This is a guest post from award-winning journalist Colleen Kaleda, who recently led a Habitat For Humanity project in India before setting out to encounter its native Bengal tigers.
Last month I visited India, home to most of the estimated 2,000 wild Bengal tigers still left on the planet. Only after drastic conservation measures have they returned from the brink of extinction they faced in the 1940s.
Wild animals are the best reminders of why we need to care about the environment. They offer us a lesson: wild animals don’t over-consume. Wild animals don’t need to collect “stuff”. Wild animals don’t need oil to get places or keep warm or clean.
Located in India’s central basin, Bandhavgarh was once a place for Indian and British royalty to shoot and kill tigers. How times have changed. Today, about 60 Bengal tigers roam over 500 square miles of protected jungle and savannah. For 12 hours each day (dusk to dawn, when they are most active) the tigers are left alone. For the other 12 hours, wildlife lovers like me in open-top jeeps crisscross the park on designated dirt roads hoping to spot them. Park fees protect the Bengal tigers and other animals, and the guide fees create much-needed income for local residents in this poor district, where most people live on about $1 per day. Eco-tourism at its best.
Sadly, the modern human way of living has affected wild animal habitat so much that simply seeing certain animals is a once-in-a-lifetime event. And when I finally saw a Bengal tiger, I teared up.
It hit me: something really bad has happened in our history for a simple glimpse of a tiger to be so precious. Will seeing trees and clean water and breathing unpolluted air be this out-and-out thrilling someday? Will humans eventually live in protected zones? I certainly hope not.
Still, wildlife reserves like Bandhavgarh will never completely undo the damage. My tears for the tiger, when it came down to it, were for all things wild. Every creature is precious, forming an ecosystem that we are only beginning to understand. Humans are an integral part of that ecosystem and an integral part of its ultimate survival. We must change our consumptive ways and strive to keep wild places wild if we, ourselves, want a better future than the tigers.
photo courtesy of Paul Mannix
Your post immediately reminded me of a poem of Walt Whitman’s “Animals”
“Animals
I think i could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contained
I stand and look at them long and long .
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied,
not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another,
nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth. ”
Thank you for your blog and for making your difference on the planet.