Category: Restoration (page 1 of 1)

The right shade of green

Early monsoon clouds, grey as elephant skin, span the skies over the hillock where we are planting tree saplings. From 500 saplings stacked in black plastic sleeves, I select and heave two over to nearby soil pits prepared to receive them.

These are not just any trees, I think, as I slit open the covers, without disturbing the roots. These are very particular trees. A korangupila or Cullenia exarillata sapling and a wild nutmeg or Myristica dactyloides , picked from the 120 tree species in the stack, all native to this very place in the Anamalai Hills of the Western Ghats. A land of evergreens, a tropical rainforest, a place the great hornbills, lion-tailed macaques, and thousands of other lifeforms call home. As if echoing my thoughts, the loud bark of the hornbill sounds from the mist-breathing rainforest patch in the distance, where a 15-strong troop of macaques also lives.

It’s our 21st year attempting to ecologically restore the tropical rainforest. The slope we are planting on lies open to the sky with only a few trees — a rainforest in tatters. Like other such remnants in the landscape, it has had a long history of being logged, converted to plantations, abandoned, overrun by weeds, and suffering decades of neglect. Today, our team, a dozen strong, is getting its hands dirty trying to bring back the forests that once graced the land. Some are pitting with crowbars, one scatters organic manure on the freshly excavated moist soil. A few are removing invasive weeds like lantana, carefully retaining any native rainforest plant growing alongside. Others distribute saplings, or squat besides the pits planting, mulching, and tagging the plants with biodegradable flagging tape for later monitoring.

Rainforest restoration planting in progress in the Anamalai Hills

Hours later, we visit one of our older sites restored two decades earlier. Where previously deforested open land and smothering tangles of weeds sprawled, now diverse trees over 50 feet tall stand like columns. Some young trees are flush with clusters of bright red leaves, others sprout their first crops of fruit. The harsh chattering alarm call of a giant squirrel sounds from the canopy where a troop of dark Nilgiri langurs munches its way through the foliage — both species having returned to the site in the last few years as the rainforest reclaimed the land.

Rainforest recovery in the Stanmore restoration site: from 2004 (top, site with weeds removed) to 2018 (below, after restoration with rainforest trees growing).

A million trees

Ecological restoration involves the careful planting of the right species in the right places in the right mix and right manner. Unfortunately, many large-scale tree planting programmes carried out today ignore each of these vital criteria even as they make headlines for having used hundreds or thousands of volunteers to plant lakhs or millions of saplings over hundreds of hectares, sometimes in a single hour or day.

A case in point is Telangana’s Haritha Haram programme that aims to plant 2.3 billion tree seedlings in four years. The programme also adopts the recent fad of lobbing seed balls (seeds embedded in balls of soil) across the State, one district vying for a record of 20 million. Telangana has a diverse range of natural ecosystems including grasslands, tree savannas, dry thorn forests, and deciduous forests, with hundreds of native plant species, from grasses and shrubs to trees. Yet, the official website of the project lists just a hundred tree species, including many invasive alien species such as Prosopis juliflora (mesquite), acacia wattles, casuarina, and ornamental trees. These species are not just inappropriate for Telangana, some are downright harmful. Yet, millions of seedlings are being planted and millions of seed balls tossed around, unmindful of whether the right species are being planted or even whether trees should be planted in that ecosystem at all.

Large-scale record-breaking tree planting makes news, not forests. Which explains why politicians, bureaucrats, and celebrities throng these events, while botanists, ecologists, and indigenous people are conspicuously absent. Besides failing to monitor or nurture the large numbers planted, such tree planting can cause more harm than good.

Across India, tree planting efforts suffer from five main problems: planting trees in the wrong places, planting the wrong species and species mix, planting too few species, failing to consider seed provenance, and planting without considering the rights of local people.

Rich deserts

The most egregious harm comes when people plant trees in areas that do not naturally support many trees: open natural ecosystems (ONEs). India has a remarkable diversity of ONEs from the hot desert dunes of Jaisalmer to the cold desert steppes of Spiti and Ladakh; from the thorn scrub and savanna woodlands of the Deccan Plateau to the ravines of the Chambal; from the dry grasslands of Banni to the wet grasslands of Kaziranga; from the montane grasslands of the Western Ghats to the alpine meadows of the Himalayas. ONEs span about 3,29,000 sq.km. or 15% of India’s land area, according to a recent study by ATREE, a Bengaluru-based NGO, and maps by scientists M.D. Madhusudan, Abi Vanak, and Abhijeet Kulkarni.

These open natural ecosystems, mislabelled ‘wastelands’, are ecosystems in their own right, home to many specialised and endangered plants and animals. Two of India’s most endangered bird species — the great Indian bustard and Jerdon’s courser — are birds of open drylands. When tree plantations, including alien or introduced trees, smother open grassland and scrub, native plant and animal species decline and disappear.

