Women collecting wood

In India, a high density of people is dependant on forest products in order to cook, to heat the houses and to feed the cattle. This has been a tradition for decades if not centuries among Indian villagers. Wood is indeed a privileged energy source since it is free of cost and is, for now on, still available. But this wood collection is step by step destroying the ecosystems of the forests. The forest products collected which are bark, dead and green wood and grass all participate in the balance to keep forests in good health. The barks are protecting the trees from any aggression; the green wood is vital for trees and especially for young trees to grow; the dead wood, by decomposing, plays a major role in the richness of the soil, creating micro ecosystems and the grass gives wild herbivores a source of food. A degradation of any of those elements is putting the others in danger.

Smokeless chulah

But the villagers can not be blamed so easily. The government is given almost no alternative to this wood collection. Liquefied Petrol Gas can be purchased at low price (≈200INR) but for poor villagers, this alternative is still too much expensive. The only way to get energy supply and moreover for free is by collecting wood. The best approach to reduce the wood consumption and therefore the wood collection is to provide sustainable alternatives to the villagers for cooking like smokeless chulah and solar ovens. The introduction of those alternatives may be hard at the beginning but they are necessary to change the wood consumption pattern and reduce the impact of the villagers on the forests. Another way to reduce the wood consumption is to give the opportunity to the villagers to raise their monthly income and make them able to afford energy supplies else than wood. The Lantana furniture making project serves this aim.

Woman making wood bundle

The wood collection is, one must never forget, a hard job. Villagers (mostly women) go early morning and walk sometime several kilometres inside the jungle in order to find wood supply. They spend around 2 hours collecting and cutting branches with a dharati. After that, they make wood bundles and tie them with green barks. They walk then back home with loads of dozens of kilograms on their heads. Sometime, they go twice a day in the jungle to get more wood if the weather is good, if more wood is needed or if children do not go to school. When asked, the women often say that they do not like going inside the jungle. First because they are afraid of tigers but also because it enable them to do work at home.

Wood bundles are to be sold

The collection of wood serves two purposes. One is for the use in the houses, the other one is to have it sold. For the second one, the problem is even bigger since the collection of wood can be seen as an usual job, and the forests as money suppliers. The more you take from the forests, the more money you will get. This excessive collection can only be stopped or at least reduced if an economic alternative is proposed to those villagers.

Woman attacked by a tiger in June 2009

Those ladies are incredibly brave, especially considering the fact that the collection of wood happens in areas where potentially lethal animals (tiger, leopard, elephant, bears, snakes, etc) can be met. Since December 2008, four attacks on villagers by tigers have been encountered, one leading to death. Those attacks are mostly due to the fact that villagers, by going inside the jungle, are stepping on big cats territories. That intrusion is sometime severely punished. When they are moving in groups (more than 4 persons), the villagers are safe from tiger attacks. But when they separate on the collection point, they are much more vulnerable and can not always look around for their safety since they have to search for wood.

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About Tiger in Red Wether

Asia in the twenty-first century as China’s shadow grows, Asia poised on the edge of change – and a woman exploring its threatened jungles for the animal they call the soul of Asia. Is this the tiger’s last moment before extinction or can it be saved? Who is trying to save it, and how? Are there any tigers left, and if so, where? After ending a long relationship, award-winning poet Ruth Padel finds herself inexplicably drawn to the great animal solitary; potent, myth-laden, and now gravely endangered. She comes across an advert for a cheap trip to India and visits a tiger reserve. So begins a remarkable journey, and an obsession. With her granny’s opera glasses and a pair of cheap Tunisian trainers, asking how and where do tigers live and what are their chances, she plunges into tiger myths, tiger dreams, and leech-infested jungles.

Among the cobras, bears and golden langurs living tangled lives in the tiger’s shadow from Nepal to Siberia, Karnataka to Indonesia, and with poems in her pocket to keep her going, she meets tigers, leopards, bee-keepers, forest guards, espionage teams pitted against ruthless poachers. She kayaks through rapids, camps on rainforested mountains, but above all she travels with and questions “defenders of the wild”: the scientists and conservationists struggling to protect the forest and its denizens from armed poachers, and from the mining, logging and development mafias that threaten the world’s last remaining wilderness.

What does wild mean? Why does it matter that wilderness should continue, that wild tigers still exist, when there are thousands of tigers in zoos and always will be? How, faced with wildlife crime, poaching and the loss of forests, do you deal with despair? What about the symbols and meanings we load the tiger with, which lead us both to revere and destroy it?

There are animal books, there are travel books, there are getting over someone books, but you don’t usually find them all together. This one is about loss and survival, poetry and science; about what you find when you enter the forest. Secret remote Bhutan, the taiga of Far East Russia, vulnerable to the mafia and changing forest law; the jungles of Laos, full of landmines and rapidly being emptied by the wildlife trade; snowy forests of north-east China; equatorial Sumatran rainforest with its illegal chainsaws, landslides, and tiger shamans.

This is a wise, captivating and above all a timely study in natural history, a beautiful piece of travel literature driven by deep reverence for nature, wildlife and science, and a meticulously focussed snapshot of Asia on the edge of irreversible environmental change. It opens your eyes to wider issues of bio-diversity in all their urgency and humanity, to knife-edge moral questions about a balance between poverty and conservation.

Finally, Tigers in Red Weather is an exploration of love – a quest for generous disenchantment, for falling out of love while honouring the past. It is an inner as well as an outer journey.

To know more about Ruth and her work please log on to www.ruthpadel.com

He then moved to Delhi and was introduced to a whole new world here. The diversity in the forests in India just struck him. When he first went to Vanghat near Corbett, he was captured by the beauty of the landscape. The winding rivers, the beautiful sunsets, the alarm calls… it was as if life was meant to be that way.

Man-animal conflict : herd of elephant walking in villagers' fields

His regular visits to Corbett National Park and Uttarakhand has further stoked his passion for conservation. Carbon credits has captured his interest since then as an economic incentive for large scale conservation. He has been involved with carbon auditing pilot projects in Warangal, A.P and generating sustainable revenue from the resulting carbon credits. He is looking to extend this to Corbett as well, primary through large scale adoption of solar power and other eco-friendly means. He is confident that this model of conservation will prove beneficial for both man and animal and to the earth as a whole.

The following poem summarizes his feelings for the jungles:

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes,

By the gushing river and the music on its roar;

I love not man the less, but Nature the more

adaptation of a poem by Lord Byron

“I hope my future generations will get to experience what I have, if not more. These jungles just deserve to stay!”