Year – 2/Issue – 2/ October – November’16
World after 5th Extinction Featured Topic : We are at…. WAR RISK (Part – 12) Editors’ Desk : Culture and Nature the Inextricable Link Story Room : Where Nature Dances in Abundance Theme Poster : God’s Own Country Arnab Basu
The Century of Total War Contemporaries called this the Great War, in which the militaryindustrial complex finally matured. The industrial capacity for warfare had accelerated rapidly since 1870, and all combatant economies had forged close ties between military commanders and industrial designers and managers. By 1914 war in Europe could be pursued with railway and wheeled vehicles, and during the war the first air forces appeared. The consequences caught everyone strategically unprepared. As the war on the Western front bogged down in a three-year stalemate along hundreds of miles of trenches in Flanders and northern France, millions of bomb and shell craters left puddles, ponds, and mud where crop fields and woodlands had been before. On both sides of the war, improved long-distance food transport enabled mass armies to be sustained year-round, and battles to be fought almost endlessly. On occasions, armies deliberately deprived both enemy units and civilians of food, fibre, and fodder by ravaging land and destroying stored crops. In early 1917, as the German armies withdrew from the Somme battlefields, they systematically destroyed nearly every building, fence, well, bridge, and tree over an area of sixty-five by twenty miles to 1|Page
deprive the advancing enemy of sustenance and cover. In Eastern Europe the wide and constantly shifting battle zone between the German and Russian armies opened remote areas to development and pointed toward vast damage to forests, marshes and agricultural zones in World War II.
The war also saw the first large-scale use of chemical warfare. Germany, France and Britain all attempted to develop chemical weapons before 1914. Germany's chemical industry, the world's leader, forged close cooperation with his military, enabling the German army to use massive amounts of chlorine and mustard gas on Allied troops. By the war's end chemical warfare produced 1.3 E-mail: natural_destination@yahoo.com Website : www.exploringnature.org.in
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million casualties, including ninety thousand deaths. Mustard gas and other chemical agents temporarily poisoned lands on and near the battlefields. It is difficult to assess the immediate environmental impact, because no one measured it, but its carryover effect was massive. Chemical warfare increased the size of chemical industries, demonstrated the value of scientific research to chemists and governments, and helped inspire post war pesticides. And military aircraft became the backbone of post war crop dusting, increasing the scale on which pest control was economical. Throughout Europe and even overseas, forests came under unprecedented wartime pressures. Lengthy bombardments in battle zones shattered forests those had been carefully managed for centuries. For hundreds of miles behind the lines, massive emergency felling of timber was carried out. Only the great forest zone of Russia escaped heavy exploitation, since imperial Russia's transport system was still rudimentary. The British, Canadians, and Americans organized large timber shipments from North America and even India's monsoon forests. But this war saw only the beginnings of tree cutting from tropical rainforests, since logging and transport facilities were still in their infancy, even in the colonial forests of British and French West Africa. Perhaps equally important for the longer run, government forestry agencies in many countries took greater control over forest resources during the war. The immediate post-war period saw reforestation programs in both Europe and North America, in which single-species tree plantations replaced the greater variety of species in the former natural forests. Between the two world wars further acceleration of military industry enabled militarized states to mobilize far greater resources from around the world than a quarter century before, and impose new levels of destruction. When Japan attacked China in 1937 and then Hitler's armies invaded Poland in late 1939, they unleashed a war in which seventy million people would die, and his own country would ultimately suffer one of the highest losses, particularly at the hands of the Allied air forces. By the summer of 1945 British and American bombers, dropping incendiary bombs produced by the rapidly maturing chemical industry, levelled one hundred thirty German cities, killing some six hundred thousand civilians. The post-war reconstruction, physical as well as social, would be daunting. In combat zones the forests of Europe were once again badly damaged by fights. Behind the lines of combat, timber was cut at the most urgent rates that the limited available workforce could achieve, and great forests of Norway and Poland were looted of their timber wealth. This time, even more than in the previous war, the battle zones of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East could call upon timber resources from other continents. Both harvesting machinery and transport networks (from forest roads to harbor facilities to oceanic shipping) were more rapidly developed than in the previous war, though the vast forest resources of Asian Russia were still largely inaccessible.
