Planted Memories: Of Man, Elephant and Conflict

The interaction of animal and human lives covers many fascinating stories. MAUREEN O' KICKI narrates her story of working in reducing man-animal conflict between farmers and elephants in Assam.

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"THANK you for bringing Jesus Christ into my life," a member of the Udalguri community reforestation project, told me. He spoke only a little English, but more than my Assamese, the primary language of Assam in India. After taking a picture with me, he returned to his work at the nursery. I was touring a native plant nursery in the heart of a half restored jungle in northeast India.

For millennia, a dense tree canopy provided abundant food and habitat for local tribes and native fauna, including wild Asian elephants. However, two decades ago, a major landslide north of the forest caused the Brahmaputra River to reroute it uprooting and washing away the trees, leaving the area barren. Human activities, development, and climate change were responsible for the landslide.

Now, after almost twenty years, the district Gethsemani Joint Forest Management Committee has restored fifty percent of the native flora. While there is now enough foraging material for elephants to return to the area, the human population expanded in their absence, leading to increased human-elephant conflicts. I traveled to India to learn about community-led initiatives to reduce these conflicts.

If you stand at the Bhutan and Assam border, which has a 2500-foot elevation, you have a clear view of the lands that lie directly south of the jungle-in-the-making. I came to this spot the night before my nursery tour when I first arrived at Elephant Country Camp, an elephant-fortified lodging on the periphery of the forest restoration project. After almost two days of travel, including a flight from San Francisco to New Delhi, a twelve-hour layover, a three-hour flight to Guwahati, Assam, and a four-hour car ride straight north, my first stop was to see the sunset on the Himalayan mountain range.

Earlier in the day, I had an unobstructed aerial view of the Himalayas from above. Cruising at 31,000-38,000 feet in the air, our plane just cleared the 30,000-foot peak of Mount Everest. There was no visible life from that height, only an enormous chiseled-sculpted rock formation erupting from the ground with billowy cloud formations hovering around its peaks. The snow-capped mountains stretched for miles – two hundred fifty miles to be exact.

I stood at the foothills of the Himalayas, watching the water cascade into multiple rivers, knowing that it originated from the "water tower to the north," the majestic Himalayas. The small town at the base of the foothills, at the intersection of Bhutan and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, is called Bhairabkunda. Known for its two rivers, the town is a popular destination for local and non-local Indians. With the backdrop of the Himalayas, the overlook of the Gethsemane human-made forest, and the sounds of the rushing rivers, one feels completely immersed in the natural world. Crowded airports and noisy roads evaporated from my mind.

Herds of fifty to a hundred hungry elephants raid subsistence farmers' crops, severely damaging property and life.

(Courtesy: Ramesh Menon)

My host, Saaksh, told me that we are in the Bodoland Territorial Region, a semi-autonomous region in Northern Assam. Members of the reforestation project come from various local communities, including Bodo, Nepalese, Adivasi, Bengali, and Assamese. Like the man who thanked me for Jesus and assumed that an American in Assam must be a Christian missionary, I made my own assumptions about India. Though I knew India contained twenty-nine states with a dizzying array of ethnic-religious diversity and geo-diversity, including tropical forests, deserts, and the Himalayas in the north, my main impression of India was that it was hot and crowded with millions of people breathing polluted air.

Newspapers had reported that breathing Delhi's air was as harmful as smoking fifty cigarettes a day. A mix of car exhaust fumes, trash burning, fallow crop field burning, construction dust, and weather conditions caused severe air pollution. A government advisory cautioned people to stay indoors. The toxic air quality of India's capital lends a sense of urgency to the reforestation and sustainability projects in this part of the country. No other Indian state wants to become the next New Delhi.

When the sunlight faded by the river's edge, we picked up a bottle of Bhutanese peach wine, Zaraon, and headed back down the road, a few miles to our lodgings. We drank our sweet wine in the dark, with a little light shining on us from solar-powered lanterns. Electricity in this area is only available for a few hours a day, so back-up solar chargers for cell phones and lanterns are necessary. In the distance, we heard sounds of revelry, including music, crowds, and firecrackers. It was the festival of Durga Puja, an annual ten-day Hindu festival that pays homage to the goddess Durga. It was also the time for rice harvesting.

Tea estate owners must also have a human-elephant conflict management plan that includes outreach to their tea workers on how to minimise elephant-human conflicts.

In the air, the smell of hay was potent; the sweet smell of rice less so— unless you were an elephant. Our olfactory senses cannot detect the odor from rice paddies, but an elephant can smell the scent miles away, and they will leave their denuded forests in search of this high-carb food. Herds of fifty to a hundred hungry elephants raid subsistence farmers' crops, severely damaging property and life. One promising community-based project to reduce crop-raiding elephants is an elephant-friendly tea certification program.

