It can be a long week/month/year/decade (delete as appropriate) when you’re constantly confronted with bad news and the terrible things that we are doing to life on this planet. It can often seem like a never-ending uphill battle. And, well, that’s what it is, but every now and again you get some news that gives you a glimmer of hope.
Since late
December, there has been a flurry of positive news coming from different parts
of India, home to the world’s largest remaining population of wild tigers.
Where they are being well protected, where there is a good relationship between
forest officials, scientists and NGOs, tigers are breeding and, because of
limitations on carrying capacity, tigers are spilling out of protected
areas, returning to the forests from which they once vanished and taking up
residence rather than just being transient.
News of
cubs in Kudremukh National Park, in Karnataka, which has historically been
ravaged by iron ore mining, and of 25 tigers residing in the Sathyamangalam
forests of Tamil Nadu is further testimony to the emergence of the southern
states as tiger conservation champions.
That said,
news of cubs galore in Kanha Tiger Reserve (21-23 cubs) and Pench Tiger Reserve
(21 cubs) in Madhya Pradesh, and even in Panna Tiger Reserve where the
translocated tigers have given birth to seven cubs, suggests the battle for
the title of The Tiger State is not over yet.
Further
north, tigers have returned to the Nandhor Valley of Uttarakhand, while Assam
is home to 143 tigers, 118 in Kaziranga National Park alone – the highest tiger
population density in the country.
To be
sure, things are far from perfect. Dispersing and transient tigers leave the
protected areas to face forests destroyed for coal, diamonds, sandstone, iron
ore and bauxite. Roads, dams and river-linking projects carve up the forest
corridors. With forest loss comes the decline in natural prey and the
inevitable slide into conflict with people and livestock. Poaching in India the
feed the illegal trade in China continues. So far this year, there have been
four tiger and nine leopard poaching/trade incidents reported. None of us
can take our foot off the gas when it comes to saving tigers.
But what
the good news from India tells us is that the tiger’s decline is not an
irreversible situation; that with the right set of circumstances, tiger
populations can recover, and with
them the watershed forests that all our futures depend on. Now is the time to
invest in progressing the strategies that are paying dividends (cubs), to
spread the word of what works and what doesn’t, to open up the system of
governance so that independent scientists, NGOs and civil society can work with
the government officials.See http://www.eia-international.org/good-news-for-tigers-shows-were-on-the-right-path
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