"The choice is ours to make: Will we stand by silent, and watch the slaughter? Watch the forests fall? Watch, as wild creatures fall off the map of India? Do we want an India that is silenced of the roar of the tiger? Do we want to live in a country where forests are barren, its land infertile? Or will we stand up and fight? So that we do not tell our children, ‘Once were tigers....." If not, help us, help them.
Fact of the matter is, in democracies, it is the electorate that guides politics and politicians, who must always have their finger on the pulse of the people. Unless nature wins itself a large constituency, it will not rate high on the political priority, and its services will continue to be taken for granted, and exploited.
By Prerna Singh Bindra The unique natural heritage of the Great Rann of Kutch that Amitabh Bachchan promotes in the slick Gujarat Tourism commercials, is imperiled, ironically by a proposed...
What i said to NDTV on the issue of reviewing environment, forests & wildlife laws (http://envfor.nic.in/content/comments-invited-suggestionscomments-are-invited-high-level-committee-hlc-review-various-env) a) that it says review, an amendment -and could still mean that the laws...
What angers me is the inane, and absolutely false propaganda of the Sundarbans tiger as compulsive maneaters: "anyone who enters its territory will not come back alive. Oh yeah? (In which case your truly would have been dead atleast five times over.) The guy who did the research (if any was done at all ) is worse than pea-brain.
Meet Kamo the porcupine, the lovable, but ‘prickliest’ of all rodents, which even predators fear. Komo is so-called as he/she ‘kums’ when called..”kamo, kamo, kammoo”. And who calls her? Forest...
In a recent essay, eminent historian and Ramchandra Guha called India “an environment basket case.” It’s true, and it doesn’t bode well for the future. Think beyond your token contribution, of shifting from conventional bulbs to LED, from plastic to paper. Think beyond June 5th. Treat every day as World Environment Day––conserving the environment, knowledge of our impact, and reducing our footprint should be a way of life, not a day’s fad. India needs growth, but not at the cost of her children's future.
Reserves like Manas in Assam, Palamu in Jharkhand, Satkosia in Orissa and Udanti-Sitanadi in Chhattisgarh. They are tiger reserves too… though not as celebrated as those closer to power centres. Here, tigers are not an easy photo-capture, nor an easy ‘sighting.’, and in some their numbers have been questioned. But, they are part of vast, high potential tiger landscapes, significant fragments of just two percent of tiger habitat that remains in the country and harbour other rare species. Yet, they struggle with acute shortage of manpower, uninterested governments…a few are under siege of insurgency, and saddled with dispirited leadership. So will we write them off? Because it is easier to shrug off responsibility? Or will we take them on as a challenge, and turn them around, making them examples like NSTR which has clawed its way back to recovery or Panna which shed the shame of local extinction to nurture a ‘new’ tiger population, even feeding tigers to other reserves today? The choice is ours to make. I hope we will have the wisdom and the vision to conserve, rather than allow deterioration and death by apathy.
Protected Areas—barely 4.5% of our land—are the last refuges for our endangered wildlife, and cannot be fragmented any further. They’re strictly no-go, and sacrosanct. Additionally, important wildlife habitats and corridors must be brought under the umbrella of Eco-Sensitive Zones, particularly in view of the escalating human-wildlife conflict nationwide.