Rekindling my romance with Earth
It’s time to fix our relationship with our planet.
The forests of Western Ghats are my favourite place in the world. I don’t know when this love crept up on me. It was an accumulation of experiences — of walks, drives and train rides in the monsoon, boarding school in Kodaikanal, of travel through the Ghats from their beginnings in Bombay to their ends in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The most revelatory memory is of my visit to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad to meet with Suprabha.
Gurukula is without doubt the most beautiful sanctuary I have witnessed and Suprabha is it’s spokesperson. The people of Gurukula have been working for decades to conserve thousands of native species from the Ghats — one of the most biodiverse places in the known universe. Gurukula has 700 species of orchids, an unbelievably beautiful hillside lined with hundreds of different ferns, carnivorous plants and so much more.
Suprabha and team are working “as ecosystem gardeners, forest restorers, plant protectors and educators” with the knowledge that “living beings and their environments … are inseparable.” That human life isn’t possible without forests. As we got a tour of the sanctuary and met its dwellers, Suprabha told us about how little of the greenery we saw in the Ghats is natural forest (93% of the Western Ghats have been destroyed). She showed us the land that they had been able to buy so the rainforest could have a little more space to grow. And I learned that allowing the forest to regenerate was probably the most effective way of offsetting carbon.
The visit is imprinted in my mind because I understood on a visceral level that to survive (and thrive) humans have to cede the sense of control we believe we have over the planet. A large majority of us seem to have some sort of amnesia about the fact that we are in a reciprocal relationship with a living, breathing, dynamic world. The climate crisis is forcing us to acknowledge the breakdown in this relationship. A good place to start perhaps is with being grateful. In scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words:
