This book is an excellent collection of essays across disciplines on how to imagine living in a world with elephants and thinking with them as academics. And it has my first elephant related publication! Its definitely not my best writing since I wrote it in the first year of my PhD. But it does give a sense of the theoretical underpinnings of my project. My essay is about how to study elephant-farmer coexistence using multiple methods. The book is open access and can be found here Composing Worlds with Elephants
Here is a blurb: "Composing Worlds with Elephants is an interdisciplinary dialogue exploring the historical, social, and ecological entanglement of humans and elephants, a thousands of years old interspecies connection that is multi-dimensional, ambivalent, and always changing. Focusing largely on elephants and peoples across Asia, the research in this volume addresses key issues in the study of their relationship including: dimensions of co-existence, cultures of elephant husbandry, and animal agency. Chapters expand how we conceptualize and study elephants, offering ideas that might also help us live better with these endangered animals. Academic texts are supported by visual contributions from three acclaimed guest artists, original visions that enrich our understanding of human-elephant worlds. Composing Worlds with Elephants is of value to researchers of human-animal relations across the humanities, social and natural sciences, as well as conservationists and an engaged public interested in exploring new perspectives on humanity’s connection with these charismatic giants."
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The moving bodies of elephants weave worlds together. Megafauna like elephants have shaped landscapes for all beings from microorganisms to humans and soils to forests, for millions of years. But now human-dominated landscapes seem to be cutting across their migratory worlds. Are they just passing ghosts or are they still shaping our lives? It is hard to imagine them shaping my life especially when I look out the car window and see kilometer after kilometer of monocropped tea gardens on my way to conduct fieldwork in Buxa, West Bengal. This frame of sight is dominated by cash crops, roads, power lines, cattle, and railway tracks. I find myself asking what is the difference between an intense urban area and hundreds of square kilometers of tea gardens to an elephant searching for survival? Both seem to have nothing to offer them and yet, elephants are traversing villages, towns, cities, and countries, leaving behind their large and fading footsteps. What can following them teach me about the shaping of our worlds? I follow Netraji who knows how to follow elephants. We find the traces of their presence that they leave behind – footprints in newly sown paddy fields, fallen areca nut trees, scattered vines along roads, bent metal poles, and stories of elephant encounters. Stories of damaged fields, crops, houses, shops, and deaths. Several farmers told me, “First, we stopped growing corn, then mustard, and then paddy. We have completely stopped farming for almost ten years because of the elephants. And now they are coming for our areca nut trees. We chase them with firecrackers and try to intimidate them with flashlights.” I heard this story repeatedly. It’s the one you hear on the news and read in the newspaper. But I also heard something else. Compassion and empathy for elephants from the same people who had sometimes lost not only crops and homes, but also loved ones. “Of course, I am angry at them! But we are in their land and there is nothing left for them to eat in the forest. We both have to share whatever there is left and survive.” I was meeting people whose lives are shaped by elephants and know how elephant lives are shaped by us. The way they talked about elephants sounded like how you might talk about annoying relatives you have grown up with. Twenty years ago, the villagers of Garo basti had approached the forest department urging them to plant food for elephants in the forests. They knew that elephant lives were changing and because of that so were theirs. They remembered a time when elephants and farmers stewarded community forests together. But these elephant-farmer relationships of coexistence have been excluded from the imagination of colonial and post-colonial development projects of teak and sal plantations, railroads, tea gardens, and mining. In barren farms and empty forests these farmers and elephants have compassion for each other as they struggle to hold on to what is left. There was fear and pain in his eyes as Jer shared with me about that night in 2005 when an elephant destroyed the house across from his. He pointed at the trees showing me the spot where the house used to be. “I heard a big sound and went outside. I saw my relative running around his collapsed wooden house, shouting, ‘the elephant has killed my wife, my son, and my daughter.’” His relative’s entire family was killed that night. Jer said, “since then fear has entered my heart. I am worried an elephant is going to come and kill me.” He stopped farming for many years and cut down all the jackfruit and banana trees around his house that