Trees planted inappropriately in chinkara habitat, destroying a grassland ecosystem (Photo: Abi Vanak)

Tree planting in ONEs can also affect local hydrology and reduce water availability. Native grasses and dryland plants are adapted to use little water in keeping with local rainfall patterns and infiltration, while helping recharge groundwater. But tree plantations in such areas can increase water uptake and transpiration, depleting the water table. For these reasons, open natural ecosystems deserve protection, including from tree planting. The ATREE study estimates that about 6,452 sq. km. or half the ONEs in Telangana could suffer from inappropriate tree planting. Across India, 51% of ONEs are similarly threatened.

Tree planting in forests can go wrong, too, as best seen in India’s flawed compensatory afforestation, where plantations are established ostensibly to compensate for forests destroyed for development projects. A November 2017 report by Community Forest Rights–Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA), a group working on forest rights issues, examined 2,479 compensatory afforestation plantations in 10 States listed in the Government’s E-Green Watch website, and found that 70% were on forest lands instead of non-forest lands. This signifies a double-loss: the original forest is wiped clear for built infrastructure, while double the area in a new ‘afforestation’ site is scoured by earthwork, trenches, and concrete structures, only to introduce alien and inappropriate trees neither native to the original destroyed forest nor to the ecosystem in the new location. In effect, three times the area of some of India’s most remarkable forests are being destroyed or disturbed at taxpayer expense in the name of compensatory afforestation.

Monoculture eucalyptus plantations are not forests and can be harmful in many ways to natural ecosystems. photo by Kalyan Varma, see his full photo essay here.

Planting the wrong species and species mix is legion in tree planting programmes. The species planted are often alien, such as eucalyptus, mesquite, senna, and wattles, or include naturalised species such as gulmohar or neem. Even where planters claim to use native species, they are generic native species found widely elsewhere in India (such as amla, banyan, or jack) rather than those native to the ecosystem at the planting location.

Worse, the seeds or seedlings are not sourced from local ecosystems or appropriate seed zones, but randomly sourced and trucked in from whichever nursery or market happens to sell them. Only a few tree planting programmes take the required care to identify the correct natural ecosystem and vegetation and bother to ethically source seeds or raise seedlings in local, native plant nurseries.

Without people

In afforestation sites, State forest departments and implementing agencies also plant a pitifully small number of tree species, usually less than 10, often as few as two or three. One study found that more than half of the 2,35,000 ha afforested between 2015 and 2018 used five or fewer species. To take just one random example from 2015, to offset the diversion of 103 ha of forest land for the trans-Arunachal highway, the State planned compensatory afforestation in 310 ha of land in a village forest reserve. Both the original forest and the village reserve would have had hundreds of plant species, but the afforestation, according to details published online, planted five unnamed species at a cost of ₹28 lakh.

Tree planting programmes often fail to consider the roles and rights of local communities, enshrined in the landmark Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. The CFR-LA report found that of 52 compensatory afforestation plantations in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha, all were established on community forest lands vested in the village gram sabhas by the FRA, but all were carried out without gram sabha permission. Even during the pandemic in 2020, States such as Chhattisgarh and Odisha continued such afforestation on lands belonging to and used by indigenous people, excluding them by building fences and walls. Under rules framed by the present government in August 2018, the requirement for gram sabha consent has been done away with, violating local rights and compromising traditional land use, such as for fodder and grazing. Crucially, it also fails to empower communities as agents of restoration.

Meanwhile, destructive development projects are poised to destroy millions of native trees in some of our best forests. A science college in Dehradun set to fell over 25,000 trees, the Buxwaha diamond mine in Bundelkhand set to hack over 2.15 lakh trees, the Ken-Betwa river-linking project slated to destroy 23 lakh trees, the proposed trans-shipment terminal on Great Nicobar island that will kill untold millions in some of India’s most extraordinary forests, and the list goes on and on. Efforts to protect these existing trees in our forests could do a lot more good than misguided tree planting.

A rainforest returns

Back in the Anamalais, I mulled over our own small-scale tree planting for rainforest restoration. Over two decades, we had planted around 70,000 trees to restore about 100 ha of highly degraded rainforest, working hectare by hectare, chasing neither targets nor records, but aiming to bring back a semblance of the original rainforest ecosystem as best we could. Three local plantation companies, Parry Agro Industries, Tata Coffee, and Tea Estates India, had also stepped up to protect over 1,075 ha of existing rainforest patches within their tea and coffee estates.

Taken together, our work was an attempt to show that protecting remaining forests was the first priority and tree planting could be done and done well, when and where it was really needed. We hoped it would serve as a model of ecological restoration that would motivate others to plant ecosystems and not just trees. Ecological restoration of the appropriate ecosystem — whether grassland, desert, savanna, or rainforest — is preferable to blind tree planting.

For us, there was another salient reason to plant rainforest trees, year after year, decade after decade. If all went well, one day, a few decades hence, from the nearby rainforest patch, descendants of the troop of macaques would comb the canopy of the Cullenia, and future hornbills would whoosh onto the Myristica to feed on the fruits of the very trees we had planted.

