Saluting Green Heroes

The RBS Earth Heroes Awards aims to celebrate unsung heroes who strive against odds to defend their chosen areas of wildlife and habitats.

- Sunil Kumar

“Nobody could care less if some of our butterflies, birds or even the tiger disappeared from the face of the earth. We need to enhance our narrative from saving species to the more comprehensive, and perhaps a more grandiose sounding, narrative of biodiversity, climate change and so on,” I said. For a county that hosts 17% of the global population over its 2.4% share of the global land, further complicated by us hosting 25% of the global cattle stock, the onus that devolves on us from the 8% of global biodiversity that we hold and our status as a country with mega-biodiversity, conservation is a rather challenging proposition. My unsolicited suggestion on enhancing the conservation narrative was offered to Dr. M.K.Ranjitsinh, the doyen among conservation personalities in India today. He, of course, could not care less either!

Biologists suspect that we are living through the sixth mass extinction. The five mass extinctions until now are believed to have caused the disappearance of 75% of species. While paleontologists are not sure what caused these mass extinctions, rapid climate change is often offered as one very plausible cause. This cause seems to be at work once again in what could be the on-going sixth mass extinction. This could be distinct from the preceding five in one significant way; one singular species is playing vector in dispersing the seeds of extinction – by anthropogenic actions that have demonstrably triggered rapid changes in weather patterns affecting plant and animal life forms, by direct actions on species, through harvest at unsustainable levels (commercial fishing and over-hunting), through habitat alterations, and scuttling the balance of the web of life by removal of key species to name a few.