elephants like to eat. Stunned into silence by his words and the emotion in his eyes, I grasp for my notebook wondering what to say. Is listening enough? “Why are the elephants coming to the village?” I ask wondering if he will share his anger with me about the forest department, colonization, oppression, capitalism, consumerism, and global supply chains. Instead, he says, “we used to live in the forest before, praying to the animals, trees, and rivers. We prayed to elephants three times a year. Now we’ve settled in villages, we cut down trees and sell them. Our elders who knew the old ways are gone. Our faith has turned into darkness. Maybe that is why this is happening.” In 2010, seven elephants were killed at once by a single goods train in India. I remember feeling devastated reading that news and making a painting to process my sorrow. In 2021, as I went through forest department records of elephant deaths in the Buxa area with Netraji one evening, I found an entry for seven elephants killed by a goods train. Without knowing, earlier that morning, I had walked the tracks where they had died. 10 years later, I realized how those seven elephants had shaped my life. I met an older farmer who had stopped farming because of elephants. He explained to me why the elephants were getting killed by trains. Males stand their ground, when they see bright lights, mistaking the approaching train for a person with a powerful flashlight used to deter elephants. In the case of families, the matriarch crosses the tracks first to inspect the vegetation on the other side. She then signals the rest of the group to cross over and feed. Elephants can feel seismic vibrations through their feet and the rumbling of trains can be very scary and disorienting for younger elephants. As the train approaches, they panic to cross back to the other side, the known and safe side. The older elephants rush to protect them. With tears in his eyes the older farmer tells me, “That’s when they get hit and die.” Our faith has turned into darkness. Jer was not naïve about the impact of colonization, capitalism, and conservation on his life when he chose to share about the loss of his old ways. When I asked him if he’d like to leave this place and go somewhere else where there were no elephants he said, “I would rather live here with elephants than in a city with gundas (goons). Humans cannot be trusted. I would rather live this difficult life than leave the forest. We will never leave this place.” Netraji shares with me, “I used to hate elephants because of how they destroyed my shop and crops year after year. But after following and watching them, their ears and trunks, I slowly fell in love with them. I think elephants in Buxa will only last for another couple of generations.” I found compassion in stories of loss at the edges of extinction. Many of us refuse to let elephants shape our lives. What if we stopped resisting? Could we live, feel, and think with elephants?
I follow Muskan into her house at the edge of the village. It has only been three days since two elephants visited at night, broke through the earthen walls of the home, and ate 1.5 quintals (150 kgs) of her stored rice. Muskan lives at her mothers’ house with her children, separated from her husband. They are the only family in the village who do not own land. These were grains they had bought. This rice was to sustain her three young children, her mother, her cousin sister, and herself for the entire year. It was all gone. I stare silently, helpless. I have come to her village in the Korba district of Chhattisgarh to conduct preliminary PhD fieldwork on elephant-farmer relations. In those moments in her home, my intellectual notions of human-elephant coexistence scatter like the grains of rice left behind in the crumbled clay. Across Muskan’s house is an abandoned house with sky blue-colored walls and overgrown plants. Manoj, a young relative of those who lived in that home tells me that the family fled when elephants broke into their home. They didn’t return. As I walked through the dark house in the pouring rain, I tried to imagine how they must have felt abandoning their home and fields. Or was it they who were abandoned, displaced again and again? In recent Korba history Adivasi and lower caste villages have been displaced first by the mega dams, then by mines, and now by the elephants. The Hasdeo Bango dam displaced 13 primarily Adivasi villages with its 103km flood zone. Manoj was from one of those villages. Chotia open cast coal mines, one of the many mines established over thousands of hectares of forested lands, is 1.5 kms away from Manoj’s current home. Harassed, starving, and displaced elephants are arriving in large groups from mining torn areas of Jharkhand, Bihar, and Orissa. As more and more elephants arrive, the government in collaboration with the forest department and conservation organizations is establishing protected areas, using elephants as a way to discriminate against Adivasis by keeping them out of forests and denying them their forest rights. Manoj’s family used to live off the forest, but they can barely enter it anymore. They have been abandoned by colonization, capitalism, and conservation. “Tell