Nature and nurture

SAIKAT K BASU

Tales from Nature XIII
We are short of words when we look at the hopeless and dismal faces of our animal and plant co-inhabitants of our planet. We have plundered the forest, destroyed them with expansion of our infrastructure to support our booming agriculture and industries, extensive mining, over grazing, randomly starting artificial forest fires and over harvesting of both major and minor forest resources, poaching and illegal trade and trafficking of wildlife, destructions of  forest products and biodiversity as well as the forest soil for our small selfish gains. We have no words to apologize to our wild world for our indiscriminate action of rapid destruction, devastation as well as over exploitation and over harvest of all our natural resources beyond their Carrying Capacity. We have created a highly vulnerable abs fragile planet for our wild friends without thinking about the future impacts. We are now at the environmental cross roads to possibly witness a global environmental and ecological catastrophe due to our own selfish actions!
Nature nurture helps in building awareness about our fragile environment among the children; who are our very next generation and our future citizens. Through use of nature based models in nature parks about diverse environmental and ecological themes we can attempt to create sensitivity regarding our environment and ecosystem in the minds of our little crusaders to create a better world for us all.
Is rewilding always a great idea?
India is a highly populous country with deep encroachment into forested areas. The recent highly monitored and media hyped reintroduction of the African cheetahs to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, has created great enthusiasm around the globe for more such reintroduction programs in different parts of the world. The social media has been loaded with several posts asking for the introduction of spotted hyena from Africa into Indian wilderness. Hyena breeding rates are high and they would not get enough prey if they establish themselves successfully. The result would be an inevitable human/animal conflict that would prove detrimental for the animals as well as the local populations. Spotted hyenas hunt in groups, a strategy not faced by herbivores in their natural ecosystem. They are adopted to predation by lions, tigers and leopards and wild dogs. Striped hyenas present in the ecosystem are mostly scavengers like foxes and jackals. They hunt smaller prays and feed upon other animal carcasses. Strategic group hunting by aggressive spotted hyenas would lead to negative impacts on the already dwindling herbivore populations. Furthermore, other than increased predation pressure, there will be intense competition among the major predators resulting in catastrophic changes to the ecosystem. Nature selected spotted hyenas to become extinct and it would be a mistake to introduce them into the Indian wilderness without looking into the proms and cons. Sometimes our best intentions ran into disaster unless we do our homework and calculations cautiously looking at future ecological and environmental impacts!
Save Our Environment
An outstanding speech was recently delivered by an Indian official (Mr. Vijay Singh, IAS) on an international platform at Glasgow has gone viral on social media. He has very nicely explained through his erudite lecture how the colonial masters are bossing over other developing and underdeveloped countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America in protecting and conserving the ecosystems by less consumption and by practicing reduce, reuse and recycle approaches.  As the difference between the new and old world or in other words first and third worlds are increasing every year; and rich are becoming rich and the poor the poorer. The divide between the developed nations with underdeveloped and developing nations is only projected to increase in both northern and southern hemispheres. The rich nations has been greatly successful in passing their part of responsibilities to their former colonies while they themselves are keeping them immune from any changes to their existing agricultural and industrial practices; but expecting others to accommodate life altering changes when they could barely meet their ends need.
We forget to accept that there is only one world that we have unfortunately divided into many worlds. Unless we decide to work together with empathy for others; unless we decide between nations to cooperate, collaborate, coordinate and communicate (4Cs) our future as humans hangs by a thin thread that is over stretched beyond the Carrying Capacity. We need to change and make sacrifices genuinely for our next generation. Until that we are heading towards a dismal dark and gloomy future, that may prove to be extremely detrimental to our human society. We need to change and adapt to the new realities of our planet by getting up from our over delayed hibernation and  excuses for not doing enough to secure our global environment and ecosystems.
(Email: saikat.basu@alumni.uleth.ca)