RURAL FUTURES: STORYTELLERS ON THE FRONTLINE
The media has played an exceedingly important role in shaping public opinion in the world, especially over the last decade or two. With the digital revolution, its scope and reach has been further widened, while, at the same time, such an opening up of the playing field has posed challenges to mainstream, conventional journalism. It is well accepted that the media performs a critical role in directing political and economic debates, both nationally and at global scale but equally important and much needed are its interventions in the social arena. Of these, environmental concerns have occupied centre stage, with an observable increase in the attention given to topics such ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, since 2005. As awareness spread through the larger narratives regarding the urgency for environmental interventions, local stories about conservation practices and sustainable use of natural resources also gained considerable traction, the world over.
Coverage of Grassroots stories is way forward towards positive storytelling in conservation
At the Eastern Himalayan Naturenomics™ Forum, 2017, the session titled ‘Storytellers on the Frontline’ saw the coming together of range of media persons and practitioners, who between them had years of experience on reporting on ground-level, environmental stories, from across the country. The panel had Bahar Dutt, environmental journalist, and Gen. (retd.) Arun Sahni as Chairs; they brought in perspectives from two very different contexts, setting an enriching discussion in motion. For Sahni, stories from our childhood, through books and films, brings about an early understanding of the sensitive interplay between us and nature. As the ICT revolution has changed how people read and interface with knowledge, he felt that the medium of storytelling has also had to adapt to these changes. The media has been a powerful tool in the telling of conservation stories, in the case of the Delhi firecrackers ban, for instance, where awareness that was created through the news reports and coverage led to its success.
Bahar Dutt began by asking whether positive storytelling, as reported by journalists, had an impact conservation policy. While she maintained that It was important to tell stories, it was fundamental to reflexively question how these stories were changing ground-level realities in the field of conservation. Having been a journalist over the years, Dutt claims that it has been easier to report on stories about poachers and overkill of species as compared to the bigger picture of habitat degradation and fragmentation, which is what she felt, would have a direct impact on conservation policy.
Moving away from reports on single species conservation, it is imperative to look at the larger picture of habitat destruction
Dutt contended that conservation discussions were set within a political environment, claiming that one of the greatest threats to habitat came from the diversion, or rather decimation, of forest land. Data during the UPA regime showed that forest diversion occurred at a rate of 333 acres per day while fresh reports indicated that under the present BJP-led government, 92,000 hectares were slated to be sliced open for development projects. Citing numerous other ‘development’ projects ranging from the dams on the Ganga to those in Arunachal Pradesh, thermal projects along the Konkan coast, Dutt claimed that we, as a society, needed to rethink the notion of ‘growth’ and ‘development’.
The panel discussion commenced with Dutt a question to the panelists: As journalists, how difficult was it to do enviro-political stories which questioned the existing patterns of growth?
Nimesh Ved, Krishnamurti Foundation, was the first to respond and spoke about how, from his experience, it was easier to sell certain kinds of stories, especially when they had to do with a particular species going extinct, rather than destruction of habitats on a larger scale. There was, in his opinion, a general degree of unwillingness to make connections between species and habitats, such as in the case of oil palm cultivation taking place inside a tiger reserve in Dampa, Mizoram. He strongly felt the need to develop a more holistic lens where problems and issues are woven into larger stories about conservation.
There is a need for a more holistic lens where problems and issues are woven into larger stories about conservation.
Amit Patro, a journalist with the Sikkim Express, stressed that the media needed to strike a balance between developmental requirements of humans and advocating environment protection. Local population often times wanted development projects to continue, despite its environmental repercussions, because of the kind of compensation they are offered for their land. In such instances, the media’s foremost role was to educate local populations about environmental issues that were at stake and to raise awareness.
While the Northeast has received significant coverage in the mainstream press of late, it has predominantly been looked upon as an exotic locale, observed documentary filmmaker, Ruella Rehman Khound. The next panelist, Naresh Mitra, of Times of India, demonstrated to the audience how the environmental narratives in the Northeast had transformed over the years. According to him, in the 1990s the press carried stories about the need for ushering in development projects in the region but from the 2000s onward, the narrative was more cautious of unmitigated development plans.
Samrat Choudhary, in his capacity as an Editor of print media, provided perspective from the other side, where he was in a manner of speaking, the gatekeeper, who decided what would be carried in the news and what would be kept out. However, he added that it was seldom the decision of one individual but rather a sphere of influencers, most powerful among them being big advertisers. On a another level, he urged that we reflect on the problem on a philosophical level about the times we live in, where neoliberalism has taught us to valourize ‘growth’ and ‘development’ in a particular kind of way, that it has come to be closely linked to our values and ethics, as a society. In a scenario where numbers are the ultimate deciders of what goes, even when it comes to the media, he believes that relating conservation to human interest stories are likely to have much more success, as was seen in the case of issues on pollution, whether it be the firecracker ban or the odd-even policy for vehicles.
Some of the most poignant points in the panel came from Prerna Singh Bindra, author of ‘The Vanishing’ who felt that the media houses were reluctant to not invest, both money and time, in environmental journalism. Although things had changed for the better from when she had first started out, and that now there is a designated ‘environment’ desk, these issues were being boxed in, away from the ‘real’ issues in the press such as politics, economics and such like. The loss of forests leading to loss of water, pollution of the environment, use of harmful pesticides all go on to affect the health of the population, thereby making them human stories, economic stories, political stories and not just environmental stories. She ended by reminding the audience that environmental journalism had been termed the ‘new frontier of war journalism’ as it was a dangerous job taking on big corporates or the government in a battle over natural resources.
People of the Northeast need to tell their stories of conservation and sustainable practices themselves
Prabal Kumar Das, a journalist with the Assam Tribune, brought the focus back on the human-interest aspect by describing the ways in which different tribes and communities of the Northeast articulate their worldview through their language. Calling the Northeast ‘a fantastic assemblage of people’, with more than 220 languages and dialects, Das argues that the loss of indigenous languages was also resulting in a loss of their worldview which held insights about how to engage and cohabit with nature. What was ingrained in their diverse cultures was being lost in translation and an attitude of disengagement.
At the close of the session, a lively discussion ensued between panelists and audience where it was strongly felt that a top-down approach would not prove to be effective as those drafting policies in the nation’s capital were far removed from the realities of life in the Northeast, a region with great natural, ethnic and cultural diversity. It was also agreed that the need of the hour was for people of the Northeast to be able to tell their own stories of conservation and sustainable practices themselves. ‘The mystery of storytelling’, says the award-winning Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, ‘is the miracle of a single living seed which can populate whole acres of human minds’ and at the end of the panel discussion, one walked away with a hunger for more stories, to write and to read, and to finally bring home the power of the written word!
Sinjini Mukherjee is an independent researcher and writer. She is a keen observer of the human condition and feels passionately about politics and philosophy. She is also a fierce lover of animals and the ocean.
The Eastern Himalayan Naturenomics™ Forum has been a platform to foster a dialogue on Rural Futures through the concept of Naturenomics™ and multi-disciplinary collaboration and innovation. The “Rural Futures Framework” catalyzes conservation efforts through designing holistic models for human centric, community based conservation to create social-environmental and economic interdependence.
