The scale of the human-animal conflict cannot be decoupled from our demand for space — for homes, farms, factories, mines, dams, garbage dumps, hospitals, schools, golf courses — and the detritus of our human ways that piles up as a monument to our time on this planet. Even communities that have always lived closer to nature cannot deal with the scale of the loss of wildlife habitat with daily conflicts. Financial compensation by the government for loss of life and property is noteworthy, but it is akin to a bandaid trying to stop a global tide of want.
As a species, we have travelled to this point in time, seduced by 500 years of an Imperial capitalist expansionist philosophy of infinite growth that has led to us plundering the Earth for raw materials, fracturing our bond with nature in the process, only for the proceeds to be grossly inequitably distributed. As the global supply chain demands bigger bananas, more minerals for electric vehicles, or more cotton for the fashion industry, it is farmers who are forced to use chemicals to enhance yields, expand their fields by cutting into forests and grasslands, and labourers who live with mining dust in their lungs. The most marginalized try to survive on the ever-diminishing returns of the capitalist marketplace to feed, educate, and care for their families.
But nobody told the animals. Wild animals are constantly on the move in search of food. Elephant herds follow the same migration paths mapped out millions of years ago. If a highway appears on their route, they will cross it. If a banana plantation or a vast garbage dump pops up, who wouldn’t want to feast! Human expansion into wild spaces has created a dire habitat loss for the creatures that sustain the Earth. During lightning storms, wild animals are electrocuted by exposed wires. Efforts to trap wild animals that repeatedly enter urban human settlements and relocate them to the designated wildlife sanctuaries are patchy and can lead to the death of the animals. Anger against wild animals spreads quickly after a human-animal conflict, and often retaliatory killings through poisoning meat carcasses or setting up bone-crushing snares and neck-breaking traps are the ways we humans manifest our misplaced fury, as our disconnect with the natural world grows.
As a resident of the Nilgiris, I am witness to this disconnect: roads are expanded by carving up the mountain to allow more tourists to enjoy this fragile landscape. This means the bears must claw away bitumen layers in their desperate search for ants and insects (their primary food source). Thick concrete revetments built to hold up the crumbling mountain seal off their ant-foraging mud slopes. Pesticides dumped on farms suck the life out of the soil – killing precious bugs that the ecosystem will crumble without. Fencing increases as land is sold for second homes or buildings, altering a once-open biodiverse landscape. We are colonizing more ground, erasing our ecological inheritance, and grinding our origins back to dust.
Instead of nurturing our connection with nature, the government’s forest management and conservation policies have perpetuated the colonial fetish that separates the common lands from the people. This has prevented the stewardship of sensitive ecosystems alongside the indigenous communities who embody kinship and coexistence with nature.