Wildlife Week, a waste?
Wildlife Week ends today. I am sure most people didn’t even know any such event existed, let alone passed us by. But it has been one helluva wild week. I have long abandoned the celebration of special days; they all come down to crass emptiness, of lofty, insincere displays of love and concern.
The UN had to give an award. So while we should be happy our Prime Minister was the recipient of the UN Environment Award, ground reality would show more hollow words than action. These past four years also showcase the least action for biodiversity conservation. Hardly ten new wildlife sanctuaries were declared, most of these tiny, and most in Tamil Nadu. Not a single new National Park was added. No new wetland was saved, none added to the Ramsar list (for wetlands of national importance). In fact, most crucial wetlands and other habitats have continued to be ravaged, sacrificed on the altar of this government’s developmental agenda. Except for Mumbai’s Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary, at barely 16 sq km more of a tradeoff for the new airport, no other site has even been looked at seriously, along nearly 7,000 km of coastline!
In our PM’S home state of Gujarat, five percent, or thereabouts, of the population of the Asiatic lion, confined to an area of under 2000 sq km, was found dead these past few days. Too many questions. As many unconvincing answers. This, in the species’ last home on the planet!
On the Mumbai Safari, a 500acre joke is playing out at Oshiwara, near Lokhandwala — the shameless, brazen devastation of mangroves.
For nearly 20 years the site has been lying vacant, overgrown and wild. The latest DP had it marked as protected for nature. The state has since declared it unfit for nature but fit for development. Perhaps they have been able to prove ‘there were no mangroves here’, never mind the recent HC ruling on mangroves, as well as the 2005 interim order.
This is a classic example of the ploy routinely being resorted to destroy the wilderness, let it rot and overgrow to prove there was no critical natural habitat at all. It is most evident in the mess of Uran and Panje.
How tragic that the survival of critical pockets of life-saving wildernesses, including CRZ-1 mangroves and adjoining wetland tracts are ridiculed by agencies and hands that have not the slightest idea of the havoc they are resulting in, often even defying court orders. How I wish some manner of real, logical ecoconsciousness could be infused in agencies like CIDCO and MMRDA that have been gifted a natural largesse like no other urban expanse on the planet.
(Sunjoy Monga is a naturalist, photographer and author of numerous books on biodiversity)