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.
0 Comments
|
Archives
October 2021
Categories |