This article appeared as the cover story in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on 8 August 2021. Available online under the title Why frenzied tree planting is no answer to ecological restoration.

Cover story in The Hindu Sunday Magazine

India’s Revenant Forests

Leonardo DiCaprio may have a lesson or two for India’s ministry of environment, forest and climate change. The Hollywood actor, as protagonist of a 2015 Oscar-winning blockbuster, plays a character who is ­att­acked, gravely wounded and left for dead, but who nevertheless recovers to live on as The Revenant of the film’s title. Now, ­imagine a Bollywood version: with an actor like Naseeruddin Shah in DiCaprio’s role, acting alongside co-stars like Ratna Pathak, Nandita Das, Rajkummar Rao and other ­talented artistes playing complex ­character roles. And imagine now that Shah plays a character who is beaten, mortally wounded and left for dead, but comes back to life. Except, in this Indian version, it is not the wounded and recovering Shah himself, but someone altogether different: say, a Salman Khan or an Akshay Kumar who ­returns with Kangana Ranaut in tow, both hero and ­heroine predictably hogging almost every scene. Would the latter character, ­co-stars and film still be a revenant representative and worthy of the original? Or would it just be a completely artificial ­replacement, ­bearing no res­emblance to the original in ­appearance, artistry or talent?

India’s environment ministry appears to fav­our the latter form of transformation if we go by recent trends affecting India’s forests and other natural ecosystems. Take, for instance, the plans to bring so-called development to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (A&N), which involve destruction of about 20,000 hectares of forest. The A&N forests are ecologically unique and rich in biodiversity, with a large number of species, many of which are endemic and found now­here else in the world. To offset the kind of damage that will result from such projects, India has a system of compensatory afforestation that involves regrowing an equivalent area of forests in non-forest land or double the area in degraded forest land. The compensatory afforestation planned for A&N inv­olves about Rs 1,480 crore to reg­row forests in…wait for it…Madhya Pradesh!

For the destruction of biologically rich forests such as these in the Andaman Islands, the compensatory afforestation will be carried out in Madhya Pradesh!

Thus, biologically rich forests will be ­des­troyed in a unique island ecosystem and a false replacement—probably using just two or three totally inappropriate species not native to either ecosystem—will be ­created over 2,000 km away in the middle of India in a totally different bio-climatic zone. Instead of the beautiful performances and uplifting music in the original movie, we will be treated to the usual tired masala and inevitable item number in the replacement.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of India’s compensatory afforestation programme, helmed by the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority or CAMPA. The CAMPA programme is founded on the belief that natural forests and other ecosystems can be severely damaged or destroyed in one place and then regrown elsewhere using money shelled out by those implementing the destructive projects. In 2018, a fund of Rs 66,000 crore had accrued over the previous decade from payments for forest destruction in the belief that the ­des­troyed forests can be ‘compensated’. In August 2018, the Central Government ­notified rules under the 2016 Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act to unlock these funds ostensibly for this purpose.

The compensatory afforestation law is now channeling a huge pot of money for aff­orestation through state bureaucracies and private parties and businesses. But it is a fat­ally flawed programme suffering from at least four major problems: planting trees in the wrong places (including grasslands, wetlands and deserts), planting the wrong tree species in forests, planting just one or a handful of tree species, and planting in lands of local and indigenous people without their consent and involvement. Almost all compensatory afforestation involves one to all of the above damaging practices.

Monoculture tree plantations are not forests: A panorama shot of a teak (Tectona grandis) plantation (Left) and moist-deciduous forest (Right) in a protected area in Karnataka, India. Photo by: Anand Osuri, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Compensatory afforestation in principle and practice is regressive, but it is now a programme with deep pockets and a greatly enlarged potential for wreaking more ­damage to India’s forestlands and non-­forest community lands and commons. It needs to be urgently replaced by an appro­ach that recognises the importance of ­retaining all existing natural and undisturbed forests, protecting non-forest ecosystems such as deserts, grasslands and savannahs from ill-advised tree planting, and reviving the roles and rights of local communities and gram sabhas. Where ­forests have been alr­eady degraded or des­troyed, there is a need to change focus from ‘afforestation’ to ‘ecological restoration’.

Ecological restoration has been defined as “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed”. Key to this is the concept of (‘assisting’) natural processes of recovery rather than installing by brute force a replica or replacement ecosystem. It involves working with nature rather than against nature. Restoration involves bringing back the original ecosystem—not just forests, but also sav­annas, grasslands, wetlands or deserts. Restoration requires careful attention to landscape, the right species mix, and appropriate methods that minimise further disturbance, foster natural recovery, and employ ecologically informed interventions.

Ecological restoration fosters recovery of diverse species native to specific ecosystems by working with nature.

