Rewilding for Better Environment & India

Why Rewilding? 

Rabid Urbanization  

As urbanization makes en route to natural ecosystems, the habitats lose ground, and a large number of species comprising local flora and fauna begin to vanish. The first impact is the destruction of the niche with small water bodies and surrounding greenery giving into concretization and unsustainable land use. Wildlife cannot survive in manicured environments and this is one major reason for species extinction on Earth. 

Protect One and All

Like the buffer zones of protected areas, the cornered niches are vital for sustaining species in our neighborhoods in urban and rural localities. The presence of natural elements including diverse life forms sustains the environment in the vicinity and impacts favorable climate patterns. They prevent temperature variations that are not in tandem with the geographical features that have prevailed throughout the ascent of evolution on Earth.  

We have lost swathes of forests, aquatic ecosystems, grasslands, and deserts in wake of economic progression. The major impact has arisen through infrastructure build-up, ingress, and pollution. The deforestation process is continuous and is engulfing or degrading the natural ecosystems. Coupled with uncontrolled emissions due to fossil fuels consumption and irresponsible biotic and abiotic indulgence, climate change due to increasing Co2 generation is warming up the planet rapidly and the impact is being felt all around the globe irrespective of the source of emissions.     

Besides reducing carbon footprints, it has become imperative to recover lost ground but in absence of any rewilding policy, there is a strong need for structural reforms in land use and energy consumption besides tending to the complex systems we dwell in. The use of alternative energy is one solution that will reduce the negative impact of fossil fuels. Another solution that the world is looking forward to is locomotion using electrical or solar energy which is imminent if not on a commercial scale yet. Rewilding is another imperative for tempering greenhouse gases and creating a life-sustaining equilibrium on Earth.    

The answer for tackling these urgencies lies immensely in rewilding giving space to the lost ecosystems with minimal intervention so that they recoup in time to come. This implies that we should demarcate large swathes of land as remedial action or rather for the prevention of global warming and let them regenerate. This is for the planners to act upon. They should place a moratorium on natural lands and make them inviolate perhaps forever. The creation of core areas in PAs in India and elsewhere can be called a good beginning but this is by no means enough.

Unsustainable Land Use

A country hell-bent on keeping up with the dominating economies is developing infrastructure at a rapid pace. There have been plenty of instances of ingression in the ecosystems which still stand preserved today due to a stroke of luck or due to our intervention.  

Development is a prerogative in modern times but if not carried out in a planned manner and thought, it will be disastrous in the long run. Visit any industrial area and you will experience how they have damaged the local ecology, and the areas have become unsustainable in terms of healthy living.

It is our haste that is doing irrevocable damage, we have to be circumspect when using the land. We cannot develop or intrude just anywhere, and large swathes of land should be left completely inviolate. We should take a cue from the destruction of forests in South America and the large-scale production of palm oil as examples. We are following suit by excavating extensively for fossil fuels and mining. We are a diversified economy and there is no pressure on a single resource for sustenance.  

Mapping India

A vast country like India should have large tracts of land inviolate naturally, but this is not the case there is human intervention everywhere. Leaving inaccessible mountainous areas most of the ecosystems like the grasslands and aquatic bodies have been impacted. Talking about the mountainous areas the ecology of most of our hill resorts has been totally ruined due to the encroachment of urban dwellings and commercial establishments. 

In order to sustain an ever-expanding population, there is an immense need to increase productivity from lands we have already taken over for agrarian practices. The impact of the unruly unsustainable livestock industry is in urgent need of modernization and induction of sustainable practices pan India. 

Livestock keeping has become imperative for small-income families in rural confines. However, there is a need for alternatives in order to discourage unproductive unorganized livestock rearing in rural confines. Unorganized livestock keeping enhances deforestation competes with natural inhabitants (wildlife) and impacts the environment thus increasing carbon footprints in the vicinity.  Most of the forests have been taken over for agricultural purposes or degraded by uncontrolled biotic pressures. 

Nature-Based Economy & Depopulation

Most of the reserves are fine examples of the nature-based economy which is a sustainable answer to deforestation and livestock keeping.  

Wildlife tourism should be conducted by enhancing the use of vehicles powered by electricity, the resorts have to strictly comply with responsible practices and the economic opportunities that are tied to nature should be explored further. 

