Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 9 (Part 1)

Minnie: So welcome Dr. Karthik to our episode. We’re really excited to have you here.

Kartik: Hi Minnie, excited to be here.

Minnie: So we’ve obviously got a huge amount of experience from you in the sea turtle field. There’s a lot of different things we could probably talk about. But to start us off, you’ve been in sea turtle conservation for over three decades.

And there’s maybe an idea that sea turtle conservation is quite a difficult undertaking because of the type of animal that the sea turtle is. And the biology of the animals and how that is quite difficult to research. Could you explain your thoughts on that and how you feel about that idea?

Kartik: Well, I think the biology, as you said, the biology of the species, it doesn’t lend itself to a number of research and science questions. I was teaching a class on study design this morning. And I said to them, if you’re really interested in certain kinds of questions, you don’t want to do manipulative experiments on an animal. You don’t want to choose an elephant, right?

You know, these turtles take 10, 20 years to mature. They leave as hatchlings, you know, are lost for much of their lives from human observation. These aren’t ideal model systems for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to work on.

But if you’re interested in sea turtles, then you have to find ways to understand their life cycles and their life histories. And I think to a certain degree, technology has made more things possible than, three decades ago when I started. There was no genetics. There was no satellite telemetry. There was no stabilized isotope analysis. So we learned about their migration. We learned about their phylogeography and evolution. We’ve learned about their diets and foraging. All of that, you know, because technology came along.

Minnie: Yeah.

Kartik: But the more applied element of this is that people have struggled to understand population trends. You have to understand population trends on the time scales of those animals’ lives, right? So because they live long and start maturing when they’re late, turtles have long generation times.

It means that it takes years or decades for impacts on their populations, either positive or negative, to show up. And I think that’s been the other challenge, which is that you can’t get away from having to understand population trends because that’s something you want to know for conservation. But you have to do it on the time scales of not individual researchers.
You know, projects of PhDs will try to last five years. These projects have to last 20, 25 years. And so those inspirational projects from around the world, George Hughes in South Africa, Archie Carr and Dr. Garrow, you know, to begin with, and then Olympus in Australia, George Belas in Hawaii.

Pretty much when they started out their programmes, they were making this commitment of dedicating the next 40, 50 years of their life or a part of their life to this project.

Kartik: And the fact that we have decades of data from those and other locations is because individuals and, you know, organisations sort of committed themselves to the long haul. And so it’s not as hard to collect that data, but the challenge is in the fact that you have to keep this going over a really long time. So I think there’s two sort of complementary challenges in research on sea turtles. And I feel the community has done a great job of overcoming both of them.

Minnie: That’s really true, actually. If you pick a species that has a lifespan of 80 years and a maturity of 30, you’re going to have to be around for a while to figure out things. I’m no statistician, but I think, for nesting, you have to have at least eight years at the minimum to be able to establish if there has been like an improvement or a change in nesting, like a return because they’re coming back so, you know, so infrequently. I think, and yeah, like you said, like 25, 30 years of data in order to actually establish the numbers required to even work out where conservation efforts need to be.

Kartik: Absolutely. I mean, I’d in fact say more than that, I’d say 15 to 20 years minimum. We’re beginning to see sort of increasing trends. But it’s only because we have about 20 years of data now.

Minnie: Wow.

Kartik: The other challenge that is often perhaps not explicitly mentioned is that nesting numbers are actually not a great index of population size either, because, you know, you’ve got an unknown proportion of the larger population coming, migrating to the breeding ground each year. So it might be 30% of the population, 40%, 14%. You know, you just don’t know what proportion turned up.

Minnie: We just don’t know.

Kartik: So that variation is actually because of that varying proportion and not the actual variation in population size. And there’s annual variation in how many nests a turtle lays, right?

So even that can vary from year to year. So the number of nests on the beach, which is the most accessible piece of data that we have around the world. There’s so many nesting beaches across all the continents that are being monitored by somebody. So we have this enormous amount of nesting beach data, but it’s really not the best way to determine population trends. But unfortunately there isn’t an alternative.