Restoration allows the recovery of species native to local ecosystems at a site-specific level, not forcible planting of saplings from some bundled list of species blindly applied to entire states or regions. It would also req­uire stripping away the bureaucratic obsession with infrastructure creation and concretisation (check dams, trenches, waterholes and such), and replace it instead with minimising alterations to landscape and terrain to nurture a greater degree of naturalness. It mandates a close focus on natural vegetation types and how much of each type remains and in what condition, rather than on generic measures of green cover, forest cover, tree cover or density classes that is the present obsession of the forest bureaucracy. Finally, ecological restoration offers an ­opp­ortunity to empower local communities and stakeholders as participants, because local people are far more knowledgeable and intimately connected to nature than the ­forest bureaucracy, external contractors or private sector plantations will ever be.

Still, the larger question remains: can an ecosystem such as a river or a forest—once damaged by destructive development, ­def­orestation or pollution—be helped to ­rec­over to its original state or some reasonable approximation of it? Can the diverse set of native species, the unruly, wild character of the original ‘jungle’ or river or grassland be brought back? Contemporary research ­suggests this can happen only partially, and only when ecological restoration is carried out with a great deal of care and effort. And that is an additional reason to be far more cautious than we are at present with how we treat and manage the little that is left of India’s forests, rivers and other natural ecosystems.

This article first appeared in Outlook Magazine on 14 June 2021.

Speak, Memory

I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

Speak, Memory (vladimir Nabokov)

The pandemic came from nowhere and everywhere and grounded us. Grounded us to place and to a renewed appreciation of our joint and earthly vulnerability, our collective insouciance to planetary health. Perhaps it will all change: the destruction of nature, the desecration of land for profit, the dissembling of reality to concoct a narrative of progress that hides multiple spirals of decline. Meanwhile, in the sudden and welcome quiet, a quiet that may presage a dawn or a storm, there are moments to reflect, to read, and to speak. To speak of what we have seen, what we have done, what we could still do for ourselves and for the world that we may yet wake up to.

Over the last year, from our home here in the Anamalai Hills, Divya and I have participated and spoken in a few online events, podcasts, and interactions, and had one documentary feature our work. The topics are as scattered as our interests and work have been: books and reading, hornbills and civets, rainforests and restoration. Nothing world-changing here. Just our plodding pursuits and local efforts to do what we can, where we can, because we’d rather be doing this than anything else. I am just parking it all here for you to watch or listen at your leisure. In reverse chronological order, here goes… and take your pick.

Valley of Words Literature Festival online session on The Wild Heart of India

My book The Wild Heart of India made the English nonfiction shortlist of the 2020 Valley of Words Award, along with four excellent titles.

The Valley of Words Award 2020 shortlist in English nonfiction.

The literature festival, meant to be held at The Savoy, Mussoorie, was held online during 20 – 22 November, 2020. While the award itself went to Ankur Bisen’s book Wasted, as part of the litfest I had the opportunity for a discussion with Dr Malvika Onial, Scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), and Dr Dhananjai Mohan, Director, WII. The recording of our discussion on my book, on conservation, and on writing about the natural world was streamed online on the 22nd.

Valley of Words Podcast on The Wild Heart of India

This conversation with Manoj Nair on my book The Wild Heart of India, which aired on 15 November, meanders through writing about the natural world, my personal journey in conservation, nature deficit and reconnecting people and nature, and where we are headed… do listen!

Restoration and Ecosystems

On September 25, 2020, Divya joined a panel of leading scientists on the Biodiversity Collaborative in a session on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, where she spoke on restoration, afforestation, and our experiences from the Western Ghats.

Watch: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Understanding, Restoring and Conserving Biodiversity to Ensure Our Future

Conversation with Jonathan Drori

On September 12, 2020, we had a lovely chat with Dr Jonathan Drori, centered on his book Around the World in 80 Trees.

Such a lovely conversation: Do scientists give enough love to individual trees, the role that botanical gardens can play in conserving plants and spreading information, is it time for us to push harder for a different view of trees—one that recognises trees for their intrinsic worth, can illustrations capture trees better than photographs? Especially loved the part where Divya, Sridhar and Jonathan talk about how we can judge the health of a society by looking at how it treats its trees. Beautiful—thank you for this!

Janhavi Rajan

Carl D’silva Memorial Lecture

On August 30, 2020, Divya and I spoke at a lecture in memory of Carl D’Silva, an outstanding wildlife artist and illustrator who died in 2015. We then joined the discussion with Dr Madhura Niphadkar on forests, reforestation, and conservation.

IMG-20200826-WA0030.jpg

On the Malabar civet

And Janaki Lenin interviewed Divya on her work on civets and the strange case of the Malabar civet as part of her #WildWomenInterviews series on 24 October 2020.

A Dream of Trees

And last on the list, but the first for us in the year past, was this stunning documentary about our work in the Anamalai Hills, made by the remarkable Sara and his team at Evanescence Studios. The film appeared on YouTube on 8 January 2020.

