sprasanna
Registered: December 2009
Posts: 2
View this Member's Photo Gallery
|
Biodiversity, as Save Animals Initiative (SAI) Sanctuary reminds us, is Nature’s “insurance policy” against natural disasters and human encroachment. The Western Ghats of southern India, watershed for the entire Indian peninsula and home to more flora and fauna than throughout most of the globe, is an epicenter of biodiversity and thus a critical insurer of Nature: humans, other animals, and plants. Our goal was to help SAI educate local communities, corporate sponsors, and university students about the importance of biodiversity and the environment. To do this, we: identified endangered flora and fauna; worked on the construction of renewable-energy biogas plants; and produced several short documentaries about conservation issues and delivered presentations to Kodagu and Bangalore communities.
The local community, located in villages around SAI, is a Kodava-speaking people whose ancestors maintained a culture distinct from more dominant, neighboring Kannada-speaking groups. But Indian independence brought about the redrawing of state boundaries based on ethnolinguistic lines, and Kodagu, a Kodava district, was incorporated into Karnataka, an overwhelmingly Kannada state. In the Kodavas' effort to remain economically sound, their governments and people have largely adopted Kannada and pro-development attitudes, views which are squarely at odds with the ecological health of the Western Ghats, one of the world’s most sensitive biodiversity "hotspots." Regions like the Ghats are, according to recent research, the best targets for conservation action because they are the most biologically diverse yet most threatened ecosystems in the world. Protecting hotspots, then, is the best way to maximize conservation workers' limited resources to create the greatest global environmental benefit (Norman Myers, "Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities," 2000).
Conserving the Western Ghats depends on a change in the economic, development, and conservation paradigms on several different fronts—the native community, whose home and practices are threatened; corporate leaders, who have the resources to effect change; and students, in whose hands the future of conservation lies.
The identification leg of our project stemmed from the urgent need to catalog the unique and rich biodiversity of the Western Ghats region. Native tradition and modern research show that local plants can serve as cancer medications or organic pesticides. We and the Sanctuary had been in touch with several professors and students at the nearby Ponnampet College of Forestry, who have been working on research about plant species unique to this area. We worked with them daily and contributed by cataloguing new or rare species through photography and film, and collecting and analyzing plant samples. Also joining us during that time was Sanjay Molur, a director at the India-based Zoological Outreach Organization (ZOO), whose intimate local knowledge of the area's animal life complemented the Forestry College’s plant study.
The construction leg of our project provided direct, tangible, and immediate service to the community. By helping and interacting with locals, we hoped to learn about them and develop their trust. To assist with some of SAI's ongoing work, we constructed one biogas plant. These plants, designed by an Indian engineer, use a plentiful and cheap resource, cow dung, to heat homes and stoves. One central biogas plant can serve an entire village, and the refuse can be used for cheap fertilizer. The plants also redirect methane emitted by dung otherwise left to dry; diverting that methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-one times more potent than carbon dioxide, will help to lastingly reduce the greenhouse effect on such fragile human and natural environments. This are all among SAI's current efforts, so we were able to contribute needed manpower and energy.
The educational leg of our project was the culmination of our work in identification and construction. Using the knowledge that we gathered from studying the Ghats' ecology and anthropology, and the relationships we built with those nearby, we created a series of short documentary videos, as well as delivered presentations about the area, its value, the threats to it, and how those can be mitigated. The footage and knowledge we gathered in the Sanctuary of the precious forms of life in and around it gave our videos powerful visual impact.
The videos' format lent itself to our mission and audience. Executives can watch them without worrying about being late to their next meeting; college students can look them up on YouTube; Theralu villagers can absorb them without getting caught up in biology jargon or language barriers.
The challenge of today is creating unity from difference—harmony among elephants, villagers, and tea estates, along with IT companies and college students. There is more in common than we might think. Some might be worried about quarterly reports, others midterms, and others harvests, but those issues all hinge on what’s ahead. The problems facing the world require all of us to answer in sync and in force. We three might not have been able to bring the entire globe together, but one of the most precious, most threatened areas in the world was a good place to start.
|
