A worm's eye view of conservation

Conventional forest and wildlife protection projects invariably focus on trees, animals and birds. Undoubtedly protecting vulnerable and ecologically sensitive species is a key aspect of conservation. However, as the human population increases, especially around the peripheries of wild areas, humans need to be recognised as a key component not only of conservation projects but also of the ecosystem of which they are apex predators. That is what sets apart Nitin Sekar’s What’s Left of the Jungle on shelves groaning with books on conservation. Through the engaging and intimate story of Akshu Atri, a young man born and raised in Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal, readers get a sense of the lived experience of conservation. The story of Akshu’s life tells a more general tale of culture, politics and economy of communities that live in close (often too close for comfort) proximity with the wild. It also illustrates the irony of forest protection today — although forest dwellers’ lives have generationally been deeply intertwined with nature, conventional conservation models invariably seek to alienate them completely from it.

The book begins with the young and slightly starry-eyed Mr Sekar (then 24) arriving in Buxa for his doctoral research on elephants. An American by birth, he spoke only a little Hindi, leave alone Bengali at the time. Navigating the unfamiliar environment of Buxa was made harder by his driver, who often drank on duty. He found his feet when he met Akshu Atri, a local youth who helped him not only find a new home and community but also helped him unlearn much of his textbook knowledge of conservation. Over the years, he observed Akshu’s life change as development, modernity and its accompanying consumerism came to Buxa. He saw that every time someone in the village acquired a better phone or an improved version of a motorcycle, cases of poaching would rise. He also noticed that even a dedicated environmentalist like Akshu, in order to blend in better with his community, could momentarily side with poachers from his village.

As time went by, Mr Sekar also noticed how Akshu and others in his village, Madhubangaon, experienced more elephant-human contact year on year. Every year, Akshu’s family loses 20 to 30 per cent, and occasionally, as much as 50 per cent of their corn crop to elephants. Farmers stopped cultivating basmati rice even though it was worth nearly three times more than short grain rice, because the elephants took a liking to basmati. Keeping the pachyderms away from bananas, the author writes, was like trying to keep flies away from a goat carcass. Nightly depredations by elephant herds became a common feature, a behaviour change that is being echoed across South Asia. Driven by their evolutionary need to become bigger and stronger for more mating success in jungles with increasingly diminishing food opportunities, male elephants (unlike females who have to protect their young) have begun to brave rocks, firecrackers and even arrows and bullets to raid fields for high nutrition foods, becoming in a sense crop pests. Yet, after such depredations, he heard many in the village attribute this to  Karma  — as humans had taken all the food from the jungle, elephants were eating theirs in order to survive.

With gentle, self-deprecating humour, Mr Sekhar describes all that the jungles of Buxa taught him to unlearn. In cities far removed from the jungle, people either envisage poachers as having no other livelihood options, or as hardened criminals. However, the poachers he met in Buxa all fell somewhere in between. Many were motivated by the desire to acquire new technology. Some were compelled by the paucity of jobs available, others, simply because the forest department chose to look the other way. Many were occasional, rather than habitual poachers. Even Akshu joined a poaching gang for a day simply because he didn’t want to be perceived as too much of an earnest do-gooder.

The author writes that for conservation to succeed, humans, as an intrinsic part of the forest ecosystem, need to be protected as well as trees and wildlife. The emergent picture is of a community always on the brink of poverty, that faces daily depredations of its standing crops by elephants and other wild animals, forbidden to access the forest to supplement their income — and yet expected to preserve the wild. 

Mr Sekar, through the seemingly simple tale of Akshu’s life, presents a worm’s eye view of what the forest really means to the people who inhabit its fringes and how they are impacted by its conservation.

This book is an essential read for conservationists and wildlife lovers. It offers suggestions for forest policies and protection programmes that could help them become more effective. Most of all, it enables us to see the forest from the prism of the thousands of Akshus who live around India’s forests, that breaks the conventional monochromatic approach to conservation to aid our understanding of what it will take to protect some of the last few wild spaces left on the planet.