by Paul Rosolie
Despite my run-ins with biology professors and defeats in ecological statistics classes, Ramapo College had been a good choice in that there was a crew of vibrant, dedicated professors inhabiting the environmental science department. Through subjects like forest resources, water resources, biology, and ecology, I found myself, for the first time in my life, actually getting something out of education. This was partly because the people teaching me were, in essence, grown-up versions of me. Of particular note, the professor who taught a course called Ecology Economics and Ethics would influence my life in big ways.
Trent Schroyer had spent his teenage years as a fur trapper in the mountains of western Maryland but eventually realized that animal populations were declining. So he hung up his snares and turned scholar, conservationist, author. When I met him he was in his seventies but still furiously turning out books and organizing international protests to support ecological and social change and bring down unregulated capitalism. He was a rebel if I ever saw one. A direct man, in today’s world of political correctness and delicate sensibilities he was viewed by many as a tyrant. To me he was a brilliant, friendly breath of fresh air. I understood the reason for the gruffness he showed at times: it was as though he had crammed his mind with so much information about the problems facing our planet, and the literature on how to fix them, that he had altogether lost his tolerance for bullshit.
The content of the class focused largely on understanding the forces behind the destruction of nature and how it impoverishes humans. The commons, as he called it, was a new way of thinking about the natural world; the idea was that water, air, forests, and even animals are all “commons,” which don’t belong to anyone—they should come free and guaranteed, a universal endowment, for all life on earth. They are the inheritance of every living thing. The problem, as we learned, is that today many of the things that should be inherent, abundant, free, and pure are disappearing: the oceans are being overfished, the forests are all being shaved, air and water are polluted and privatized by corporations, land is bought up, wildlife exterminated.
For the first time in my academic career, my experiences and interest in the real world mattered inside a classroom. Trent was interested in the Amazon as a woodsman and as a scholar of the commons, and we spent hours talking together. He was a man of great warmth and depth, a fact obscured to almost everyone by his brash brilliance. Somehow, despite the decades that separated us, there was a mutual fraternal recognition. As that semester went on, we spent an increasing amount of time discussing our mountain-man adventures and environmental theory. It was on one of these days at a café between classes that Trent first brought up the prospect of India.
He explained that he had created, and for the last several years captained, a study-abroad group to India, and he felt that it would be an important learning experience for me. “This is a place you need to go,” he said, looking at me frankly. “The Amazon is intact in your area at this point, and that is great, but what is going to happen ten, twenty, fifty years down the line? You need to learn what is coming, so that you know how to protect it. In India it’s all happening now. The time is going to come when you are going to have to protect this place you love.”
Unafraid to put me on the spot, Trent persisted. “Are you a thrill-seeking adventurer, purely after your own enjoyment? Or do you feel that you might possibly owe something to the jungle, have some responsibility for it?” I could see what he was saying but still was not thrilled about the idea of going to a place with more than a billion people. “Besides,” Trent added, strategically, “how could you not want to go to the country that has jungles filled with elephants, and more tigers than anywhere else on the planet?”
Several weeks later, I was on a plane to Bangalore, India.
Trent ran the semester-long program out of a place called Fireflies, an ashram; it was an aesthetically brilliant spiritual/learning center surrounded by tropical foliage and green architecture. There were birds, snakes, frogs, and other wildlife sneaking around the campus and I instantly liked the place. It was a serene contrast to the sprawling city nearby.
For any Westerner, arriving in India can be shocking. I remember walking out of the airport, and the first moments of the madhouse: bustling streets filled with thousands of people, goats, carts, cows, lorries, wagons, horses, dogs, cats, vendors, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles. Once, on a road full of traffic in the state of Kerala, I saw a tremendous bull elephant, as tall as the buses, with several men on its back and a load of timber on its tusks. The smell of spices, burning eucalyptus, and an entirely alternate reality from anything familiar—it is pure, beautiful insanity. As per the cliché of Americans who travel to India, it was a transformative experience. I quickly fell in love with the place that would eventually become my home. But at the same time, as a naturalist, and just as Trent had predicted, I was frightened by it.
Farmland surrounded the ashram, occasionally interrupted by tufts of forest, and I would sprint from class each day into these in search of giants. More than one person told me stories of elephants coming over the fields to the ashram to soak in the lake and pillage crops. I spent virtually all my free time roaming in search of even a single pachyderm. It was weeks before a friend at the ashram, a young guy named Rajesh, asked what I was doing for so many hours out by myself, and I told him. Then he laughed. “The elephants aren’t coming here anymore, boss,” he said, smiling and wobbling his head. “Years back they were coming every day, you know, but that is because”—he pointed toward the horizon—“that used to be forest. They would be coming through the trees to visit the lake each night, but the forest is gone now. Long time ago.”