the war's most notorious action, the retreating Chinese Nationalist leadership broke the Yellow River dikes, flooding vast areas of intensely cultivated lowlands, drowning over 800,000 people and turning 2 million others into refugees. Between them, the Nationalist and Japanese armies produced a scale of human and environmental damage by war's end that is still not fully measured. In early 1942, immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan's war machine continued down the Pacific, quickly seizing the strategic forests and rubber resources of the Philippines, Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asia. For roughly three years, until they were beaten back, the occupying Japanese forces brutalized forests and plantations, leaving a seriously compromised environmental legacy. The war in the Pacific had impacts on island biota, coastal coral ecosystems and the aquatic environment that had no previous parallel in that ocean's web of life. Small islands support limited varieties of plant and animal species. Coral atolls have thin, fragile soils; they are exceptionally vulnerable to the impacts of human conflict. On both of steep volcanic islands and coral atolls, the fights caused fundamental ecological degradation of forests, watersheds, coastal swamplands, and coral reefs. World War II marked another watershed in the history of warfare: for the first time more soldiers died in a battle than of disease. Diseases, of both humans and livestock, had spread into the Pacific with traumatic impacts ever since the 1770s, but the Pacific War ended with a dramatic reverse.
In the Far East, Japan had pre-empted Soviet interest in the industrial belt of Manchuria by occupying it as early as 1931. Six years later Japanese armies, supported by Japanese aerial bombing of Chinese cities, advanced westward across China. In 2|Page E-mail: natural_destination@yahoo.com Website : www.exploringnature.org.in
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Until 1943 malaria caused nearly ten times as many casualties as battles. Thereafter DDT almost fully controlled the disease among the troops before the war's end. No one at the time foresaw the massive environmental damage that DDT would produce in peacetime. For marine resources the war had paradoxical effects. Commercial fisheries and whaling fleets were largely destroyed, docked, or transformed into military uses until 1945, leaving fish stocks and marine mammal population to recover, if not fully, though submarine warfare killed some whales, and any increase in their numbers was very temporary. In Japan itself, the war had tragic ecological as well as human impacts. For Japan's forest resources the loss of import sources (especially the northwest coast of North America) meant intensive cutting of domestic forests, even ancient stands which had been preserved for centuries, for charcoal, firewood, and construction. In many locations the direct result was loss of soil and damage to water regimes. On Japan's farms, food production expanded critically, especially on marginal lands. American incendiary bombing, following the attacks on German cities, almost totally destroyed Japan's urban areas, which had been built largely of wood. Finally, Japan suffered the ultimate environmental disaster, the impact of nuclear bombs, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were levelled on August 6 and 9, 1945. The two cities were rapidly rebuilt after the war, and the local flora made a surprisingly rapid recovery from radioactive pollution, yet the human costs of the two bombs are still being counted. By August 1945, the United States was triumphant, having suffered relatively less long-term damage to its domestic resources and ecosystems or to its additional source areas in Latin America. Its military industry had grown exponentially, and military-industrial coordination had reached high levels. Hence that war sowed the seeds of later disasters, which began to be evident as the Cold War deepened after 1948.
levels until around 1800, the native population of North America was fully replaced by North European immigrants in much shorter order, and croplands replaced forests.
25 Oct: "Jungle View Hike" (1/2-day tour): 4 hours hike in the Gunung Leuser National; Park & stop at the Sumatran orangutan feeding platform. 26 Oct: "Explore Local Life!" (1/2-day tour): Memorable tour to villages around Bukit Lawang by traditional becak. 27 Oct: "Batcave & Landak River Walk" (1-day tour ): Walk to the famous batcave & explore this impressive cave system.
