Call of the wild

More than anything, TR Shankar Raman ties ecological loss to the everyday

Paraphrasing the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, the author sees ecology both as evocative of the wonders of nature and as enabling the means for a community “to see the marks of death”. This may, at first glance, seem morbid but Shankar Raman, with his ludic and sometimes lyrical prose, tears us away from an Animal Planet or Bear Grylls’ view of the wild. Ecology is a science of relationships of the tree and the garden gecko as much as the rain forest. He invites the reader to let the senses enjoy and learn from nature and its “eternal dance of