Beyond protected areas

AT THE FEET OF LIVING THINGS JOURNALS EXPERIENCES OF ECOLOGISTS WHO PRACTISE A COLLABORATIVE AND SOCIO-ECOLOGICALLY SENSITIVE APPROACH TO CONSERVATION

- TIASA ADHYA

TILL THE late 1990s, students of nature mostly worked inside protected areas and seldom interacted with the societies and cultures that existed in the larger landscape. They were guided by the prevailing conservation notions that species would be adequately protected if there were protected areas, and that local people and their practices were a threat to wildlife.

However, only about 5 per cent of India's land is protected, which is not enough to sustain wild animals in the long run. Science reveals that wildlife have always travelled through and/or stayed in human-used spaces. Moreover, the past two decades also witnessed the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic policies on nature.

It soon became clear that to conserve species, one would need to look beyond protected areas and work with different types of stakeholders-local communities, the forest department, development sectors, policymakers, private companies and nature enthusiasts from all walks of life. This presented a challenging proposition to students of nature who were not fully trained to don the hat of a multitasker. They had to learn on the job. At the Feet of Living Things is the accumulated experience of ecologists from Mysuru-based public charitable trust Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), who have adopted this conservation approach over the past 25 years. The approach sheds its previously conventional, exclusionary, elitist skin and is emerging as collaborative, constructive and socio-ecologically sensitive.