In Latin America, even in the 1500s the impacts of conquest registered on lowland coastal zones and riverine forests, the highlands of Mexico and the Andes, where sheep and goats came to rule degraded pasture lands, and the wide natural grasslands where cattle soon prevailed. Aside from these cases, the systematic study of environmental changes caused by warfare in Latin America has barely begun. In an ironic case of warfare and epidemic disease, by the 1700s Iberian-Americans who had settled in the New World were relatively immune to malaria and yellow fever. The dreaded twin diseases were their allies in defending their colonial empires against newcomer challengers from northern Europe, until the collapse of the Old Regimes in Spain and Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars. In North American woodland settings, the impact of endemic frontier warfare was somewhat different. There Europeans counterparts followed up their conquests by settling on the land and clearing temperate forests far more readily than they could anchor themselves in tropical forest zones. In contrast to Latin America, where population did not recover to their pre-1492 3|Page
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Editors’ Desk:
Culture and Nature: The Inextricable Link Respect for biological diversity implies respect for human diversity. Indeed, both elements are fundamental to stability and durable peace on earth. The key to creating forms of development which are sustainable and in harmony with the needs and aspirations of each culture implies breaking out of patterns that render the invisible lives and perspectives of those cultures. It is the concern of many people that biodiversity must be appreciated in terms of human diversity, because different cultures and people from different walks of life perceive and apprehend biodiversity in different ways as a consequence of their distinct heritages and experiences. Most indigenous and/or traditional population inhabit areas of mega-biodiversity. This illustrates the inextricable link between cultural and biological diversity. The very origins of environmental conservation lie buried in ancient cultures found throughout the world. Modern environmental movements express various ideologies of these original belief systems, yet neither realize their debts to their forebears, nor towards those who still embody these ideals. Learning and respecting the ways of today’s indigenous and traditional people, and integrating them into environmental and developmental considerations, will prove indispensable for the survival of diversity. Cultural diversity is more than appearance, more than folklore, song and dance. It is the embodiment of values, institutions and patterns of behaviour. It is a composite whole representing the people’s historical experiences, aspirations and world-view. The contributions of traditional and indigenous people should be made visible. Those who are privileged cannot assume that there is only one worldview. Exploring Nature acknowledges that extinct anthropology and culture, forgotten art and skill are also contributing factors to the survival risk of the rich but threatened biodiversity of our planet. One such ancient culture believed to have originated in the ninth century AD and uses Kamba Ramayana as its basic text......Tholpavakoothu...... is a form of shadow puppetry that is practiced in Kerala, India. It is performed using leather puppets as a ritual dedicated to Bhadrakali and is performed in Devi temples in specially built theatres called koothumadams. This art form is especially popular in the Palakkad, Thrissur and Malappuram districts of Kerala....Pulavars undergo intensive training in puppetry and have a deep knowledge of Malayalam, Tamil and Sanskrit. Puppeteers have to study the Kamba Ramayana and be well read in the Vedas and Puranas, Ayurveda, and be trained in classical music. The representative of Exploring Nature was privileged to attend one such Tholpavakoothu performance at L&T South City, Bangalore on 4th September, 2016, as part of Onam celebration 4|Page
organized by the resident Malayali. The lead performer Ramachandra Pulavars, a junior & senior fellowship holder from the ministry of culture, Government of India and a Scholar from the department of culture, interacted and shared his story in this journey.
