Trophic Cascade

Hurt Hawks - Robinson Jeffers, 1928

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits

The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom

And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him??

?At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;

Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

?????????

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality

It all started with an article that "Nilgais", a type of Indian antelope, were running wild in huge numbers in Bihar and destroying crops. I have personally seen an accident in Rohtak, Haryana when Nilgais suddenly galloped across a road forcing a car to go off road. It Is not the beginning but the terminal symptoms of a habitat that has gone berserk because man took out all the predators at the top of the food change.

It would sound like a sensationally brutal statement to say that the Sunderbans survive because of the Tiger. More than a thousand “Tiger widows” live in the Sunderbans, husbands, brothers, fathers snatched while fishing for crabs or honey hunting in the dense marshy woodlands. A tragedy that hides the fact that if there had been no tigers, the Sunderbans would have been cut down or burnt down to plant cash crops. Kolkata, the mega city approximately 100 kilometers downstream has had 4 devastating tropical cyclones in the past 150 years. 3 of them in the past 15 years and 2 of them in 3 years. As population put pressure on the Sundarbans, Sundari trees that give it its name were hacked down. Mangroves uprooted. Salinity, soil erosion followed. High sea temperatures are now creating more cyclones and a barren land is powerless to resist.

In the Yellowstone National Park, wolfs were killed off, Elk, Moose and bison overgrazed the land. Oaks, pines and honeybush that held together stream edges was eaten away by deer causing erosion, meandering streams straightened, the flows increased, beaver disappeared, fish species declined, birds like ospreys and eagles declined. By removing the wolf – an entire system was degraded over decades. This process is so slow that we humans do not even realize the consequences. The reintroduction of the Grey Wolf is being fought legally and through poaching by big ranchers in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and other states as they fear for their business – cattle.

Such examples are increasing in Europe and Africa, Brazil and Costa Rica, as for India my hope is withering with an increasingly environment destructive population that is growing up far removed from Nature. In India, there are no more wild places, where once I trekked in the upper reaches of the Garhwal and Himachal Himalayas, going for days without meeting people, there is only destruction of forests that took hundreds of years to grow. By planting a few trees you cannot make up for the lost bio diversity.

The poster child of such destruction remains the Amazon forest, shrinking by 30% to logging, growing soybeans etc. The demand from China is insatiable. Most of the poached ivory went to China and Taiwan. Poached Rhino horn to the Middle East. Millions of sharks killed year year for their fins.

The overfishing of the rich waters of the Somalian coast has indirectly led to piracy coming back into fashion in the 21st Century. Advanced fishing trawlers from Japan, Thailand and Vietnam have destroyed fishing stock of the entire east coast of Africa – from Senegal to Mozambique. Japan is again hunting whales. Legally.

?Closer home in Bengal, India a fish called “Hilsa”, a type of Indian salmon once found till Agra is now almost lost as it spawns in rivers - grows up in the sea then returns to sweetwater.

?Why ? Fishermen are using fine nets to catch juvenile fish, dams block their migratory path and surprisingly Bangladesh has managed conservation efforts so now a few million dollars worth of fish is imported, the prices rise, precious foreign currency gets used up.

The vegans think they are saving the planet. If they only knew the millions of hectares of rainforest culled every year to grow soybeans for soymilk or almonds………….removing even a single species from its natural environment has a cost that is least understood, sometimes many years hence and sometimes never

We know what is happening, we cannot do much as there is no political will. All that talk of Earth being the only home is just that. Talk.

Trophic cascade is a catastrophe but we just don't know it yet!