To Rajesh, elephants coming or not coming was about as important a matter as the kitchen serving masala tea or cinnamon tea. To me it was very different. For weeks the land had seemed vibrant with possibility, excitement, and potential—just at the idea of elephants. Each new bend in a brook was an adventure when a herd of elephants could be around the turn. But hearing that they had been chased away and run out more than a decade ago changed everything. The landscape seemed mute and uninteresting. After that I had less reason to go out. This learning curve was a major theme in my early days in India. So I resigned myself to spending much of my time drinking chai and reading books, hanging out with Rajesh and the other workers of the ashram, playing highly competitive games of carom late into the night.
Yet still the theme of India for me was the tiger trail. I had come to India imagining seeing a tiger the way I would stalk an animal in the Amazon. I had read enough to know that if you can find a deer carcass, a tiger kill, sooner or later you’ll see the tiger. That, I thought, couldn’t be very difficult. I would hike through the forest until I found a deer carcass, then stake out the site; all alone in the woods, I would watch the greatest predator on our planet feast. But it was far from that easy.
Just a few hundred years ago tigers ranged from Eastern Europe and the Middle East and down through Asia and Indonesia, all the way up to the frigid eastern Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. They were the ruling terrestrial predator of our planet. They are the genetic pinnacle of millions of years of evolution—the ultimate predator. From the steaming jungles of Sumatra to the snowy wilderness of the Russian far east, they are the apex predator—the latter of these species, the Amur tiger, even dominates the brown bears and wolves that share their range. Yet humans have historically been at odds with the fire cats, mercilessly hunting them, poisoning them, removing their habitat and prey species, and sometimes deliberately exterminating them. Many have speculated that it is our similarity to tigers rather than our differences that is the true impetus for the ancient conflict. Today the species is devastatingly close to extinction. More than 95 percent of the tigers that used to inhabit the earth are gone; most of those remaining are found in India. It is a species in triage.
I searched for tigers in India the way I had for anacondas in the Amazon, asking people, searching for insights into where to find the
m. But I was following ghosts. Old farmers would tell stories of the tiger that had eaten a cow, or been seen on the edge of the forest when they were young. Their eyes would glow with the memory of the wondrous creatures. Products in stores used the tiger’s image, vendors sold trinket statues of them, and houses often had at least one ornate wall painting that bore the image of a tiger. But, despite their omnipresence in people’s minds, the stories always had the same ending: that was then, this is now. The forests had been cleared, or occupied by the homeless and subsequently emptied of wildlife. In the vicinity of Bangalore no one had seen a tiger in decades. They were gone. My quest for tigers taught me that India has changed at dizzying speed in the last fifty years, socially, economically, and environmentally. The India in the minds of the elderly and the India before my own eyes were different worlds.
With mounting dread I spent months researching, making phone calls, learning. Every lead directed me to a national park or reserve set up specifically for tigers, where tiger tourism was run by way of organized jeep travel, and all other entry was illegal. In years to come I would learn about the importance of these reserves and come to understand that without them, and the hard work Indians do to maintain them, tigers would face an even greater magnitude of doom. Against the tsunami of development and population growth, dedicated and heroic scientists, photographers, naturalists, politicians, park guards, and reporters had been devoting their lives to protecting the striped cats long before I was born. Nevertheless, coming to terms with the fact that I would not be able to simply strike out in search of the cats in “the wild” was infinitely frustrating.
In my first trip to India, as a young, dumb student, without many connections, I spent most of my time reading about tigers instead of actually hiking through forests. India’s tigers are contained in roughly fifty designated tiger reserves across the country. Along with the tigers, of course, one finds in many places elephants, leopards, wild dogs, Indian rhino, deer, boar, hundreds of bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish species—all protected under the name of the “king,” the tiger.
Just like at Yellowstone National Park in the United States, there is a front-country and backcountry philosophy to Indian tiger reserves. Many parks incorporate native tribal villages, roads, guard stations, and even grazing areas for livestock in the front-country areas. Yet each, or most, have a backcountry, which in India is called a “core zone,” an inviolate area where the idea is to have no human activity at all (or as little as possible). Like any system, it is not without its flaws, but as I dived into the literature of Indian wildlife conservation, the core zones struck me as ingenious—allowing the wildlife space apart from humans, to breed, feed, and go about their lives in peace.
Yet to my great despair, these core areas were completely off-limits, and getting authorization to enter them was a monumental feat. In years to come, as I became more familiar with the Indian system, I would come to value and treasure this fact of inaccessibility, for its ability to keep the animals safe—but during that semester abroad it was frustrating. My dream had been to move through forests alone, tracking, learning—not brought through on an official, expensive jeep packed with tourists. I had read enough to know that when a tiger or other notable animal is spotted, there can be dozens of jeeps bearing hundreds of tourists, all snapping photos, all violating the peace and privacy of the very animal they are marveling at.