This film tells the story of the ecological restoration of degraded tropical rainforests in the Anamalai Hills of the Western Ghats, India. It shows how Divya and I have been working with our team to restore degraded patches of rainforest in the Anamalai Hills in partnership with tea and coffee plantation companies since 2001. It speaks of the extraordinary values of rainforests and how restoration helps revive forests, bring back wildlife, and pull carbon down from the atmosphere in a time of climate crisis. An instructive story of challenge, limitation, and hope, A Dream of Trees is also an inspiring tale of restoration, of reviving the connections between plants and animals and between people and rainforests in a shared landscape. Do watch!

Note: This post was updated on 8 January 2021 to include the Valley of Words recorded video session of 22 November.

A Weekend in Lake Tahoe

Carved by glaciers, filled by snow melt and cool creeks of clear water, the crystal lake is bluer than the sky itself. Ensconced by a ring of rugged ridges, some softened by blankets of snow, the lake seems separated from the rest of the world. It gazes at the heavens like an unblinking but shimmering, sparkling eye. From a distance, the bristling conifers on the surrounding slopes—Jeffrey pine, lodgepole pine, western white pine, incense cedar, and white fir—seem as gentle as eyelashes, the crestline of the mountains becomes the ridge of the eyebrow, and the folded ranges rolling away into the grey-blue distance become a forehead, furrowed in thought. On the skyward face of the Sierra Nevada, alongside more than 25,000 hectares of forest, alpine meadows, and granitic rocks in the Desolation Wilderness, Lake Tahoe shines in the sun.

Lake Tahoe looking at space (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On Memorial Day weekend, the metaphor can only go so far. What do I make of the white wakes of boats, the stream of cars, the sibilant rush of tyres on steely tarmac, and the pressing throng of several thousand people, bikers, dogs, and ourselves? All spattered over Tahoe’s eye, like scratches and smoke and pieces of grit? At the edge of the wilderness and the lake, I now stand, perplexed for a moment, reflecting on my own metaphor.

Steller’s Jay; by Wolfgang Krause (Picasa Web Albums) [CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

From the branches of a nearby pine, a Steller’s jay with its dark wedge of a head laughs—a staccato, rasping laugh—before his feathery blue shape plunges into the woods.

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It is a bright, clear day over Lake Tahoe, as we head out from the rented house where we stayed the night, and the tops of the trees are touched gold by rays of morning sun. High above everyone, a lone osprey wings his way with purpose—across the open sky towards the lake.

Osprey in flight; by Mandcrobertson (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

At a trailhead near South Lake Tahoe, my brother and I enter Desolation Wilderness. I am astonished at the crowd of weekend visitors on foot, although there seems to be fewer people here than by the lake itself. Unlike around the lake, there are no roads in the wilderness reserve, and none are permitted to be established, so one can only enter on foot for hiking or camping. Yet, as a board placed at the trailhead declares, Desolation Wilderness receives more visitors on a per acre basis than any other American wilderness. A sheaf of entry permits hangs on the same board—voluntary permit forms that we fill out with our details, drop into an attached box, before going on.

Wilson’s Warbler; by Linda Tanner (Flickr: Wilson’s Warbler) [CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We take a short, slow walk on the trail winding through scattered shrubbery, punctuated by taller conifers, and threaded by dense vegetation along the streams. From a shrub, a western wood pewee, a brown flycatcher-like bird, flits out after an insect and loops back to his perch. A Wilson’s warbler, smaller than my fist, his face a heart-stopping flash of gold, energetically gleans insects off the leaves. On the trail, sprightly and shrill squirrels dart aside for us while, overhead, sleek and handsome violet-green swallows scythe through the air. Further ahead, at a little creek, in shimmering sun-flecks under the quivering leaves of an aspen, I bend to the stream, cup cold, clear water in my hands, drink deep, and stand up, refreshed.

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In its high glacier-scoured valley, Lake Tahoe sits at the edge of myriad lines. Fault lines form a great ‘V’, whose arms open to the north encompassing the lake, and are flanked by mountain ranges—the Sierra Nevada to the west and the Carson range to the east. Other invisible lines, too, slice the landscape: climatic lines-in-the-air, edaphic lines-in-the-earth, the lines defined only on maps and in human perception, where bristly conifers yield to sparse sagebrush, where California becomes Nevada, and valleys of silicon give way to basins of sand. Beneath all runs a deeper line, impressed in the human mind, which many visitors imagine they cross, when they leave the city and suburbs behind, for a spell outdoors in nature, for a trip into the wilderness.

Lake Tahoe, with a surface area of 50,000 hectares, is the largest of the Sierra lakes, 35 kilometres long, about 16 kilometres wide, and upto half a kilometre deep. More than a hundred years ago in The Mountains of California, John Muir—writer, naturalist, and an early proponent of wilderness preservation whom Bill McKibben has called an “American mystic”—evocatively described the landscape and waters of Lake Tahoe.

