The Hindu Business Line : Is nature not worth any notice?

Usually, one walks into a bookstore to buy a book of a well-known author; a good review in a newspaper helps. It is something like buying vegetables at the corner store. Excitement lies in coming across an interesting book, which one has not heard about, and reading it in short bursts.

Recently, at the Strand Book Stall one picked up a book one was not aware of: Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The importance of everything and other lessons from Darwin's lost notebooks by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.

One has not gone beyond 35 pages with time spent in re-reading and a while on musing over the simple message put out by Lyanda.

In the introduction, the lady states it is not a biography of Charles Darwin. She tries to understand the way Darwin worked. He trudged and crawled to observe birds and animals at Galapagos Islands and seems to have remarked, "I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men."

He watched black-winged stilts (Himantopus himantopus) on the wide, swampy fens of Maldonado, near Buena Ayres on the east coast of South America. In Ornithological Notes, Maldonado, May 1833, Darwin notes: "Himantopus, legs rose pink. This bird is very numerous, in small; & sometimes in tolerably large flocks. On the great swampy plains and fens between the Sierra Ventana & B. Ayres.

The genus has been wrongfully accused of inelegance; the appearance of one of these birds when walking about shallow water, which appears to be its favourite resort, is far from awkward."

In a footnote, Lyanda reminds readers that Darwin's spelling was poor, and his punctuation was poorer. Darwin first observed black-winged stilts in May 1833, one and a half years into his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. The bird he killed for his scientific collection at Maldonado was specimen number 1,221. Analysing specimens and writing detailed notes took time.

"But more than any of this, Darwin's work consisted of watching. With astonishing presumption, this young, educated Englishman with a trust fund got down on his hands and knees, dragged his rich British flannel through the mud, and watched the earth's creature with an attention both subtle and brash," writes Lyanda.

For Darwin everything on earth was important. "Nothing in the natural world is beneath our notice - he almost whacks us on the head with it. Nothing. In a modern scientific era that discards heaps of organisms as unworthy of representation in a scientific journal because they lack "statistical significance", I try to take Darwin's vision to heart," confesses Lyanda Lynn Haupt.

For India, which is living through the worst wildlife crisis, Darwin and Lyanda are apt. With 9.5 per cent GDP growth marking the beginning and end of any discussion on the political economy, nature is not worth any notice. Forests and wild life can wait; steel plants, ports, mining, malls, special economic zones and roads cannot wait.

On May 31, Greenpeace pasted at its site a critique on the Dhamra port, Orissa, being built by the Tatas. The critique has been authored by Dr Paul Johnston and Dr David Santillo from the Greenpeace Research Laboratories, School of Biosciences, Exeter University, UK.

The Dhamra port is located in an ecologically sensitive area, 5 km from the Bhitarkanika Sanctuary and less than 15 km from the Gahirmata nesting beaches of the world's largest mass nesting site for Oliver Riddley turtles.

Ashish Fernandes, Oceans Campaigner, Greenpeace, says, "The main flaws related to poor baseline ecological data, a complete omission of the impacts on turtles, impacts of noise and chemical pollution and a poor hazard analysis and emergency plan. To top it all, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) considers a port site that is completely different from the one currently being developed."

The EIA considers the port site on Kanika Sands whereas the site now being developed is on the mainland. The environmental impacts for both the sites will vary. For example, the new site requires the dredging of a 19-km long shipping channel, whereas the length of the dredged shipping channel for the earlier site would have been considerably less. There are also significant differences between the size and scale of the project that received central government clearance and the one now being developed, says the Greenpeace site.

Adds Dr Johnston from Exeter: "It is amazing that such a large project is going ahead in an ecologically sensitive area on the basis of such a shoddy EIA. The most important problems with the EIA relate to a failure to describe fully the baseline ecological conditions, a failure to identify fully the potential ecological impacts and a failure to consider potential extreme weather events, not to mention the potential impacts of climate change, both of which the Orissa coast is prone to."

Greenpeace has sent a copy of the critique to Ratan Tata and B. Muthuraman, Tata Steel for their response. The Gahirmatha and adjoining beaches on the Orissa coast, where the massive arribada of nesting Ridley turtles occurs, was first brought to the notice of the State and Central governments and the conservation world by scientists of the Crocodile Rehabilitation Project of the FAO and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) in the early 1970s, going by the notes by J.C. Daniel in his book Indian reptiles and Amphibians. Since then, there has been a steady deterioration of the breeding site and in the number of breeding turtles, following development activity and mechanised trawling without the mandatory Turtle Exclusion Devices.

"Unless exemplary action is taken, the arribada will be a thing of the past within a few years," is the dire prediction by Daniel. Will we have nothing left of the Oliver Riddley turtles?

P. Devarajan