In the case of areas comprising vital ecosystems, local economies will experience a paradigm shift as the educated youth migrate to urban centers for employment. Migration is not because of educated youth alone even those who provide labor in farming and industry are moving to urban centers with a tendency to populate.  

There is a definite depopulation taking place in rural areas, and the impact is noticeable with an unmanageable rise in urban populations. 

Traditional farming and livestock rearing will not be sustainable in the long run due to an aging population, the impact is already evident. The local communities will have to find alternatives that are nature-friendly and sustainable. 

Large-scale commercial projects that impact the local ecology are being banned near the reserves and sanctuaries thus there will be a pressing need for a nature-based economy to take over. This will further increase the migration of youth towards urbanity if an alternative is not in place.

Depopulation though considered something good will lead to frequent economic paradigm shifts and demographic changes and the absence of sustainable solutions can lead to poaching, wood logging, and other practices which are detrimental. 

Rewilding Imperatives

Rewilding is not only declaring the area as inviolate and sacrosanct or resorting to the plantation of endemic species. Nature not only in India is inextricably tied to local economies. If we have to regenerate forests, encourage reintroduction, or the survival of endangered species we need to keep in mind the perspective of the local economy which is imperative for the survival of communities dependent upon local resources. 

While rewilding impacts nature favorably it should sustain the local economy by creating enterprises that are nature friendly and generate finances. It is vital for experts, NGOs, and dispensation to play an active role in finding the right solutions in terms of services generated and help in product marketing. 

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Uday freelances as a naturalist and loves to write about tiger conservation and the environment.

He also provides SEO and Content and teaches  Digital Marketing in his hometown Jabalpur. 

Contact: 

pateluday90@hotmail.com

9755089323

Conservation: It's Pay Back Time

Our  Earth: A Saga of Exploitation

Not only extensive farming, poaching, wood logging, and hunting have denuded our wilds we conveniently seek to forgive our sins whence it comes to breakneck industrial revolution and urbanization. Like agriculture, large industries and industrial estates scrap off nature from Earth in long strips along with associated urbanization in our towns and cities. 

In the past few centuries, we have hastened the demise of many invaluable ecosystems to alternate them with nonviable human constructs and the process goes on. The developed countries have been quick to extensively exploit natural resources and strip off ecosystems forests, grasslands, and rivers to name a few in order to develop in material terms without digging deep into ramifications. Most countries are stripped of natural lands and they have virtually exterminated their wilderness. But there is no looking back,  and if there is at places it is weak and without commitment. As a consequence, we are facing climate change and species extinction due to the dismembering of remaining ecosystems, pollution, human intrusions, and alternating natural systems to suit our exigencies.             

Earth is supposed to be shared among trillions of life forms thus maintaining an equilibrium so that life sustenance mechanism remains inviolate. Large chunks of ecosystems have been decimated for crops without any circumspection, and industrialization, and urbanization is taking place with haste. We are turning settlements into cement jungles and urban ghettos. 

All we look at is modern infrastructure and the gleaming societies and lifestyles they generate forgetting the dead that lies beneath. The industrial revolution has been a major disaster and caused wars innumerable, social disparities as well as grave harm to the environment. Global warming is an evident phenomenon among even those who are not erudite or aware, and the suffering is taking a toll in terms of health physical and mental.   

It is difficult to hinder this blitzkrieg because dispensations do not bow down and at the most pay lip service to conservation. Maintaining an equilibrium would require some committed steps for preservation even if the infrastructure buildup is halted. We simply cannot regenerate the complex living systems that nature does. This is rabid development is the trend everywhere, and most vicious in overpopulated countries trying to emerge from ongoing poverty without understanding the route they are adopting. As urban ghettos increase poverty will as well for we see life not as sustainable but gauge impoverished societies keeping the yardstick of measure highlighting disparity with those well developed (sic). There is no limit to the demands of humanity, and we will perish if we fulfill them at the cost of nature. Are we going to need artificial glass bubbles with oxygen supplies to survive on Earth in the future?       