Its forested shores go curving in and out and around many an emerald bay and pine-crowned promontory, and its waters are everywhere as keenly pure as any to be found among the highest mountains.

John Muir

Emerald Bay at Lake Tahoe Image: © Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons

On the map, Lake Tahoe nestles alongside the great tract, lying to the southwest, of over 25,000 hectares of sub-alpine and alpine forest, lakes, and meadows, and high peaks in the Desolation Wilderness. The wilderness areas in the United States were created following the enactment of the landmark legislation in 1964, the Wilderness Act. The Act defined a wilderness as an

…area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain…

Under the Act, a wilderness was also envisaged as an area

…which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation…

Desolation itself was designated by the US Congress in 1969, from an area that was part of Lake Tahoe Forest Reserve established seventy years earlier. Not long after John Muir’s book was published, tourists were already visiting the area, which became part of the Eldorado National Forest in 1910, and later notified as Desolation Valley Primitive Area in 1931 before it was inducted into the National Wilderness Preservation System. Despite its rather forbidding name, or, perhaps, because of it, Desolation Wilderness now manages to entice well over a hundred thousand visitors every year. As a place for more routine recreation rather than wilderness tourism in the same landscape, Lake Tahoe receives, every year, around three million.

Like elsewhere, the history of human presence and use in the Tahoe Basin landscape is longer than the history of preservation efforts. The Washoe lived, hunted, and fished here for over 8000 years, leaving a smaller imprint on the land than what came later. A little over a century before the wilderness legislation, human impact on the landscape escalated with the discovery, in 1859, of silver ore in the famous Comstock Lode. In the ensuing ‘silver-rush’ and mining boom, ground was broken for trails, railroads, and roads through the mountains, and the demand for timber spurred logging in the Tahoe Basin.

Comstock Lode, c. 1870; via Wikimedia Commons

Old-growth forest area in the basin soon declined by two-thirds and, as logging continued into the twentieth century, plummeted further, until less than two percent remained. The legacy of logging is still marked on the land, and the forests—now with fewer large trees, more pines, and an altered fire regime—are still changing.

And yet, it is possible to imagine something different. Ascending the grand Sierra, one feels a certain exhilaration, like finding beauty untempered by loss. Scaling a high pass down to South Lake Tahoe, turning off the road into Pioneer Trail, one can imagine a frontier landscape that early visitors, forerunners of others to come, came to explore. One imagines miners prospecting for ore, riders seeking land, timber, or game, or even thieving raiders of the wild west escaping the law—outlaws riding into the outback with rangers on their tail. One imagines a time when people left the urban and the suburban, the ranch and the farm—all of it—behind, and set out on expeditions into uncharted territory. Into wilderness. Desolation.

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The map of Lake Tahoe and its encircling forests bespeaks a different reality that is neither desolation nor wilderness. Everywhere, trails squiggle from trailhead to viewpoint, to alpine lakes and waterfalls, through logged coniferous forests and upland meadows, up rocky slopes to smooth ski-trails, or down ravines, past aspen-lined creeks, back to the lake. The tourist map carries a smattering of points to visit—to ratchet-up your been-there-done-that list—emerald bays, white beaches, silvery cascades—promising vistas that inspire, places that are heavenly. You can even reach Heavenly by gondola lift, ascending to the mountain-top ski resort on cable-car. There is a peppering of private property in the landscape—wood cabins with verandahs overlooking the lake, log houses tacked to wooden jetties where boats with oars and outboard motors are tied, homes fronted by the inevitable garage, the ubiquitous lawn.

On the Sunday before Memorial Day at Lake Tahoe, people are out in numbers. My brother, sister-in-law, a cousin and her husband, and myself are joined by my younger cousin sister and her fiancé, who have driven down from the university at Reno for the weekend. Together, we thread our way through walkers, cyclists, and vehicles to the lake. Everywhere, small plastic American flags flutter on windshields and bonnets, or taped to the spokes of bicycles, go spinning and spinning. Some of the people have cycled up, but most have carried cycles perched on bike racks on their cars and trucks. A few motorcyclists ride past, from bikers on humble, purring Yamahas, to the men mounted on growling Harley Davidsons—faceless people in helmets marked with fearsome stickers and logos, wearing black gloves and leather jackets, sometimes sleeveless, often tattooed. The walkers on steady march, in hiking boots and walking shoes, are outfitted in casuals, shorts, jackets, or outdoor clothes, their heads bare or covered by hats or baseball caps, their clothes of every colour from white to black to flourescent yellow and orange. On many shoulders are slung backpacks with rehydrating tubes leading to water bottles, from many ears emerge the wires of earphones connected to music players.