Minnie: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a big thing. We only get access to a very small slither of the life cycle of a turtle, and we’ve had to kind of make do. But like you say, with technology, I guess there’s an increasing ability to track other life cycles, other life stages and males, for example. But I guess we need people like you who are willing to really stick it in for the long haul in order to get this kind of information.

Kartik: Perhaps more a part of my life, because, unlike, I think there’s some people who sort of spend their entire lives doing sea turtle biology and conservation and I’ve got all the frog and bird stuff going on on the side as well. But I think the other, the other thing that was needed for a long-term program was either government support of the sort that they had in South Africa and Australia and so on.

But many of the projects that are sort of have long-term, you know, monitoring records now, so many of them have been funded by the Marine Turtle Conservation Act Fund of the U.S. government. And so it’s basically a part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And, you know, Earl Possard, who was the sort of the main person who drafted the Conservation Act and championed it through and then sort of initiated the program, had this vision that the MTCA would fund projects for, as he put it, for as long as possible.

Because we recognise that all of you guys need to do this for 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know, this is absurd. There’s no other donor that I know that has said, I’ll just fund you for ever.

Minnie: Yeah, I feel like in the scientific community, that’s quite unusual.

Kartik: Yeah! So the fact that I’m here and I’m able to say, you know, we have one of those long-term data is partly because I didn’t have to go out every couple of years and, like, scramble and worry about where my next year’s budget was going to come from.

Minnie: That’s really interesting. I think there are still quite a few, I guess, mysteries, even now in this technology-backed and our sort of more modern understanding of the scientific method. There’s still a lot of things about turtles that we just don’t know. And I was going to ask you about, for example, one of your field sites for the listeners at home is a place called Odisha in India, which is a mass nesting site for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle.

So they nest in huge numbers, and it’s called an Arabada, which is Spanish for arrival. And so these guys all arrive in huge numbers, which is unusual because not many other species do that. It’s exclusive to, as far as we understand it, the Ridley turtles, the Olive Ridleys, and the Kemp’s Ridleys off the coast of the US.

And so you’ve been looking into this site for a very long time. What is our current understanding of this phenomenon? Do we have much more information on how they pick these sites and what this actually is?

Kartik: Yeah, as you said, there’s many things that we still don’t know about sea turtles. And the veteran sea turtle biologist, Jack Fraser. He visited India and helped us out with projects here. We met quite frequently. I think one time maybe at a workshop, I introduced him as a sea turtle expert. And he looked at me and he said, there is no such thing as a sea turtle expert. You know, you cannot be an expert on sea turtles. They will always find a way to do something that, you know, baffles you.

People have been speculating on multiple questions about Arribadas. You know, why do they nest in Arribadas? How do they choose their sites? When and how do they choose to come ashore synchronously? And the dominant hypothesis for the first question about . it is something that’s called a predator association hypothesis, which is that they’re basically swamping predators with so many eggs and hatchlings that even if predators were to take out like, 10%, 20%, and that’s too high a number. If there are 100,000 nests, predators aren’t going to destroy, you know, 20,000 nests, you know. You might lose a few hundred at the most unless you have large-scale erosion and inundation. But predators themselves are going to perhaps destroy like 1% of the nest. So the idea that you basically totally swamp and satiate the predators, both during nesting and again during hatching when they go out.

So when the hatchlings leave the beach, they are basically fish food, right? And so even a single turtle laying 100 hatchlings is a form of predator satiation because out of the 100, some will survive, right? Imagine if you had an aribada with 100,000 nests, you have about 10 million hatchlings going out over the course of four or five days. And, of course, fish realise this. So what probably happens is like fish from all across the coast that are smelling this are lining up saying, oh, buffet.

But there’s still, you know, however large that number is, many of them are going to get through. So why do they do it is likely predator satiation. Why are these the only sea turtles that do it? It’s probably because they’re the smallest species and lay the most shallow nests and therefore are the most susceptible to predation.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that, usually a few days after the nest is deposited, predators can only detect the smell in the first couple of days after the turtle lays the eggs, you know, because obviously there’s a smell. And a few days later, the predation level just sort of drops off. Ridley nests are really shallow.

So even as they, through the period that they’re incubating, as the hatchlings embryos start to develop, predators are going to be able to detect them again, right? And so because they’re shallow, maybe there’s so much more predation pressure. And with feral predators like dogs and wild pigs, if you have beaches anywhere in the world with human settlements nearby, solitary nests probably have a survival of like five to 10%. 90% of them are being predated by dogs and other human subsidised predators.

So historically, maybe there’s massive pressure that predation pressure resulted in them nesting in small groups and the small groups became larger groups. And there’s always this problem that, you know, however large the group is and maybe the groups become too crowded.

Minnie: yeah it can get quite crowded

Kartik: However, you still benefit from going to the group, than nesting solitary, right? And so sometimes there isn’t an effective cap on group size, even though there are costs starting to build up like, you know, other turtles are digging up your nest.

Kartik: So despite the costs, the benefits of taking the chance with the group is still better than going it alone. But I mean, ridley’s do nest both solitary and in Aribada, so maybe they are bet hedging and nesting in Aribada sometimes and solitary at other times. But this is why we think it evolved.

I’ve speculated fairly recently from the fact that most Aribada nesting beaches are near large river mouths, that because of this large sort of biomass that’s there in the sand, not all of it survived, right? A lot of the eggs rot, you know, hatchlings get eaten by crabs. And, you know, when they emerge, there’s this, they’re leaving all of the shells and the organic matter. So there’s often an organic matter buildup that results in both diseases as well as, you know, in Mexico, they’ve had like weevil infestations and so on. And on some of those beaches, hatching success has dropped to less than 5% because of disease and infestation. So solution, if you nested at a location, which is near a river mouth, the beach is more likely to be washed away on a regular basis, right? So there’s a flooding, there’s a, you know, there’s a storm, the river floods, the beach gets washed away. And basically it’s like, the house got cleaned.

Beach is gone and the next year, the next, maybe the next year the turtles come back, there isn’t a good beach for them to nest on, that’s okay. Because a year later there’s been erosion and there’s a little, beautiful little sandbar or a new beach that’s formed at the river mouth, and it’s all fresh. And so I speculate, and I think some people agree with me and others don’t, that a lot of Arribada beaches, maybe they form everywhere, but the ones that are really successful are, many of them seem to be near these prominent river mouths.

That’s sort of a spatial explanation for where they might choose. You could ask the question about why don’t they occur in Africa and so on, which, I mean, I don’t have good answers to any of those questions.

I think large populations have been successful because the beaches were productive in the first place.I think there’s some sort of a threshold that they perhaps reach when, you know, they sort of tip from being high density nesting to synchronised Arribada nesting. And we don’t really know how that happens, but we’ve discovered new beaches in Latin America, and in the Andamans now, at locations where at least in recorded history in the last 40, 50 years or a hundred years, no Arribadas have been recorded there. And so we know that these are new ones.

And so we do know that they form and disappear, not even evolutionary time scales, on ecological scales, decades and centuries, they seem to appear and disappear. So that’s really interesting.

Minnie: That’s great. I was going to ask you, because for the listeners at home, you have a really excellent book, which I love the title of, by the way, called From Soup to Superstar, which is a book specifically about um sea turtles, across India and the kind of history and conservation of them. And you’ve just mentioned that there are nesting sites in Latin America that sort of have collapsed and have disappeared. And then we’ve had new ones form.

Kartik: Yeah, just to sort interject there, when I started working on sea turtles, and maybe till about even 10 years ago, the assumption was that if an Aribara beach disappeared, and perhaps because of human pressure, it was lost forever, right? So you read literature from the 90s about the decline of Ridley populations worldwide. And you’ll find in our own work, in my own writing, the narrative that, you know, the rookery at Devi River Mouth, which is one of the three in Orissa, hasn’t had nesting since 1997. That rookery disappeared. The ones in Suriname disappeared. The beaches in Mexico that have disappeared. So we talk about these as if they’re permanent events, right?

Or, you know, as if it’s a one-directional trend. It wasn’t till about, till the discovery of a couple of these sites, and, you know, it should have occurred to me earlier, because I also work on, you know, on population biology and metapopulation dynamics, where the appearance and disappearance of populations is a part of the population cycle, right? And so all of a sudden, when we discover these, some of us, and I don’t even know if everybody still sort of has fully internalised this, some of us go, sure, there is a human impact. No one’s denying it. But maybe the appearance and disappearance of Aribada sites is a part of the natural cycle. And maybe the disappearance of a site is not as much of a doomsday outcome.

Right? We haven’t had nesting at Devi Rivermouth for the last 25 years, and most of my contemporary turtle conservationists will talk about it as a loss, right?

And I’m like, wait, but you guys don’t know whether they were nesting in Rushikulya before that. It was discovered in 94. Maybe there wasn’t much nesting in Rushikulya, and all they did was shift, right? Now, I can’t tell you this with certainty, but I’m more cautious about inferring disappearance of certain rookeries as like a death knell for the population.

Minnie: A swan song. Yeah. I guess sea turtles just are so long lived and long established that we just don’t know that we haven’t got that information from all of those hundreds of years ago as to what they were up to.

Well, and I guess sort of following on from that then based on your kind of research as an experience, then what do you feel are the most kind of significant threats that turtles face? Is there something that is a big concern for the populations at large?

Kartik: I think the biggest concerns are the overarching global sort of drivers of environmental change, right, which is, you know, climate change, land use change, development in this particular case, coastal development, which includes threats such as light and so on.

And historically, again, there’s been focus on things that are more tangible and sort of more emotive. So even today, for example, in the newspapers in India, you will see in winter, you’ll see articles that say 4,500 more olive ridleys killed this year by trawlers. And, I don’t particularly like to see a dead turtle on a beach.

But if you step back, I point out that the populations in Odisha which we have the actual numbers for, have actually increased by an order of magnitude in the 20 years that we’ve been studying them. My colleague, Bhuvash Pandav, who did his Ph.D. there in the 90s, was recording ballpark estimates, and guessing that there were about 20,000 to 30,000 turtles in those arribadas.

In the early 2000s, the first quantitative estimates are made by another researcher from Odisha, Vasudev Tripathi. And he estimated, I think, 25,000 in one aribada and 75,000 in another. And so after we start monitoring, we’re getting about the same order of magnitude of numbers, right? Since 2015, there’s some years that there have been no arribadas, but when there’s an arribada, it’s between 150,000 and 400,000, right? It’s just, eh, it’s a jump.

Now, is that because there are more turtles nesting there and there are fewer nesting in Gahirmatha, I don’t know that. But what I do know is that that site has shown a marked increase in the last decade. And if there are 5,000 turtles dying in trawler nets or 10,000 turtles dying in trawler nets, it doesn’t seem to be making much difference to the population.

It’s not having an impact, right? And these numbers are, you know, people get, they’re like, but it’s 10,000 turtles. The fact is, I’m not sure I remember the numbers correctly, but they’re harvesting something or taking like a million kangaroos a year for the kangaroo meat industry in Australia. And it’s not even a blip. It’s not even affecting the population a bit.

So actually the numbers that die and whether that has an effect on the population is really a product of the population size and it’s sort of like it’s growth rate, right, depending on, you know, fecundity and survival and all of that. And so in some sense they seem to be doing well locally, and this is also the product of conservation, right? Like to a certain extent people complain that there’s a lot of illegal trawling in Orissa and there is. But the attention that this received and the degree of patrolling that does go on from the forest department and so on, maybe has prevented it from being 25,000 turtles being killed each year and it’s only, it’s 5,000, but that makes a big difference in terms of impact over the years.

Other parts of the world where there’s been very effective conservation, there’s so many places that they’re talking about, so ridley populations have gone up everywhere, you know, Costa Rica, Mexico, it’s just like there’s large ridley populations around the world. And, you know, you mentioned somewhere that they are classified as vulnerable.

I mean, we should come back to that in a minute. But the idea that a species that basically has something like 2 million nests across all of its beaches in the world, you know, in what sort of like frame of conservation do we consider it vulnerable in any way? I think it’s absurd. Do they need conservation measures? Yes.

But are they vulnerable to extinction? I would think no.

And many other sea turtle species as well. There’s places where green turtles have grown so much. Two turtle biologists who started their careers being sort of being like, oh my God, turtles are on the brink of extinction. At a conference in Japan, and I remember this clearly because we had a panel on, going beyond protection and talking about use, two people said they’ve become like cockroaches where I work.

Minnie: Did too good a job.

Kartik: Yeah. The Latin American, they’re like cucaracha. I understand that much Spanish. But see how, but there are other conservationists who will say, oh yeah, there’s lots of them, but they haven’t recovered to their historic levels that they were in the 1600s.

Now, I honestly don’t think those, you know, if there were a million green turtles in the Caribbean in the 1600s, I don’t know, but I personally don’t believe that there was a stable, a million turtles there, and that it crashed in the 20th century.

You know, there’s like a few thousand green turtles in the Lakshadweep, they’re wiping the seagrass out. There’s going to be nothing there for them to eat. There already is nothing there for them to eat, right? So I think they hit these historic highs, eat themselves out of existence, crash, and then the seagrass meadows take some decades to recover, and then they’re like, oh, food again, and then all the numbers are going through the roof. So again, this conservationist idea of there’s a static goal, right? When I have, you know, 100,000 sea turtles, I’ve reached my goal. I don’t think they’ve ever behaved like that historically.

I think they’ve gone up and down, and now we’ve inserted ourselves into the process in the last, I mean, 2,000 years really, but more recently in the last 200 years in a dramatic way.

And, I think, just circling back to my original point, I think over the decades, the focus has been on these tangible things like take and exploitation. People see turtles dying in nets or, you know, people eating turtles and sort of like brings out all these emotions. I mean, places that have mitigated that turtles have bounced back. What are you going to do about climate change?
What happens when the heat temperatures go up by a couple of degrees and you’re producing 80 – 90% females, which is what many models are showing for beaches around the world that in 50 to 60 years time, you’re going to have very, very feminised hatchling sex ratios. So sometimes, you know, I feel like the big problem seems so hard to solve that we end up kind of like, you know, let’s focus on something else.

Minnie: Like you said, that’s quite an emotive and historically interesting point about turtle consumption and how that is often what people get stuck on even now about how important that is to control. But actually really it is about the threats to their habitat that is far more relevant. Maybe Western conservation efforts as well, focused on the consumption far more actually than would be helpful for a population at large.

Kartik: Western and elite, I mean, I won’t take any of the blame away from the Western model of conservation, that’s a point well made but sometimes what’s missing is that, it stems from Western models, sometimes it stems from local models, but there’s also power hierarchies within, within regions, right? And India is this classic example of the whole model of conservation from the Wildlife Protection Act was devised in a very urban elite kind of framing. Consumptive use of anything that’s considered to be worthy of conservation cannot even be discussed. So, sometimes it’s also the imposition of local elite ideologies on a larger community.

Minnie: I think it’s quite taboo really in conservation circles to discuss, for example, I know that in the Arribadas that exist in Costa Rica, they’ve implemented a local take where obviously the people who have historically relied or at least involved turtle consumption in their livelihoods, are now entitled, as they’ve previously historically been, to take eggs from the arribadas.
And that’s been deemed fine because on a numbers game, like you’ve mentioned, that first wave of eggs is unlikely to make it past the next wave of turtles anyway.

Kartik: Exactly!

Minnie: So, they might as well go into the human food chain and actually support the local community. But I think if you maybe talk to some conservationists, there is actually quite a lot of controversy surrounding that, quote unquote, permissive aspect perhaps to consumption and what that kind of means for conservation of turtles as a whole.

Kartik: I don’t understand the controversy at all. One of the things that a few of us have been discussing recently is that if the premise of your argument that people should start consuming turtles was that turtle populations are declining, and you said that I, as the outsider from this community, either foreign or educated or whatever it is, I am aware because of my science that these populations are declining and I want to now educate you and I’m passing a law that you shouldn’t eat these turtles because they’re declining. Well, the premise of this was the science behind it, right? Now that same science is telling us that those populations are going back up.

If your first argument was based on science and not on some emotional, you know, I love turtles and I don’t ever want to see a sea turtle eaten. No, you said it was science. Now, that science is now telling you that those populations have bounced back in some way.

By the same argument, you should be like, oh, you know what, I told you you couldn’t eat it before, you can eat it now because the numbers are back up. Coast Ostional, I don’t know how far the egg take itself goes back, but I think it goes back decades. I think it goes back a very long way.

It started getting regulated more recently, you know, with the last, I guess in the last 30, 40 years with conservationists working over there. So it’s more regulated now, but in the time that the egg take has been recorded, the numbers in Ostional have not gone down. Again, your science is showing that you can take those eggs and the population isn’t affected.

Where’s the controversy here? And funnily enough, the populations inside Nancite, at Playa Nancite, which is inside a national park, and at Gahirmatha in India, which is inside a national park, the populations inside the park, coincidentally, I don’t think this is a, I don’t think this means anything, but the ones that were in the most protected areas have actually declined. Nancite actually like dropped off completely, Gahirmatha has not dropped off so much, but the ones that are doing really well are the ones that in Ostional that actually have use.

And, you know, in Rishikulia they’ve had, you know, people tromping around during the Arribadas, you know, communities fishing over there. And now the forest department, of course, wants to when the Aribada happens, they come in and regulate everything. And I’m like, you know, you guys don’t need to.

The population increased without your help. So to me, my question is what, where’s the controversy here? You said we should base this on science. Sure, let’s base it on science, right?

Minnie: Yep. And then I guess it becomes, actually, we realise that the core of it is there’s quite an emotive aspect as opposed to a data-driven, you know, quantitative assessment.

Kartik: It absolutely is. But if you have emotions, so do the people living on the coast and eating those turtle eggs, right? Then, you know, whose turtle eggs are they? I mean, if it’s your emotion versus their emotion, then they win because they were there first.

Minnie: They were there first. And they’ve been using them a lot longer and they know the deal. So, yeah.

Kartik: Well, that probably leads quite well. I wanted to talk about your organisation. You’re part of the Dakshin Foundation, which you started.

It’s a sort of a marine and coastal conservation organisation in India. And I feel like your programs and your areas of research are quite focused on people first and on the rights of communities and the resource use, as opposed to a lot of other conservation, maybe standpoints, which start with the species first and then kind of trickle down into the benefits for people. What sort of led, I guess, to this kind of standpoint and this sort of vision, more so perhaps than a species focused vision?

Kartik: So, I think, you know, in the conservation field, which emerged, as a movement in the middle of the 20th century, sort of environmental awareness and, books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Archie Carr’s Windward Road sort of brought consciousness of sort of the modern environmental issues, the people that formulated intentionally or otherwise the Western notion of wilderness, right? So, you go back to, Thoreau’s writings and then John Muir and Aldo Leopold and Theodore Roosevelt, who, there’s a famous quote where he, I think he’s talking about Yosemite and he says, a temple grander than any that can be built by man. So, there’s this whole idea of nature, nature in all its pristine glory, right?

And so, my friend, Dan Brockington, who’s a social scientist who plays a role in this narrative, he and I write a spoof column and in one of those, we said this idea of pristine nature is a religion and needs to be given a name and so we call it Pristianity.

And, you know, so this religion of Pristianity is sort of the background for this idea of conservation science as a crisis discipline. But when conservation science appears in the 60s and the 70s, conservation science is conservation biology.

And so, for about three or four decades, the idea of what informs conservation comes from ecologists, you know, journals like Biological Conservation, Conservation Biology has started, all of your textbooks in the 80s are called Conservation Biology, Principles of Conservation Biology, blah, blah, Conservation Biology, right?

Now, it was in the early 2000s that social scientists started to point out and in fact, people like Dan Brockington, who worked in Tanzania and wrote this book about what he called Fortress Conservation. And so, sort of the phrase Fortress Conservation has sort of become a very widely used phrase now, but the idea that the model that we inherited largely from the West was this idea of building these little fortresses and preserving things within it.

And the wider community of social scientists and people that engaged with this pointed out two flaws in this. One was an instrumental flaw and the other is sort of more of a philosophical flaw, right?

The instrumental one was that A – a lot of conservation wasn’t going to be successful because you were going to have negative impacts on local communities, there was going to be pressure, there was going to be resistance, and sometimes you might succeed, but, sustainability of that success was in question.

So, they said, you have to involve communities or people that are engaged with that resource or that area in order to be successful at conservation. This, you know, phrase community-based conservation, all of these became very prominent in their use in the late 90s, early 2000s, stemming from this group. Many of the same people pointed out that a larger problem was the rights-based problem, right?

So, you have, you can say that I don’t really care about that tribal living in that forest, I want to save the tiger, but I know I need the tribal, so I will find a way to involve him, but I personally only care about the tiger. So, sort of a very instrumental, you know, end-oriented framing. On the other hand, you could also say that the things that conservation does are fundamentally human rights violations.

So, in the early 2000s, again, Matt Chapin wrote a wonderful article called: A Challenge to Conservationists where he critiqued the three large NGOs, WWF, TNC, and WCS the major NGOs, and called them out on how their actions were having these negative consequences for people. And there was a classic article later expanded into a book by Mark Dowie, I think he was the one who coined the phrase conservation refugees, and he was pointing out that conservation has resulted in more displacement of people than most human activities.

So, I think, you know, and again I don’t know the exact numbers, but I think, it’s like there’s war and there’s dams and then there’s conservation, right?

And so, these are fundamentally human rights abuses that we don’t tolerate in other spheres of life. So, the shift in what conservation should be was framed as both, you know, a rights-based problem as well as an instrumental problem. And my criticism of a number of NGOs that do have people-related programs is, I speculate or, you know, this is my feeling that many of them do it for instrumental reasons.

It’s not perhaps that they really care about the people, but they know that they need the people in order to succeed, right? And I personally never felt that was adequate. And in the early 2000s, when I was working on sea turtles in Orissa, one of my co-founders of Dakshin, Arathi Sridhar approached me because she was actually working on a project for the International Collective in Support of Fish Workers, ICSF.

And she was documenting the impacts of turtle conservation on communities over there. And so, she met me to gather some literature that I had, you know, old-fashioned and filing cabinets and little puddles of paper.

And we started talking and I had the discretionary sort of funding to offer her a position. And I said, why don’t you come aboard as the social scientist and why don’t we try and find the middle ground in between conservation and people’s rights in Orissa? And we, in fact, exactly 20 years ago, we started this thing called the Orissa Marine Resources Conservation Consortium. That hasn’t been very successful, but the idea was that it was a platform for both turtle conservationists, as well as fishery unions, for all of them to come ashore and sort of like duke it out there and say, look, what are the things that we can agree on? While I was working there in the early 2000s, I also, I’d also sort of recognized that the path to turtle conservation in Orissa was by promoting the fisheries laws.

The fisheries laws prohibited the fishing by larger trawlers within five and 10 kilometres of the coast, depending on their size. And the conservationists were all sort of flogging these laws in public as, as the government must implement this law to save turtles, right? And I kept saying, why, why are you bringing turtles into it?

Say the government must implement these laws to protect small-scale and artisanal fishermen. Let’s get small scale artisanal fishermen on our side. In this instance, if we’re working with the artisanal fishermen and saying, all we’re doing is protecting your livelihoods, the turtles will be taken care of as a side product.

And in fact, like the phrase that I used to use then was, you know, from incidental catch to incidental conservation. And the idea of incidental conservation sort of like became something that I thought needed to be central to all conservation work, right? So as Dakshin, we established Dakshin a few years later in 2008.

You know, Arthi from the outset has sort of had the coastal governance, resource governance program, which sort of focuses on community leadership and governance. You know, my colleague manages the fisheries program. I, you know, I run the flagships program.

So we’ve had slightly more ecology focused and slightly more like social focus, but right from the beginning of Dakshin’s form, our idea was, we started out saying people say conservation, how do I get communities involved? When we formed Dakshin, we were like, how do we give them equal emphasis? But this idea of this incidental conservation was sort of growing in my head.

