Anamalai Archives • View from Elephant Hills

28 September 2014 / 0 Comments

How Green is Your Tea

(With Divya Mudappa in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014)

Gaur grazing at edge of a forest in a tea estate in the Anamalai hills.

You could have imagined you were on a forest trail. Fifty metres away, the dark hulk of a solitary bull gaur, over five feet tall at the shoulder with taut muscles and thick, curving horns, looks up from the swampy valley where he stands in his white-stockinged legs. Eyes locked with gaur, your ears pick up the harsh bark of a great hornbill resounding through the cool mountain air from a patch of tall trees on the hill slope beyond. As you skirt the gaur and walk quietly down the trail, stepping past fresh scat of a sloth bear and dropped quills of a porcupine, a stripe-necked mongoose darts across, a flash of crimson bright against background green. The green is not the multi-hued mosaic of a real forest, but a more uniform smear of a monoculture. Row upon row of neatly pruned metre-high bushes range away in tight lines, punctuated by well-spaced and heavily-lopped silver oak trees. In the mountains of the Western Ghats, at the edge of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, you are walking through a large tea plantation.

In south India, tea is grown as extensive monocultures with sparse canopy of alien silver oak trees.

Read on here… or from magazine pages below.

…This post first appeared in the blog on the Coyotes Network on 28 September 2014 and in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

16 June 2014 / 0 Comments

The Enduring Relevance of Rachel Carson

It is tough for a single publication or its author to have an impact across nations, cultures, genres, and disciplines. It is tougher still for their appearance on the world stage to spark a social movement, rekindle human values and awareness, and create new mandates for action. And toughest of all is when the author is a woman, a scientist, who must overcome the prejudices of her time−of gender, of notions of progress, of the omnipotence of untrammelled industry−to articulate a clear-eyed, renewed vision of a better world, a cleaner environment, where people do not merely live, but flourish.

If I had to pick one exemplary work from the environmental canon that does this and does it well, it would be the one that burst on the scene on this day, 16 June, all of 52 years ago, in the United States of America and then swiftly encompassed, in its scope and sweep, the rest of the world. The book, Silent Spring, and its author, marine biologist Rachel Carson, are widely credited to be the sparks that lit the fire of the global environmental movement.

Google Doodle on Rachel Carson’s birthday, 27 May 2014 (Courtesy: Google)
A young girl mixing chemicals without protective equipment beside a pond in a coffee estate, Western Ghats
Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (Photo courtesy: Environment and Society Portal )

… This post first appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 16 June 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

15 November 2013 / 0 Comments

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.

Rainforest fragment in the Valparai plateau (Photo courtesy: Ganesh Raghunathan)
Elephants on the move through tea fields with rainforests in the distance (Photo: Divya Mudappa)
Great Hornbill in flight
A landscape of forests, wildlife, and people.