K.K.Ramachandra pulavar was born on 25-05-1960 to late Guru Shri: K.L.Krishnan kutty pulavar and Shrimati: Gomathy ammal. He was born into a traditional family with a rich historical background. He started studying Tholpavakoothu by his great guru/father at the age of six. He soon achieved all the aspects of Tholpavakoothu within the span of his childhood. While he was training with his father, he followed the traditional style of puppet performance which he continues to do so till date. He follows the 8th generation from the followers of guru were endowed the talented skills in this art form Chinathambi pulavar, Ela pulavar, Appanna pulavar, Lakshmana pulavar, Krishnan kutty pulavar. Guru Krishnan kutty pulavar took this artform from the temple primes to outside. It can easily grow up in Kerala and all around the world of puppetry. Ramachandra pulavar is also engaged in this art form with his new contributions and his own great efforts to promote this art form in Kerala. Every year from the month of December to June, he had performed in 40 temples in 7, 14,21,41,71 days and also on
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500 stages every year out side of the temple primes in Kerala– India, and abroad. Ramachandra told Exploring Nature, that all the puppets used for the play are purely handmade, made up from deer skin. The Puppet centres are famous for creating and coloring puppets.
Besides ecological conservation, Exploring Nature will always promote conservation of ancient anthropogenic culture.
K.K.Ramachandra pulavar has profound hands on experiences in making puppets. He is creating almost 300 puppets in a year and also performing puppetry play. The annual performances in about 45 temples during the temple festivals seasons from December to June have been performed by him. Tholpavakoothu, like many traditional art forms, has been facing the threat of extinction due to the arrival of alternate platforms of entertainment, such as television and cinema and due to changing cultural values. The younger generation have increasingly failed to take up this art form as it is highly demanding and does not pay much. The audience for these shows have dwindled even in rural Kerala. To cope up with these social changes, the duration of many performances have been drastically reduced. Thematically, puppeteers have begun to introduce contemporary and secular themes to appeal to the youth. Themes such as ragging, communal amity and stories from India's freedom struggle have been featured in recent years. Performances are no longer confined only to temples but are also held in secular venues such as colleges and at the International Film Festival of Kerala. Ensuring historical continuity is an essential element of any nature conservation and conserving forgotten anthropogenic art and culture is an effective way of ensuring historical continuity. These principles cannot be regarded as universal, but generally emphasize the following values: • • • • •
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co-operation; family bonding and cross-generational communication, including links with ancestors; concern for the well-being of future generations; local-scale self-sufficiency, and reliance on locally available natural resources; rights to lands, territories and resources which tend to be collective and inalienable rather than individual and alienable; Restraint in resource exploitation and respect for nature, especially for sacred sites.
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Story Room:
Anwesha Ghatak
The state of Wisconsin is an exquisite getaway in the northcentral United States. Being a next-door neighbor to the state of Minnesota, Wisconsin is a soothing journey of not more than 3-4 hours from downtown Minneapolis. When I left behind the Saturday morning hustles and bustles of a city, it alleviated my mind and at the same time excited me to look forward to a perfect summer weekend recess. Steadfastly the Interstate-35 transported through the luscious country sides of Wisconsin, the “Dairy-land” of the country. Particularly famous for its cheese, Wisconsin is one of the nation’s leading dairy producers. The viridescent farm lands against cerulean summer sky would paint a perfect picture of a rural area, the very area that harvests crops and fortifies the nation with endeavors from painstaking country men, women and their livestock. Occasional grazing of “all the pretty horses” and cattle in the boundless green, reaffirmed that the earth is still “real” albeit all the “virtual” replacements a city has to offer!