Then, seeming to outnumber and outpace the bikers and walkers, come the vehicles bearing names strangely reminscent of the pioneer years: cars. The roads thrum to the traffic of the Explorers, the 4Runners, the Outback riders, the Escapes, the Ascenders and Uplanders, the Rangers and Raiders, the Suburban Expedition adventurers. Cars. Cars in steely grey and flaming red. Cars in lake blue and sky blue and meadow green and moss green. Cars in brown and bronze and beige. Cars in passionate pink and pollen yellow. Cars in white and ivory and pitch black. Cars small enough to tuck in your legs and squat into, cars so large that you must haul yourself up like ascending a mountain with handrails. Cars that are trendy hybrids or gas guzzlers. Cars called trucks, called sedans, called SUVs, called cars. Cars with roofs open, retractable, convertible, closed. Cars with people, cars with attitude, cars with unassailable confidence. Cars. Cars. Cars.

Like a giant, colourful, wheeled millipede, the traffic crawls on the road along the lake. In favoured tourist spots, the rarest find is a space to park the car. We drive more than a mile, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, past the stationary millipede of parked vehicles, to find a space to park our own.

Yet, the few hours spent in casual birding in Lake Tahoe are enjoyable, yielding familiar birds and new species, some imprinted on memory. On the fens and fenceposts, flocks of red-winged blackbirds chatter and screech, their epaulets flaming on feathers black as an oil slick. In the trees, a male yellow-headed blackbird gleams, black mask and dagger beak on a sunflower yellow head and neck. On the lake, California gulls bob white and placid, alongside a couple of cantankerous mallard drakes. A tree swallow sweeps overhead, as a skein of Canada geese whips past, and flying even higher, a dark, slow raven rends the air with raucous cries. Later in the afternoon, as we head back to the car park, after seeing the sights, after the photos with lake and landscape as background, we see the osprey in the skies again—is it the same one?—carrying a glistening fish in its talons. Wings held wide, the bird bends its head to its feet to tear at the fish, apparently for a mid-air meal.

Our bird list hovers at around fifteen species, representing a dozen bird families. But the marques of cars seen exceeds twenty: Subaru, GMC, Dodge, Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Lexus, Acura, Hummer, Volkswagen, Audi, JEEP, Opel, Mitsubishi, Chrysler, Land Rover, Datsun, Scion, Chevrolet, Hyundai, and Volvo. And the species and shades of cars—from the tiny two doors to the hunkering Hummers, the Oldsmobiles to newsmobiles, the Corollas and Sequoias, the Jaguars and Mustangs—there was no way to keep count. One SUV is even named Tahoe.

Traffic and lights in South Lake Tahoe; by Constantine Kulikovsky (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Perhaps, in our birding today, lost in our own distractions as we were, it is safer to assume that we missed many species. It is safer and more reassuring, because the alternative explanation—that on a pleasant weekend spent outdoors the species and races of cars outnumber the species and races of birds—is truly frightening.

Fifty years on, the legacy of the Wilderness Act still raises questions that deserve attention. Why does the Wilderness Act talk about opportunities for solitude or recreation when, in many areas, a person seeking the former in all likelihood will be interrupted by others pursuing the latter? What does it portend for recreation that is primitive and unconfined, when the ability to immerse oneself into such an experience, untrammeled as the wilderness, eludes most of us, benumbed passengers of a world careening in the opposite direction? Why does the Act insist that man must himself merely be a visitor who does not remain, when all land, forest, and air bears telling evidence to the contrary? Ultimately, too, whose standards of recreation are we to consider? Those of the Washoe Indians who lived here for millenia before the white man, those of the visionaries of the American wilderness system, or those of the ever-shifting throng of tourists at the entry gates among whom a form of recreation may be discovered by each person anew? And what of the other kind of tourism, hovering at the edge of the wilderness, in places like Lake Tahoe: when the desired experience of landscape is something that can be purchased, how does one value one’s place in nature?

§

As the day wears on and we walk the trails skirting the lakeshore and adjoining slopes, I realise our time in Tahoe brings more than just rest or recreation. My younger cousin, tall and effervescent, describes her doctoral research on the ecology of birds in the high mountains of California, while her fiancé, a hydrologist, talks about the Tahoe basin and the mile-high cluster of sub-alpine lakes. From them, I learn that Lake Tahoe is among the most pellucid lakes, partly due to the low-nutrient soils on the surrounding slopes and consequent low nutrient loading into the lake. In the 1960s, one could see clearly up to a depth of nearly a hundred feet, but with pollution and sediment load from the surrounding developed areas and roads, water clarity and visibility declined to about sixty feet in recent years. They tell me that concerned citizens are now working to restore the lake and the surrounding watershed. The lake appears to be responding, too, and is slowly recovering the clearness of the past. On the roadside, they point to a stormwater drain installed to trap and filter the run-off that may otherwise find its way into the lake. My eyes follow the drain down the slope to the lake, seeing it, again, with renewed clarity. Among human efforts, ecological restoration appears to be that rare endeavour where the past can become a measure of progress.

By U.S. Geological Survey from Reston, VA, USA (Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe) [CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

We turn back to the house where we will stay the night. It might be the last night we will all get to spend together for a long while yet.