To keep industries alive and the economy booming we continue to exploit natural resources which are already dwindling. In economic haste, we are not using the resources in a judicious manner, and are not at all looking for renewable on a war footing. Development is the mantra of disaster and the infrastructure built up in hinterlands in countries like India is a scourge with no mitigation seemingly possible. Rather than judging the economy by scale, we must peep into the environmental disaster we are leaving in the wake. We need to define our basic needs and stick to them.         

Poverty alleviation should not come about through the industrial revolution, it should come by rational use of renewable energy and a paradigm shift in our lifestyles. Too much energy consumption or unprecedented use of natural resources has wreaked havoc on our planet and we need to stem the rot. The major stress factor is not poverty but our excessive consumption of fossil fuels and other natural resources. Controlling the population is wise but there is no such urgency among various countries and demographics. Population control should be imperative, especially in Asia and Africa.         

Time to Pay Back 

We need reforestation, conservation of wildlife, habitat repair, and preservation of the ecosystem that supports them, and to stop the destruction of tropical forests going on on large scale.  We will have to redefine our lifestyle and consumption pattern and wean out what is unsustainable with vigor and commitment.     

We will have to have a methodology in place as far as industrialization and infrastructure build-up is taking place. We will have to draw out sustainable plans and practices which mitigate damage to natural lands.  Yes a lot more has to be done in order to preserve our  Earth and the efforts should come about not only from institutions but we the public as well.  

We can do it, we are successfully saving the tiger and the lion and many other endangered species and India has also preserved good enough ecosystems. There is hope! 

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Uday Works as Freelance Naturalist and Blogs on conservation, tigers, environmental issues.

He also provides SEO and Website Contents in English.

He can be contacted at:

Mail: pateluday90@hotmail.com

 Mob: 09755089323

    

Tiger Conservation Threats & History of Linear Development in India

When the British conquered India the exploitation was mostly of resources. They were physically perhaps not as brutal as the earlier invaders which were looters, Mogul megalomaniacs, bigots and usurpers. They did not sack the local populace resorting to senseless killings, rape, loot and forced conversions. Those were times of colonization and there was a purpose! 

The Raj was a manifestation of an advanced and comparatively modern civilization shaped by the industrial world of Europe. The natives were no match for them and the subjugation was complete. 

The disparity that prevailed was absolute because the Sahibs were contemporary with overpowering cultural traits, elite, educated, and yielded power that came easily with their superior force. The governance was aided by employment of  natives in various disciplines and the satraps due to whom a handful of them could easily rule over India. They had mastered structured governance in their domain, albeit India too had a structure in place being a Vedic civilization dating five thousand year but we were helpless in front of such overbearing. During the Raj, the rulers writ ran large. 

Coming straight to the point in order to exploit the natural resources better, an infrastructure was required to be put in place. With a technology considered modern in those times, they invaded the hinterland all over. This was the culmination of disastrous unplanned infrastructure building were  only thing that mattered was reaching and unearthing the natural resources and dispatching them to their homeland. 

The aim was extracting maximum economic benefit of having a jewel in the crown - a subjugated civilization that was enormously rich in natural wealth and yet timid and impoverished. With modern infrastructure in place, the enslaved country was being milked incessantly.

In post independent India we benefited from the infrastructure created by the British...and till this day we are following in the footsteps of our erstwhile masters. Though the rulers have left in the year 1947 we are still living with the slave mentality which we inherited during centuries of foreign subjugation.  

We have lost our original ethos and our civilization is badly corrupted by traits of external civilizations that at the most has made us submissive and adaptable babus.  

Post independent India, the incursion into our hinterlands became linear development a contemporary terminology that describes invasion of our lands in lieu of development. We have not hesitated to emulate our erstwhile rulers by doing exactly what they did. 

In this assault on our natural spaces we are empowered to a great extent by education in foreign language and rigidly following the Western ethos, a civilization parasitism that is simply incomprehensible and irrelevant till this day.      

1. During the Raj we had lost a large chunk of our natural spaces, and denudation and plantation of commercially viable species had already altered the remaining forever. When the rulers left, we did everything that they should not have done. And we still continue...the linear development that is taking a heavy toll of our tiger reserves, National Parks and other ecosystems continues unabated.  

