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Hatod <eco-notes> |
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and getting tighter all the time. Check out these figures.
But the environment is taking a whack. Through the nineteen eighties, I travelled the Himalayas, Rajasthan, and North-East India as a professional adventurer, travel-writer, and photographer. In review: what has always struck me about those fascinating travels is that I was very, very, rarely more than about five kilometers from the nearest human habitation. In the forty years of my life thus far, the wide open spaces of my childhood have almost completely disappeared all over this once-beautiful land. Quite naturally, I sometimes worry for our little son,..and all of our other children too. The first time I visited Shivpuri and Hatod was by road, about three and a half years ago. As it has been for years now, the 250 kilometer stretch from Delhi to Agra was a flat back-to-back pan of villages, towns, farms, factories, and food-joints. The 100 kilometer section from Agra to Gwalior was only slightly better, but contours including the spectacular Chambal Ravines and the sharp-sloped hills in and around Gwalior itself now began appearing upon the landscape. And then, the final 100 kilometers from Gwalior to Shivpuri saw everything suddenly change. While it was, of course, the essentially barren semi-desertscape of Central India, it was also the northernmost edges of the ancient Vindhya mountains. There were fewer villages, settlements, and farms, and there were empty vistas to the horizon, ancient brush jungle, tall hills, ridges and gorges, hidden springs and waterfalls, and wildlife abounding like I had thought to be entirely in the past on the Indian plains,... all steeped in and marked by the sign of heroic and romantic ancient histories and myth. In just the short period down the line since then, two brand-new villages and uncounted smaller settlements have cropped up on that 100 kilometer stretch ~as though from nowhere~ and miles of forest have been clear-cut and ploughed into new farmlands. Much of what remains is being attended to by grazing of the obviously burgeoning attendant populations of goats (who pull out what they eat, by the roots, when not attacking tree-branches lopped down for them by their grazers), and cattle (2-3 litre-per-day buffaloes and cows who just stomp what they do not eat, into oblivion). And as for wildlife, ~beyond kitchen- or table-ready versions illegally but quite freely available,~ I've seen that lately only in The Last Resort, and the nearby Madho National Park. As illustrated by this example, what we are seeing happen right before our eyes in this country today is a near-total reclamation of the last few remaining open lands for human habitation and its attendant accouterments (outside just the small sum of our sanctuaries, wildlife parks, and uninhabitable areas). It is an inevitable process given the burgeoning human population, and for quite some years now I have therefore personally held the view that it is extremely urgent for us to demand at least some little foresight, planning, and perhaps even regulation in these processes. I believe that in the circumstances obtaining in this country at the present time, changes continuously being made even at the micro-level to our lands are routinely turning up ecological results far more damaging than necessary. I believe that in the scale of the almost unimaginably crowded state we have arrived at, even the otherwise seemingly little matter of a farmer permanently diverting a bit of monsoon rainwater flow, may be damaging a basic ecological balance down the line to a degree far beyond what we can routinely allow to all. I believe that small-scale landowners fencing and walling-in little patches of land all over this country are often inadvertently and unnecessarily barricading important wildlife corridors. I believe that farmers and farm-labor routinely dipping hands to the elbow in dangerous percutaneous pesticides while handling them, are incompetent to be allowed to freely posses such materials ~ leave aside having the stuff aggressively publicized, and even subsidized by the state. (read about the poisoning of the Barhai River on the "Wildlife" page) I believe the commonplace political gestures of subsidizing well-boring, and supplying cheap or even free electricity for farmers' pumps stinks of the crassest populism, when it is transparently draining our underground water resources at an acceleratingly unsustainable rate (aside from wrecking good lands over time with deposits of dissolved minerals). I believe that eco-professionals have been self-servingly criminal for too long in diverting global fascination so completely towards "pretty" places to work in, as though harsher lands are ecologically non-relevant, or just "empty". I believe that the availability of cheaper timber in a dry-land region, as opposed to a verdant region in the same country, is indicative of gaping holes in environmental agendas. I believe that pop chants such as "Grow More Trees" offer no universal panacea in the face of Ma Nature's magnificent complexity (for example, I believe that the unique dry-land ecosystem of the Indus River valley at 10-13,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas (Ladakh), is being willfully decimated by implementation of this ideology with a hugely pro-active monoculture of common poplar and willow). I believe that the only chance for survival ~in even the immediate short term~ of much of the ecological diversity of this nation, and the region, is early and ongoing identification of an infinite number of large and little key sites and innocuous wildlife corridors everywhere around us (even right down to the scale of individual popular nesting trees, for example), to preserve and nurture these into the future. I believe "The Last Resort" to be uniquely such a site and corridor. And with recent mass tree-felling on farms in our neighborhood ("to curb the monkey menace" we're told) I believe that The Last Resort went critical last summer (1997), many years before expectations. ~ |
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