Because the Indian government did not enforce the Wilderness Protection Act of 1972 that preserved elephant territory, elephant habitat has been degraded and replaced by agricultural fields, dams, and freeways. In response, elephants have sought cover and water on tea farms that abut their dwindling and diminished forests; elephants do not eat tea leaves. But tea farms are not always a safe refuge for pachyderms. Illegal fencing on tea farms causes painful electrocution; young elephants slip and drown in wide irrigation ditches, and unsecured pesticides can lead to death by poison. If tea farmers eliminate these dangers, create paths to allow elephants safe passage through their tea fields, and protect local habitat, they are close to having their tea certified as elephant-friendly.

Prioritising the workers' and elephants' safety is a strong selling point for consumers in Europe and America who are willing to pay a premium price for elephant-safe tea. The goal of the elephant-friendly tea project is to help communities in wild elephant movement zones benefit economically and live safely with elephants who have long been part of their cultural and natural heritage.

In Hinduism, elephants are the reincarnation of Lord Ganesha, an elephant-headed god. In every elephant, one reforestation crew member told me, Hindus see Ganesha, so they must love and respect these sacred animals.

The morning after I arrived, I headed to the forest nursery with staff members from Elephant Country Camp. Forest restoration is a crucial component to help elephants exist in the wild and not become dependent upon raiding farm crops. When there is enough food in the forests, elephants will not venture out to human landscapes unless the reward outweighs the risk. Within minutes of entering the forest, I saw my first wild elephant footprint.

The base of an elephant's foot is about 13" in length and width. My companions immediately stopped to listen for the sounds of elephants nearby. I asked them what we are supposed to do if we see elephants. "If they are charging us, we climb up a tree," replied Taren, a young Bodo reforestation crew member. While I was flattered that my companions thought that I could shimmy up a tree, I knew that only a surge of adrenaline and shaving off ten years from my age would make that a possibility. A few minutes before, I had hoped to see a wild elephant, a dream since my childhood, when I first saw an elephant in chains at a zoo. But without any protection or noise deterrents with us and knowing that my only protection was my speed and agility, I wanted to return to our camp quickly.

(Courtesy: Ramesh Menon)

We came across a few more footprints, including a mother and baby elephant print, where there was a small concentric circle within a larger circle—evidence of how closely mothers and their babies travel together. By now, we had stopped talking to concentrate on locating the camera traps and listening for any rustling sounds from the forest. Fallen bamboo trees, with their leaves broken off, also told us that elephants had been in the vicinity. It was a gratifying sight for the reforestation crew members to see evidence that elephants were eating some of their maturing plantings.

After locating the camera traps, we replaced the batteries, tip-toed out of the forest, and met up with the rest of our group who were waiting for us in the jeep. It was a bumpy ride but preferable to the nail-biting ride on the smooth asphalt road the day before, where my airport driver from Guwahati to the Udalguri District wove in and out of traffic, coming within inches of bikes, buses, goats, and children, all the while holding his hand on the horn. When we arrived at the managed forest site, the crew members told us how they rotated shifts, groups of five men staying overnight once a week in a treehouse-like structure made from concrete. The crew keeps watch over the forest for poachers of all things – elephants, monkeys, pangolins – even trees. If they see elephants heading towards a village, they sound an alarm. The treehouse-like structure allows elephants to pass under it, for the safety of both the men and elephants.

The forest crew eagerly showed us their nursery teeming with over a hundred varieties of native flora, including many elephant favourites such as elephant apples, bananas, and bamboo. A placard over the nursery displayed the name of the project: Gethsemane. It is an Aramaic word meaning olive press. Aramaic is a Semitic language that was spoken at the time of Jesus (and is still spoken in some parts of Syria), whereas Jalpai is the Assamese word for olive.

What memories are being planted in the Assam forest? 

Elephants are long-lived animals like humans, and they are known to have incredible memories, such as remembering water sources from a half-century ago. Some elephants in Assam must be old enough to remember the time before the forest washed away. They would remember being part of herds of elephants descending from Bhutan and crossing over the northeast border along the Dhanshiri River. That was when they still numbered in the hundreds of thousands, not just a few thousand like today.

Geopolitical land boundaries have no meaning to elephants. For thousands of years, their survival depended on having access to large tracts of forested habitat and flowing rivers. In turn, elephants shaped landscapes through constant movement and foraging, making them what scientists call "ecosystem engineers." Elephants made what was to become the state Assam their home long before humans did.

Planting memories. By restoring the forests, Project Gethsemane crew members are bringing back the elephants' memories of their sacred land.

Thank you for bringing Ganesha into my life, I thought, as we drove away from the forest nursery.

(Maureen O'Kicki is doing her MA in Nonfiction writing at the Johns Hopkins University. She has traveled extensively in India over many years and built up an impressive collection of essays on environmental issues at the intersection with culture and politics. Views are personal.)