the forest department that we are at the final stage of our anger. Either they take their elephants away from here, or we will find each one and kill them all.” Many people are angry. Elephants in a remote Pando village had trampled two women to death who were guarding the village’s crops in the fields. The elephants didn’t leave enough seeds to sow for the next season. First the polluted water from the coal mines poisoned their crops, and now the elephants eat what is left. When the elephants come at night, they are pursued with fire torches and firecrackers. The forest department cannot be trusted. It continues to follow the path of its colonial legacy: exploitation, corruption, and exclusion. “How many elephants would you be willing to live with, if they behaved well?” I ask awkwardly, muscles knotted in my stomach. “They say these might be the last couple of generations of elephants left before they go extinct”, I take a chance to say when I sense less anger in the group. In my mind I think about how I might be talking with the last generation of farmers in this village. The last generation who knows the ways of living with the forest. The last generation who will be so angry because they remember what they have lost. Recently, 3 elephants were chased by a crowd of 400 people continuously for 8 days. They were pursued from one part of the village to another to another, until something snapped for one of them. She crushed a man to death. A villager said to me, “elephants know who thinks badly of them, they remember who has abused them and they will find and kill them.” “What do you think is the solution to this struggle with elephants?” I asked a group of Pando villagers. Will they tell a stranger how they really feel? A grandma replied, “once people reform, then the elephants will be reformed too.” The applause that followed revealed a shared conscience. But the mining corporations were not listening. There was no applause from them. A Baiga elder said to me, “industries and mining have hollowed out the forests and the earth itself. The elephant families are wandering, hungry. Forgive me for saying this, but humans have fallen lower than animals.” Muskan shows me the spot where the grains had been stored. The larger elephant had broken the mud walls of the house right above where the grain was stored. Perhaps with his tusks, he pierced the walls, sensing the presence of grains on the other side. The gaping hole in the wall, shaped like a large V, had been covered with some sheets and barricaded with sticks for now. I imagine the head of the elephant emerging through the top of the wall, the trunk reaching in. The smaller elephant had entered through the front, breaking parts of the walls as he moved through. The roof of the house had not collapsed. Mansoor, a biologist working with the elephants in that area for the last 20 years believes that the elephants are very careful about how they break into houses, taking care not to let the roof collapse and kill anyone sleeping in the house. Muskan and her children were not there when they came. No one had been sleeping in the house the night the elephants came. Had the elephants known and sensed that? "If the elephants want they can rampage through villages and fields, destroying and killing everything in their path" said Mansoor. "We have ways to kill them with our bows and arrows. Leave them to us" a Dhanwar villager expressed to me. Coexistence is hanging by a thread in Korba, Chattisgarh. How long before historically persecuted communities can bear no more loss? How long before traumatized elephants become unforgiving? How long before the last forest is stolen by the mines?
*I was able to do this fieldwork thanks to Ekta Parishad activists who took me to multiple villages and guided me during my time. Ekta Parishad is a mass-based people's movement known for several milestone successes including securing land rights to nearly 500,000 families, creating grassroots leadership of more than 10,000 people, protecting forest and water bodies, and framing several laws and policies related to the land reforms in India. I thought I was done with academics ten years ago, and yet here I am, willing to spend several years of my life in academia. It was because of reading Kanya’s story, written by Michael, that I am here. I remember the first time when I was at a conference, and I began to join the dots between agriculture and wildlife; it was an overwhelming feeling of excitement that was making it hard for me to sit still in my seat. There was no clear idea yet in my mind of what connection between agriculture and wildlife I wanted to pursue, but I knew I was onto something. When I read Kanya's story of coexistence with wild elephants in Thailand, everything clicked into place. Michael wrote that Kanya had transformed an antagonistic relationship with local elephants in her area by growing food for elephants. Kanya had started planting wild bananas for elephants in different parts of her farm using a diversified forest gardening system. The elephants recognized this, started eating what she grew for them, and left her main crops alone. Not only this, but they also protect her farm from other migrating elephants.
