And what about our four-legged friends? Here are some quirky ones!

In the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, when Noah invited representatives of all animals onto his ark, he had to select a pair each from: an ambush of tigers, an array of hedgehogs, a bloat of hippos, a crash of rhinos, a rumpus of baboons, a shrewdness of apes, a singular of boar, a skulk of foxes, a sleuth of bears and a mob of kangaroos!


Not to mention the hoppers and slitherers from a colony of frogs, a knot of toads, a quiver of cobras, a bask of crocodiles, and even a culture of bacteria!

While serious scientists may not be amused at the attribution of human traits to describe animals, discovering new terms can be great fun for language lovers.

Even more fun is trying to coin one’s own terms! Here are some that I thought of: a cacophony of koels, a preening of peacocks, a menace of mosquitoes, and a buzzload of bumblebees!

* Answers: a pride of lions; a school of fish; a pack of wolves.

Why don’t you try your hand at coining some appropriate, and fun, words to describe groups of creatures that hop, skip, jump, fly, creep, crawl and more! Write to us at editor.ccmagazine@gmail.com and we will try to put it up on our social media channels!

This article is from issue

CC Kids 16

2022 Dec