The tiger is on verge of extinction so are many other species, we have no count of how many species that have become extinct, and the extent to which our forests have been denuded. Tigers need inviolate space to breed and live. But is there more space for them in this country? How many big cats does our land mass can support? Will development impact or alter our tiger reserves negatively? These are the questions conservationists are raising. 

Our geography has changed and become non-viable, climate change is affecting us badly with greater  ferocity every year, carbon footprints are enlarging every year, heat, water shortage, pollution and other life threatening factors are on increase. Yet we are in race for development that we perceive is good for us. 

Linear infrastructure development creates opening and easy accessibility to remote regions which were in an inviolate state since evolution due to inaccessibility. This impacts the linear connectivity and prevents corridor formations or makes existing corridors non-viable. Overall habitat loss and or fragmentation of our ecosystems can happen as a result of intrusion. Intruding humans can also cause problems like damage to the fragile species web of life, poaching and wood logging besides according access to foreign or alien species to overpower. Wind erosion and fires can be deadly and so can be territorial changes brought about by man. 

India is on a spree of infrastructural development, and the haste can prevent or discourage the alternative, a less damaging methodology.  The impetus on road building, new settlements, urbanization and extraction of natural resources, power projects, dams etc are  like a death knell for species survival and conservation of our natural spaces.   

It is imperative for the Nation to develop sound policies that in spite of infrastructural development circumvent or safe guards our natural spaces and preserves crucial resources besides creating a harmonious environment good enough for our well being and maintain an equilibrium.
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Uday works as a naturalist in India and writes on tigers and their conservation.
Contact: pateluday90@hotmail.com
9755089323

Dissecting The Tiger Reserves

The news is infrequent but the consequences are deadly. Already a large part of our land mass has been stripped of all-natural ingredients and more are being subjected to them. Politicians and bureaucrats do not accord consideration to the land which has been deprived of an ecosystem bearing or is too difficult to be comprehended as of ecological importance.

The dispensation exhibits limits of ill-planned approach, lack of logical thinking, no care for our environment, and declining wilderness. Economic upliftment is an urgency often aimed without proper planning and with total disregard for remaining natural landscapes. Populist governance is a bane of democracies all over the World not only in India, otherwise a time-tested meritorious system of governance.    

Large ecosystems under the ambit of conservation and right under the public eye do survive the rot, but this is not true entirely. Dissecting our tiger reserves, National Parks, and wildlife sanctuaries under the road and rail development programs are considered as a prerequisite since that is imperative to our goal of economic development. 

During the Raj inaccessible lands were ripped apart by road and rail construction leaving the forest lands open for depredation and its wildlife for easy culling. The rulers had only one aim in mind and that was to generate revenue from a usurped Nation. But the land in question belongs to us and certainly does not justify the emulation of policies of our erstwhile masters. But that is what we are doing since independence. 

After all, it is just a strip. Is this well under the limitation of sustained development in green corridors? The impact of the decimation of such strips of forest lands is disastrous, but it does not appear to be so whence the quantum of land destroyed is considered inconsequential, and the imbalance and disturbance caused are considered negligible. Whence the conservationist cries hoarse this is equated with the parable cry wolf!     

The fact is even an ill-planned minimalist approach to urban development in green corridors or protected areas can augur fatal consequences and in some circumstances that negative impact may be futuristic. For example, we have seen the impact of massive deforestation resulting in global warming in recent times. 

Teerath Singh 

Plans are often accepted and implemented by managers and bureaucrats with no insight into how ecosystems or natural lands work. They have no idea about the biodiversity prevailing in those places. They have no knowledge about the sensitivities of other life forms and their survival. Technical and economic viability is the key consideration taken into account, and yes the beneficial political fallout could favor the ruling dispensation. In the hurry to implement the projects, wildlife mitigation is not taken into account while executing the projects or at times they are never placed on the information table for the general public, NGOs and conservationists.  

Teerath Singh

We cannot continue to see development through a single prism, a multifarious approach toward the management of our lands should be accorded priority keeping in mind the health of the environment as a whole. Hence before we lose our natural lands a more circumspect policy should be in place which would mitigate conflict between wildlife managers, NGOs, and conservationists. This would be a sign of less damage being done to our natural lands if not entirely - under the developmental goals.