Climate change is often called the great problem of our times, an existential threat to all life on earth. But, unlike totalitarians, terrorists, or total cholesterol, climate change can seem diffuse, impersonal, and faraway. This makes it hard to rally our forces against it. Literature has a unique power to evoke emotion, galvanise action, and unite communities. It’s in this spirit that Bengaluru’s annual Green Literature Festival (GLF) brought together writers on environmental issues from around the world.
The fourth edition of the GLF occurred on December 7, at the Century Club in the city. With the motto “learn more, do more,” this year’s edition featured book launches, green literature awards, and a focus on our connection to nature. An invocation dance by primary-school students from Parikrma, an institution for slum-dwelling first-generation schoolgoers, set the stage for a festival that examined the intersections of inequity, nature deprivation, and climate change.
Festival founder Benedict Paramanand, who is chief executive officer of SustainabilityNext (a platform for environmental journalism and entrepreneurship), discussed the importance of education in the fight for nature conservation. GLF’s fourth edition featured workshops by partner organisations for students, educators, and aspiring environment writers. Paramanand reminded us that, while negativity is ubiquitous, we need to focus on what communities can do, and to celebrate literature, films, and podcasts that raise our awareness of and engagement with nature – which, as increasingly frequent heatwaves and other disasters remind us, we cannot harm without harming ourselves.
Workshop for children organised by World Wildlife Fund at GLF. Photo: Amita Basu.
Vibrant mix breaks down silos
GLF sessions included talks and panel discussions by on-ground conservation workers, journalists and nonfiction writers and editors, scientists, green transition entrepreneurs and investors, green architects, and science communicators. Given the super-specialised and arcane nature of science, the gap between scientific and popular understanding is well known. Perhaps nowhere is this gap clearer than in climate science. Climate systems are vastly multifactorial, climate models are stochastic, and climate action, being a high-risk activity characterised by losses to be prevented rather than gains to be enjoyed, can be a psychologically discouraging field. GLF’s vibrant mix of specialists, and its focus on youth and communities, reflected necessary cooperation, coordination, and communication.
Tarsh Thekaekara (co-Founder, Shola Trust and Real Elephant Collective) and Vasanth Bosco (regeneration ecologist and author) discussed challenges and opportunities presented by conservation in the Nilgiris. Thekaekara discussed how, while India has successfully preserved the boundaries of national forests, biodiversity in these forests is nonetheless being affected by human activity. British-era plantations of nonnative invasive species, including in the Nilgiri grasslands, have had long lasting effects. Lantana camera, an inedible and toxic weed, has displaced much native vegetation, along with the animal communities they supported. The Real Elephant Collective endeavours to uproot lantana weed, and recruiting local communities to turn them into elephant sculptures, spreading awareness in the process.
Rogue journalism
GLF panellists discussed sensationalism in environment journalism as well. Inadequate scientific knowledge among reporters, as well as the lazy use of AI to find or generate inaccurate images, show up frequently in reports of, for instance, adverse human-wildlife interactions. Gowri Shankar (herpetologist, IISc) and Shailesh Srivastava (reporter, Mongabay) lamented the frequency with which even reputable newspapers use photographs of the harmless rat snake to accompany articles about its lookalike the cobra – an error that can be very costly for reptiles who play key roles in ecosystems.
Anthropomorphising language applied to animals, such as “rogue” or “notorious,” also exemplify irresponsible journalism. Scientists and journalists at GLF agreed that, while they frequently collaborate informally to fight against popular misconceptions about wildlife, a more systematic understanding between academics, grassroots conservationists, and writers would create a saner environment for public education and informed policymaking.
Bookstalls and partner organisation stalls at GLF. Photo: Amita Basu.
The money
A unique feature of GLF was its role in showcasing opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs in green transition. Paramanand, who is also founder of Bengaluru’s Business Literature Festival, interviewed a panel of entrepreneurs on India’s green innovation landscape. From using software to help integrate renewable energy (which poses certain challenges from being intermittent in nature and sometimes unpredictable) into India’s power grid, to fostering the demand for sustainable agriculture, business owners-cum-authors Nagaraja Prakasam (author and mentor at IIMB’s startup incubation centre), Vishal Pandya (co-founder, REConnect Energy), and Rajan Mehta (author and founder of Climate Ventures Partner) discussed, among other things, strategies to raise popular awareness about the complex and opaque political power structures hampering effective climate action.
Over the course of GLF, delegates discussed various approaches to and issues around conservation.
For instance, while it’s true that human trekkers inside reserve forests pose certain risks – e.g. unwittingly carrying in weed seeds on their footwear – should conservation mean a complete separation of humans from nature? If so, how will humans form the bonds with nature that enable us to fight for conservation?
Arati Kumar-Rao dispels the common misconception of the Thar Desert as a waterless, lifeless place. In fact, sand dunes have historically occupied only 5% of what is a diverse and thriving landscape supporting both humans and wildlife. Photo: Amita Basu.
The why, when and how of conservation
Thekaekara observed that focussing conservation around pristine, human-free reserves is a paradigm borrowed from the US, spurred by a reaction against a history of white settlers devastating both native wildlife and local human populations. Debates in the mainstream around keeping tribal and other local communities out of reserves, or trying to educate them in how to conserve nature, also belies the fact that local communities are often nature’s most knowledgeable and best advocates.
Given how deeply existing power structures dictate our approaches to problem-solving, it’s no wonder, Arati Kumar-Rao (author) remarked, that we’re investing in massive, expensive, industrial solutions to, for instance, water scarcity in the desert: whereas far more effective, harmonious, indigenous solutions to such problems already exist, like the network of percolation wells that Rajasthan’s communities have tended over the centuries.
Finally, there’s the question: where conservation? India seems to have opted for a path where the conservation of biodiversity, clean air, and clean water has been ‘outsourced’ to reserves while, in our cities and our landscapes at large, tree cover is lost, lakes die, and massive development projects increasingly render life unliveable, not just for nature, but for all but the most privileged humans.
Attractions
Partners of the GLF, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Bangalore Political Action Committee (B-PAC) which works to improve citywide governance, the environmental magazine Mongabay, and Atta Galatta, an leading independent bookstore, set up stalls with books by delegates, and merchandise to fund conservation activities. Opportunities to volunteer and get involved were also presented. Stalls also featured college-aged buskers writing poetry for visitors on a pay-as-you-will basis, an organic farmer from Tamil Nadu vending rare rice cultivars, and Elephant Poop Paper, an NGO which helps indigent women in villages near Jaipur to make a living by turning elephant dung and recycled cotton undershirts into paper products.
Bengaluru is both a city of readers, and the headquarters of many important national organisations for conservation and climate action – from ATREE to Divecha, from the Holematthi Foundation to Wildlife Conservation Society). It’s fitting, therefore, that the Green Literature Festival has sprung from this city of innovation, which is also quickly becoming un-livable for many of its 14 million residents. As India grapples with unprecedented biodiversity loss and climate change, the country as a whole must recognise the role that literature, art, and education play in inspiring collective action for a greener, kinder, more inclusive tomorrow.
Amita Basu is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose fiction appears in over 75 venues including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and The Bombay Literary Magazine.