This blew my mind, and I wanted to understand 1) why does she want to coexist with elephants? 2) what kind of agriculture methods is she using to do this? And 3) what do the elephants think about all this? The larger context within which this was relevant to me was mass extinctions of the Anthropocene and the plantationocene. The fact that most agriculture strives to keep other life outside farm boundaries while wildlife is going rapidly extinct on the edges of human expansion is the context against which Kanya's story stands in relief. I recently interviewed Michael again, and he shared that Eastern Thailand has changed tremendously over the years. Even 12 years ago, there was more forest cover than there is now, and it's rapidly being replaced by palm and rubber plantations. One critical turning point was 80 years ago when a British company was given a timber concession, which allowed them to build straight roads through the landscape and remove large trees. The second turning point was the homesteading act in the 1960s-70s following the Vietnam war when socialists and communists were thought to be hiding in remote, forested areas. The government offered people rights to claim land by clearing forests and doing agriculture. That was accompanied by the green revolution and the advent of cash crops. In the present, Kanya is a minority farmer who still grows crops in a diversified system. She grows durian and mangosteen that can grow with other plants. She practices wanakaset or forest gardening system and is a leader of a small group in her area practicing agroforestry. Michael narrates that Kanya understands that the elephants see her land as their land or territory. “They want to steward it. If the humans on the land are willing to coexist with elephants, then they are willing to steward the land together and protect it from other migrating elephants. Otherwise, they are likely to destroy crops and move on." All the villagers in Kanya's village say that elephants are psychic. "They know what you are saying, doing, and whose land is whose. In some farms, they can walk daintily across the tiniest of paths without damaging a single plant, and in others, they are very destructive." It's not just Kanya who is doing this in Thailand. But other farmers are also trying out things like food walls that aim to feed elephants and keep them out of their crops. A big farmer in Thailand who recently won an award had many elephants come through and eat some of his crops. Michael narrated that the farmer's reaction was very calm. The farmer said that he was okay with elephants eating some of his crop. It was not that much. And his Islamic teachings say that 10% of what you grow is not yours. These farmer-elephant coexistence assemblages are steeped in complex and dynamic interplay of history, religion, agricultural practices, and everyday negotiations. Attuning to these human-nonhuman entanglements may provide insight into how these assemblages hold together and transform over time and space. It has been almost 10 years since I became interested in agriculture and the situation of farmers in India and all over the world. It has been a wonderful journey so far exploring and learning alternatives to industrial agriculture such as organic farming, permaculture, agroecology, regenerative and natural farming. Alongside these experiences I have nurtured a growing passion for wildlife within me. And I have realized that farmers and wild animals are very deeply connected and are often in conflict with each other at the edges of where farmland and wildlife meet. Both are struggling for survival and land. Most non-domesticated animals, birds, and insects have already lost approximately 80% of their habitats especially larger animals and predators. Meanwhile farmers are facing an ever-increasing demand for higher food production on rapidly degrading land. While animals are looking for food, farmers are looking for fertile land. Farmers living at the edges of wild ecosystems most often have small-scale farms that they either used to farm for subsistence or didn't farm at all and lived off the forests or wild habitats around them. Now they are trying to make a livelihood off of these farms which they must protect from wild animals because any destruction is unbearable to farmers barely making a living. Even just thinking about it for a few minutes makes you realize how very complex this "human-animal conflict" is. Often phrased as a war between farmers and animals in the media by farmer organizations or conservation non-profits, it fail to bring out the profound complexity of the situation. Ultimately the most oppressed in these situations are the poor farmers (who are often also indigenous peoples) and the local animals who suffer tremendously. To support either farmers or animals both need to be seen as being on the same side and the same team. Seeing animals as neighbors and relatives deserving respect and rights to their lands was a common sentiment even just a couple of decades ago in many parts of the world. But as environmental and agricultural crises intensify the polarity and animosity between the different sides keeps expanding. My vision for my future work is shaped by this escalating situation and by my passion for both marginalized farmers and wild animals. My Vision - To be involved in promoting/supporting/creating co-existence (rather than deterrence) based relationships between farmers and wildlife (especially larger animals and predators) and their ecologies at the edges of where existing wildlife habitats and farmlands meet. Coexistence between farmers and wildlife to me is a situation where farmers actively enhance or create habitat for animals/birds/insects while simultaneously obtaining high yields to meet their economic needs. Coexistence based interactions are creative solutions that promote the well-being (emotional, physical, cultural, and habitat) of farmers and wild beings. The goal is to ease the pressure off of both struggling farmers and endangered animals through sustainable agricultural practices that are grounded in a worldview (integral to several indigenous tribes throughout the world) that situates all life as equal and the more-than human world as family. - Specifically I am interested in understanding already existing best-practices around co-existence and farming, learning them, documenting them, and making the information available for other farmers. I would like to compare different co-existence methods practiced by farmers in different locations with the same species of animals (e.g. Asian elephants in Thailand, India, Srilanka and Nepal). I would also like to compare best-practices across multiple species (e.g. lions, orangutans, bears, gorillas etc.) to understand the common agricultural and cultural practices that these people and places might share as well as the differences between each situation. Learning Goals
Based on this vision, I have 5 learning goals to guide my knowledge and skill gathering. 1. Understanding local farmers and farming needs, issues, and culture. 2. Understanding local animals and animal habitat needs, issues, and culture. 3. Understanding different ancient and existing indigenous worldviews on the relationship between humans and nature (especially endangered wild animals). 4. Understanding ancient and existing best-practices around farmers co-existing with wildlife. 5. Understanding regenerative, multi-layered, perennial and tree-based high production agriculture. Over the next several years I will be focusing on achieving these learning goals through work and study. If you have any suggestions for people, places, animals, and organizations that you feel are aligned to my vision and goals please send them my way. |
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