would voyage in the Lake Superior and the evening Grand Tour came highly recommended. We had couple of hours before our sail and decided to explore the town. Lunch in the local restaurant consisted of fish and chips, with Whitefish freshly caught from the lake. The view of the turquoise lake added an extra zing to the meal. It was a shimmering summer afternoon and the town was flocked by tourists. We took a leisure walk through the streets till the lake shore. Plenty of private boats were anchored as summertime is the prime time to quest through the magnificent lake. After past 5 in the evening we were guided to the dock where already a long and patient queue initiated. Seats in the upper deck of the cruise, named the “The Superior Princess”, were much coveted as the vision would be unhindered. But once the cruise navigated it was impossible to sit tight and not to wander off in the boat. The view was all-around. To admire deepness of the world’s largest
But Wisconsin is not only lake from the shoreline is one thing, but to infiltrate the heart about pastoral ranches and of that blueness is barns, it apportions the largest overpowering. The Captain of freshwater lake in the world by the cruise was adept and surface area, The Lake relentless in narrating the Superior. As the name history and geology of the lake advocates, The Lake Superior and the surrounding islands. is profoundly majestic, The 12 largest islands were mysterious and often renamed The Apostle Islands merciless. The climate of by New France historian Pierre Wisconsin is of continental nature, with warm summer and Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, freezing winter. The Lake Superior freezes completely in every who named them after 12 20 years. Therefore, life by The Lake Superior burgeons in all its Apostles (each of the 12 exuberant forms during summer. One such vibrancy is sighted disciples of Jesus Christ). The in Bayfield, one of the quaint port towns of Wisconsin, voted as Apostle Islands National one of the most serene in the nation. From Bayfield, cruises 6|Page E-mail: natural_destination@yahoo.com Website : www.exploringnature.org.in
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Lakeshore is an adobe for diverse flora and fauna groups. Over 800 plant species thrive within the lakeshore, including the state of Wisconsin listed endangered and threatened species. According to the National Park Service, one of the greatest concentrations of black bears in North America is found on the Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The Lakeshore provides important nesting habitat for the following nesting birds: herring and ringbilled gulls, double-crested cormorants, great blue herons and cliff swallows. The cruise jaunted near the Devils Island, one of the twenty two Apostle Islands, famous for its extensive sea caves. The dramatic rock formations would entreat your immediate attention. It is popular with kayakers who enjoy meandering in and out of the caves on calm days. The caves were sculpted from billions of years old sandstone bedrock exposed through the island's surface. The red and gold sandstone was deposited over the area by wandering streams from western hills. The undulating of the climate over about a million of year period laid a sandstone crust that is about 1800 feet thick. They are colorfully stratified. When surf on the lake is heavy, the waves thunder and boom in the sea caves. The rumbling can be heard even well away from the shoreline. Local residents claim that the Indigenous Indians, Ojibwe (Chippewa), interpreted this noise as the sound of evil spirits, hence the name “Devils Island”! The Devils Island Lighthouse located at the northern end of the island is staffed by a volunteer ranger during the busy months of the summer. Accompanied by the volunteer, visitors may climb the tower, and go inside the original keeper's quarters. Built in 1894, the Lighthouse is a stand-alone human inhabitant in the island. It was almost eventide and a solitary gull was waiting perhaps for the assembly of the fellow compeer. The wanderlust of the birds never fails to astonish me and how they find their way back home before sundown. The last light of the sun could spell a magic with vivacious colors. And when the sun sets by the vast horizon of the world’s largest lake, the rays break into thousand pieces adding effulgence to the face of earth, both in the land and in the water. The spectacular rock formations of Devils Island were beaming bright and the ripples in the lake were incandescent. The sun knows how to make his presence felt
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even after he’s long gone. We, the mere humans on the cruise, were yet again, taken aback by the glory of nature. Observing the fading glare from the deck, you would wish for another beautiful day in your life, of another dawn and dusk.
That’s the “blazing” worth living for.
desire
The Cruise took us through twilight to nightfall and when we swayed back to the Bayfield port, the town was lit up. We landed safely with our hearts glowing in anticipation of more such delightful expeditions. For Team Exploring Nature Editors’ Desk : Dwaipayan Ghosh Arnab Basu Review : Anwesha Ghatak Title & Logo Design : Arijit Das Majumder Saikat Chakraborty Newsletter Design : Dwaipayan Ghosh Arnab Basu
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Theme Poster
:: God’s Own Country – Sketch by Ajay Kumar Debnath:
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