Right. And at one point I was like, guys, let’s just throw this conservation business out of the window as an overt outcome. And it’s captured by a beautiful phrase that we are only initiating a sort of a social media campaign on now, but one of our young researchers doing his PhD in Canada.

And he just joined Dakshin and he was hearing us say this sort of thing. And he says, he said, then why do we talk to the fishermen about conservation? We should just tell them, ‘Khane ke liye bachao’, which means in Hindi ‘ save it to eat it’.

And he was like, why do we bother telling them about conservation? And so for me, you know, khane ke liye bachao, you know, save to savor or whatever it is, is actually a phrase that captures my idea of incidental conservation even more beautifully. It’s a lovely way of phrasing it.

And, and I think in our campaign, we’re trying to sort of point out that the eating part is not like just, I mean, of course we mean, you know, eating fish as well, but we can also think of it metaphorically, right? That there’s so many cultural ways of engaging with biodiversity that it doesn’t all have to be about, I want to protect it to see it, right?

It can be any number of different ways that we have to find, we have to be pluralistic about, about accepting that.

So that’s how Dakshan switched. We never started out as a conservation focused organisation. We were like, okay, let’s, let’s try and balance it.

But we actually, decided to throw the balance away because we felt that the emphasis on conservation was not a necessary tool in succeeding at it. If you know what I mean.

Minnie: No, it’s really interesting. I can, I can draw parallels. For example, this comes up in my own profession. I’m a veterinary surgeon and frequently people will say, or at least a lot of vets, even vet students, you know, younger members of the profession or people who want to be vets will say, well, I love animals. And I’m like, well, it’s amazing.

But actually if you then tell me in your next breath that you don’t like people and that’s why you want to be a vet, then you have made a mistake because especially if you choose to work in maybe a more companion animal setup, the people, especially then are at the absolute core of everything you do and you, and you cannot separate the person from the animal. And to do so will mean you don’t do your job very well because you will not be able to balance the needs of the people and their animals and, and actually end up coming up with an outcome that suits both.

But actually, if you look after the people, then the animal will get looked after by proxy of you looking after the people. We cannot actually disengage the two. And to do so, like you say, is missing a huge swathe of, of benefit.

Kartik: This is a really interesting analogy with veterinarians. And I mean, I do have a theory about why this comes about in ecology. And it’s exactly the same in veterinary sciences.

It’s because when at the age of 18, when you choose an academic path forward, you’re choosing it on the basis of, you know, I hate working in the lab. I hate genetics. I love being in the forest. I love animals. I love wildlife. I love watching elephants. I love watching turtles. Similarly, I like dogs and cats and I like, you know, I like livestock and, you know, I want to spend my life, caring for animals. So people make their career choice paths at that early professional academic stage based on this, I love animals.

Now, nobody told them when they were going to become a veterinarian or a conservationist that actually your work is more about people than about animals.

Minnie: Always

Kartik: Nobody told me that you spend most of your time in front of a desk, right? As an ecologist, my job is, go out and work with people. My real job is, is email, you know, worksheets and, and occasionally analysis, not even something as, you know, as fun as data analysis, even that’s fairly rare, but for editing people’s word documents. So, you know, the, but this is the, the more important consequence is that people end up in these professions as ecologists or veterinarians. And all of a sudden they’re like, no, you know, conservation is about people and so many folks don’t want to accept that because that’s not why they got into the business.

Minnie: Yeah.

Kartik: No, you know what? I’m just going to continue collecting this, this really fine scale data on ray abundance in forests until I can, you know, point it out to the third decimal point and that will save tigers. Like, Eugene Odom wrote, predators need prey and explained why in his ecology textbook in 1944. That’s as much as we need to know. I’m, I mean, I’m exaggerating of course, but it, you know, it’s the, I think the reason that many people don’t, for themselves personally, or even in their organisations go far enough to work with people is because, simply because that’s not why they got in. And then, they’re not willing to actually acknowledge that that really is what conservation is about.

Outro: Thank you for listening. Tune in for Part 2, where the conversation with Dr Kartik continues.