ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Green Cover Safely Left to Providence

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 30 2002 (IPS) - To say that it has been left to providence to protect India’s fast dwindling green cover is more than a metaphor – the ancient concept of ‘sacred forests’ is proving to be the best deterrent yet for the buzz saw.

With remote sensing data from satellites showing the loss of some 6,000 square kilometres of tree cover over the last five years, conservationists are ready to grab at anything to stop the country from turning slowly into a vast dust bowl.

And many think that sacred groves may just be what could put the fear of god into rapacious forest contractors.

Known by different local names, sacred groves are scattered throughout India. They may vary in size from small patches of shrubbery to several square kilometres of dense forest that for deep religious beliefs, taboos and folklore, been allowed to stay unmolested.

Much of the credit for reviving the concept of ‘sacred groves’ with better conservation in mind must go to P.S. Ramakrishnan, a passionate professor of ecology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University who made good use funds from the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO) to promote the idea.

“One aspect of increasing interest in traditional resource management is a growing recognition of the extent and importance of religious sanctuaries and sacred places which house the gods of village communities and are therefore taboo to human interference,” Ramakrishnan says.

The professor counts among his major achievements the prevention of a dam from coming up in the ecologically sensitive eastern state of Sikkim — which is cradled in the shadow of the massive Khanchenjunga mountain in the Himalayas — and that after acquisition of land for the project.

Local communities like the Sikkimese Buddhists are keenly aware of the differences between minor disturbances to their ecosystem and major ones which are irreparable. While they have no problem with tourists trekking through their sacred landscape, they resisted attempts to build a hydroelectric plant on it.

They are eternally grateful to Ramakrishnan’s intervention — as leader of an expert group trying to settle a dispute over the project — to pronounce that the ‘demajong’ (hidden rice land) area of Sikkim is an “exceptional case of a sacred landscape where ecological considerations cannot be separated from the historical, cultural and religious dimensions unique to the region”.

Ramakrishnan found Sikkim a rich repository of valuable medicinal plants, nurtured by the Buddhist monasteries for the traditional Tibetan Parmacopoeia and important for the survival of system of medicine with a 2,500-year-old history.

Sacred groves and landscapes need to be seen as community-based, living repositories which contribute to the more recent approaches to protected area management based on western scientific knowledge and promoted by conservation groups and government agencies, Ramakrishnan says.

Mercifully, Ramakrishnan’s views have found wholehearted support among experts, policy-makers, voluntary groups and local stakeholders, so that across India there are now discernible several movements to protect and conserve sacred forests and landscapes.

Barely 150 km east of the national capital, near Mathura city, devotees of Krishna the propounder of the Gita, which sets out to explain the mysteries of life, death and reincarnation, have recreated the legendary forests on the banks of the Yamuna river, where the legendary teacher lived and tended cows some 5,000 years ago.

Where there were large tracts of barren land, much of it encroached upon, the devotees have recreated a vast wooded area complete with gardens and walking paths in memory of a deified figure characterised by a benign nature and often showed playing a flute.

Says Vineet Narain, a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which played a major role in the gigantic conservation effort: “It was expensive, difficult and slow work but in the end well worth it.”

More than 2,500 km away in southern Kerala state, families, communities and even individuals are dedicated to tending tend thousands of thickets of called ‘kaavus’ in which are believed to be inhabited by spirits and deities that must be propitiated with rituals and ceremonies — but most especially by leaving their habitats alone.

One of India’s leading botanists, P Pushpangadan, says no one is allowed to cut or remove any tree, branch or leaf from a ‘kaave’ without first consulting a priest and any violation is believed to invite the wrath of the presiding spirit or deity.

“This faith and belief guided non-interference is such islands of biodiversity is and excellent example of micro-level ‘in situ’ conservation practices evolved by Indian rural folk.,” says Pushpangadan, a consultant to UNESCO.

Many ‘kaavus’ in modern-day Kerala exist close to heavily urbanised centres but remain as the ‘sanctum sanctorum’ of rare, endangered and endemic plant species, many of which have disappeared from areas outside the groves.

A typical ‘kaavu’ would consist of ground herbs, trees of various types, some them reaching out to form a canopy and smaller ones that prefer the shade, creepers, climbers, vines, parasitic plants and epiphytes, including rare orchid species.

“Structurally, the ‘kaavus’ exhibit a stable picture of equilibrium and it is only rarely that an aggressive species finds an opportunity for relative rapid expansion and usually this is a feature of a highly disturbed sacred grove system,” Pushpangadan said.

Officially, the best acknowledgement of the importance of sacred groves is to be found in the 200-acre grounds of the National Museum of Mankind in Bhopal in central Madhya Pradesh state, where attempts are being made to replicate several types of sacred groves found in the different corners of the country.

So far, the museum has managed to grow ‘kaavus’ from Kerala, ‘mawasmai’ from eastern Meghalaya state (famous for being the wettest region in the world) and the ‘orans’ of the Bishnoi community that inhabits the arid Thar desert of Rajasthan that extends deep into neighbouring Pakistan.

Five hundred years ago, the Bishnois were enjoined by their spiritual master Guru Tmeshwarji to conserve their forests and nature even if it meant losing their lives.

Some 200 years later, the tribe had its first opportunity to prove its obedience by resisting a local ruler’s attempt to cut down their trees for firewood, vowing to behead one of their own number for each tree that was cut down.

After 350 trees were cut down and an equal number of Bishnois beheaded by their own tribesmen in protest, the shocked ruler stopped the felling and the forests have remained by and large safe — though no one in India or Pakistan would care to vouch for the future.