In the evening, the cars stream back to city and town, as people leave the wilderness behind for the urban and suburban, leave nature for office and home. Yet, the wilderness they leave behind will not sink into great desolation, and the home that lies ahead will not be disconnected from nature. The people have touched Tahoe and, perhaps, some have been touched by Tahoe, in return. Who knows how many found their solitude, or a primitive and unconfined recreation, or forged new connections with nature, or among themselves? And what, finally, is the real catalyst of it all, if not the landscape itself? For it is the lake and the wilderness, by their presence, accessibility, and grandeur, that drew each of us briefly outside the busy, self-contained cocoons of our lives. And yet, watching the departing vehicles and recalling the milling crowds, I cannot help thinking: catalysts are supposed to remain unchanged by the reactions they facilitate.

The envelope of night slips over the lake. The slithering roar of the highway subsides to muted shush of tyres. One can now stand on the slopes above the lake and the city of South Lake Tahoe, and look—look down at the sprinkling of lights in the landscape, glowing in boats and houses, beaming from streetlights and cars. To the sighing of wind in the pines, one can look at the lake and imagine the unflinching eye reflecting the light of stars.

This article first appeared on my blog on the Coyotes Network on 7 June 2016.

Kalakad: Three Years in Rainforest

(With Divya Mudappa, for a volume commemorating 25 years of Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve)

A place that is marked by the presence of people is not unusual, but a place whose presence itself leaves an indelible mark on people is something extraordinary. In the ancient mountains at the southern tip of the great Western Ghats ranges, sheltering among rocky peaks and rugged slopes draped with tall evergreen forest, lies one such place. A place of beauty and challenge and diversity, which if you have really experienced, you will declare has no real equivalent. And if you have lived and worked there, wherever you go, the place will go with you. It will remain a benchmark, a touchstone, a reference point in felt memory and field experience, against which you will forever measure other places, newer knowledge. A place that does all this, slowly, gently, but inevitably, is Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 9 December 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

Integrating Ecology and Economy: Five Lessons

“One of the hardest things in politics,” US President Barack Obama said in a recent interview, “is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.” Obama’s words are pertinent not only to the rules proposed on June 2 by his administration to cut future carbon emissions by US fossil-fuel power plants as a step to address climate change. They are also relevant to the other great democracy and its spanking new government on the other side of the planet: India.

On the road to development? Destructive projects promoted for short-term gains may have unaccounted long-term costs to people and nation (Photo of logs lying along the Andaman Trunk Road).

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network, while a slightly edited version appeared in the opinion/editorial page of The Hindu on 3 July 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

14 to 41: where I had always wanted to be

There are times in your life, when, in an unexpected moment, you come face to face with yourself. It could happen anytime, to anyone. It could happen over your breakfast as aroma and sound—hot coffee swirling in your cup and a dosa sizzling on the stove—suddenly release a sensory cascade of recollections as history intersects happenstance. It could happen in a memory or a dream, where past and present merge into a fused and frozen time indistinct, even, from the future. It could happen while you walk down a street and momentarily catch your own full-length reflection in a shining, shop-front glass. In that moment, the person who you were confronts the one who you have become. Chances are, it might catch you unawares.

… This post first appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 15 November 2013. Read more in the Prologue of The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

Coming home to Danum: A Borneo interlude

The song of the whistling thrush in the cloud-covered mountains. A chill in the air in the hills of the elephants. The river in-between the hills—the Naduar—whose white swells over the rocks he can see through his window, whose rich, sibilant sighs carry through the clear air all the way up to him. To him at his table by the window, from where he hears, he feels, he sees.

… This post first appeared in the Rainforest Revival blog on 30 September 2012. Read the article in Fountain Ink, Coming Home to Borneo.

New booklet on rainforest restoration

What is rainforest restoration? Why do we need it? If we wish to restore degraded rainforest, what should we do? How do we go about it? Where is it needed? And when? Motivated by these and many other questions, we have put down our thoughts and experiences gathered over the last decade in the Anamalai hills, in relation to those of other restoration ecologists and practitioners into a beautifully-designed and richly illustrated 40-odd page booklet:

Mudappa, D., and Raman, T. R. S. 2010. Rainforest Restoration: A Guide to Principles and Practice. Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore.

Download from here: PDF 6.7 MB

Or from the Website of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, India, here.

The cover

The booklet aims to present concepts of ecological restoration along with guidelines and suggestions for practice and on-ground implementation in a simple, easy to understand manner. Attractively designed by Pavithra Sankaran and richly illustrated with beautiful photographs, the booklet is a visual treat. Here’s a sample:

Inside pages

Take a look at the contents:

Contents

The booklet was brought out with support from the IUCN National Committee of The Netherlands, Ecosystems Grant Programme (IUCN-NL EGP). The text of the booklet may be used under a Creative Commons licence.

Take a look and let us know what you think. Here’s looking forward to your feedback!

This post first appeared on the Rainforest Revival blog on 10 August 2011.