Save the whale shark. And say a prayer

[Guest guest]

Save the whale shark. And say a prayer Wild Notebook: the ingenious methods

of the Wildlife Trust for India

 

Simon Barnes

 

We tend to think of wildlife conservation as a particularly British thing:

something that we must somehow seek to impose on the barbaric foreigners. We

must make them see the light, must we not? But this is not the way it works

at all.

 

I have learnt this from my association with the World Land Trust. The

trust's work of safeguarding land for conservation can only be done by

finding a local partner: a non-government organisation that is brilliant,

committed and highly motivated - like, for example, the Wildlife Trust for

India, WLT's partner in a big project that will safeguard the future of the

Indian elephant.

 

While I was in India the other week looking at elephants and their habitat,

I was constantly blown away by the Indian partner: an organisation light on

its feet, punching above its weight and constantly solving Indian problems

in a wholly Indian way.

 

Take the whale shark campaign. Fishermen were catching these, the biggest

fish on the planet, simply for their livers, which were used for

waterproofing boats. And while there was a very solid education campaign,

and the Government was successfully lobbied to establish legal protection,

the decisive moment came with the involvement of the holy man Morari Bapu.

 

Morari Bapu considered the matter and then declared that the whale shark was

a god. The fish was nothing less than the first avatar of Vishnu. The

slaying of the whale shark, Morari Bapu declared, was not fishing but

deicide.

 

The killing was stopped at a stroke, and the great gods of the sea cruise

off the coast of India, filter-feeding as they go, unmolested by the devout.

We in this country imagine that the Romantic movement gave us a privileged

insight into the natural world and a consequent reverence that foreigners lack.

It was, after

all, William Blake who told us that everything that lives is holy. That

never came as news to India.

 

*Beak practice*

 

India is not a homogeneous society. You will, for example, find a very

different India if you travel to the far northeast, to Arunachal Pradesh,

and meet the Nyishi tribespeople. Out there, you don't really count for much

unless you have a hornbill's beak on your head.

 

Hornbills make up one of those groups in which nature has given itself over

to fantasy: the extraordinary bulky and elongated beaks, often with an

elaborate casque above them, are among the most peculiar things you can see

on the planet. To see a hornbill in flight is spectacularly

counter-intuitive: you'd think the bird must nosedive and crash beak first

into the ground. But the bill is a masterpiece of lightness and it is a

deeply desired object among the Nyishi.

 

But as the Nyishi increased in numbers, so the desire for hornbill bills

increased - after all, you can't get married unless you have a hornbill bill

to wear. Three species of hornbills were fast being hunted to extinction.

The WTI didn't make a fight of it. Instead they started to make fibreglass

hornbill bills. When their first slavishly accurate bills were but a

qualified success, they coloured them more gaudily: and in a flash, they

caught on. Now beak-making has become a local industry, with Nyishi artisans

making beaks for themselves.

 

*Vote for goat*

 

India has become glamorous. The world knows it: and India itself is deeply

conscious of its own glamour. Wealth and prestige are an extravagant aspect

of this new India, as demonstrated this weekend by the launch of the second

season of the billionaire's plaything, the Indian Premier League.

 

Glamour matters: and shawls made in shahtoosh are the last word in

restrained elegance: soft, light, warm and tinglingly expensive. You can

pull your thousand- dollar shahtoosh shawl through your wedding ring. But

the Tibetan antelope, or chiru, won't obligingly stand still to be sheared.

You have to kill it first.

 

The chiru was being hunted to extinction for the sake of glamour. Time,

then, for a campaign and one that didn't put the Kashmiri women who make the

shawls out of work. The WTI went for a high-profile anti-shahtoosh campaign,

and backed it up with promotion of a new and much finer pashmina product,

with hair from a farmed goat.

 

This glamorous alternative was glamorously modelled, and those who chose to

stick with shahtoosh have been made very aware that the stuff was illegal. I

went into an upmarket tourist shop and demanded shahtoosh. I was at once

told that it was illegal and here was the alternative. They passed the

pashmina shawl through a wedding ring for my admiration.

 

These are just some of many projects that the WTI is taking on, often in a

funky and left-field way that simply wouldn't occur to British

conservationists: lateral thinking backed up with immaculate research and

top-quality science. The partnership with the far-from-unfunky World Land

Trust has been a triumph for both organisations. And as for the WTI - we can

learn a thing or two from these people.