No, I wanted to be walking silently through a forest and see a tiger, a moment I fantasized about so often it became almost an obsession. But as a newcomer to the country I was floored by how few human-free spaces there were. In the past fifty years the explosion of humanity in India had consumed every scrap of habitat that was not protected by law. Every last chital deer, every last boar in many places had been hunted out, thereby removing the tiger’s prey base. The tigers were gone and the trees fewer, the herds of elephants more distant. At the time I first traveled to India, a national debate was taking place over who had the rights to live in India’s remaining forests: tribal people or tigers. In reality, both groups had been given the short end of the stick by the greater society, which had cut down so much of the forest that once stood. The battle over who is entitled to the patches that remain, tigers (and the other wildlife encompassed in their domain) or tribal communities, is ongoing and fierce.
Archival photos in India show the result of British elephant-back hunts, where proud colonial aristocrats pose besides dozens of tiger carcasses. As India’s population grew, the conflict between humans and tigers increased, and in many places hunters were hired to eradicate the cats. This deliberate culling, combined with the habitat destruction of a rapidly developing world, saw India’s tigers reduced from 40,000 to only 1,800 in the span of a single century. Think about that for a moment. Today most tigers in India exist within the confines of specially designated, guarded areas and national parks, and continue to do so only because of dedicated people who fight the myriad forces that are forever threatening to complete the extermination of the great cats.
What I saw as a student, new to the Indian reality, was a tragedy. Despite the national parks, and the incredible work of local and international conservationists who work to ensure the survival of the species there, only a scrap of the past remains, a stump of a once-glorious tree of life. And as always, it is crucial to reiterate that under the umbrella of tigers fall thousands of other species that are less iconic, yet equally as deserving of protection. The subject encompasses entire biomes. India’s population has strained resources to such an extent that conflicts over land, water, forests, minerals, and indeed all natural resources have reached the breaking point.
During the semester in Bangalore a visiting lecturer asked: “Why do we need the tiger? Why do we need elephants? Do we need them at all? If the farmers don’t want them on their land, and the developers find them a nuisance, and as long as there are tigers in parks so that tourists can gawk at them, what use is it to us to have tigers running around in the wild? Let the forests stand and regulate climate, and rainfall and what have you, let them be there. But tigers and elephants? Maybe it is of no use and they should be extinct? Why would we want elephants to come and eat our crops? It would be better if they were gone. Life is difficult enough already; how can we spend time trying to protect animals when humans are suffering?” There is perhaps nothing so tragic as the idea that the vanishing of species is a logical part of human progress.
I did not get to see a tiger on my first trip to India. Instead I spent countless hours learning about the complexities facing them. Yet amid all the studying, I did find some time for fun. I spent time playing carom with the staff of the ashram, hanging out with the other students, and occasionally traveling a bit.
One day, near Mysore, I woke up early on a free day during a class trip and made for Nagarhole National Park, a dry-forest tiger sanctuary. Though my professors had told me not to go, I was not about to pass up my only chance, and at the time had no idea that I was committing a grave offense against the forest department, not to mention entering a forest inhabited by elephants, tigers, leopards, bears, and numerous venomous snakes.
It was within Nagarhole, at last, that I got a first look at Indian wildlife. On a single day’s hike I spotted peacocks, a sloth bear, chital deer, herds of titanic guar (Indian bison), and numerous other animals. Being in a forest that definitely held tigers supercharged every step; I was on cloud nine. Though it took considerable effort to find out where to go, and a long hike around checkpoints to get in, the forest in India was overwhelmingly beautiful.
Toward the end of a long day, I rock-hopped silently through a shallow gorge as the slanted orange rays of the afternoon sun lit up the lime-green forest. A troop of black-faced langurs with luxuriant long white tails observed my passage from the canopy. The stream I followed slithered between some large boulders, and as I leapt from one to the other I noticed that there were huge circular depressions in the mud, and large piles of fresh, grassy droppings. With mounting e
xcitement I took great care to remain silent, and stalked onward. When I rounded a bend I met a sight as terrifying as it was wonderful: a cow elephant.
To see an elephant in a forest, just a few dozen feet from where you stand, alone, is an experience I cannot do justice to with words. Suffice it to say that a wild elephant that has lived in proximity to angry farmers and other human conflict can be among the most dangerous animals on earth. But there was nothing malignant in either her posture or expression. Her brown, heavily lashed eyes looked into mine as her trunk calmly worked below. The mud-caked giant barely looked real, towering more than nine feet tall. She looked more like an animated cement statue than flesh and blood. Amid the orange beams and delicate lime foliage of the wood, she was a vision.
It was unnerving how intimately she seemed to calculate and quantify me. She knew I meant no harm but was small enough to kill if necessary. For several minutes I remained still, as she gathered vegetation in her trunk and sniffed about. But when she saw that I was not leaving, she cautiously, almost silently, melted away into the brush. I was left alone in the forest with my heart jackhammering and hands shaking.
In just ten hours in Nagarhole I saw a world I had never known existed; it was a glimpse of what India’s Karnataka landscape had once held here. But this was not wild nature. Nagarhole was filled with roads, tribal villages, guard posts, and various degrees of human interference that every species was forced to contend with. My goal in India was to find the Indian wild, if such a thing still existed.