Recognizing and responding to the crisis at hand
Ankita Rajasekharan
All creatures on Earth influence the health of the planet. Be it a burrowing ant in the foundation of our homes, a floating kelp in the ocean, a mushrooming fungi colony on a log of dead-wood in the forest, a herd of elephants walking across jungles and savanna, or even the now attempted revival of the long extinct mammoth! And, certainly us humans. No other species in the recent centuries has had as much of an impact on the health of the planet as our own. A species that has and continues to have an influential role in the increasing long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns can’t be powerless in also having an influential role in now responding to the consequences of these long-term shifts, i.e., climate change. Climate change, as it is today, isn’t indicative of a thriving planet. In its wake, it has left several creatures, including human communities struggling for every-day wellbeing, be it in habitat loss, resource scarcity, or loss of nature and connection. A species with our influence cannot shy away from finding ways to respond to the very much immediate crisis of climate change. The means and methods of climate action are many. Sharing within this article, stories of five individuals and their methods of responding to climate change in their own communities and spaces of influence.

Arun. V is one among the group who founded and works within the trust – The Forest Way, based in Thiruvannamalai. As defined by them, the core questions they engage with include ‘what we can do to restore wild lands, how we can live sustainably, how we grow our food, how our children learn, how we ourselves continue learning, and how we relate to both our fellow humans and all non human life.’ Being a child in a family that moved around plenty owing to a parent with a transferable job, Arun got to explore several villages as a child. As a young adult, he moved to Bombay and was taken aback by the stark contrast of the industrial lifestyle to everything he had experienced up until then. He quickly realized that so much of life there was in confrontation with things he cared about. And there began his continued engagement with the question of ‘what do I truly believe in and how is that in contradiction to what I do’. He recognizes that while action cannot change the past, it can certainly influence the present and significantly so.
Arun’s work in Thiruvannamalai began with a re-wilding journey. Alongside others, he supported and worked on reforestation programs, creating fire-lines, planting trees and building nurseries of native species. In 30 years, the community was able to protect and keep 180 unique native species of plants and trees. Today, they have reached a saturation point with planting trees. What used to be a 15,000 trees a year planting project is now regenerating itself naturally. With this came revival of species and healthier biodiversity and weather ecosystems. What used to be a hot and dry habitat 80 years ago, is now a wet and humid ecosystem.
Education is one of the key ways that Arun responds to the climate change crisis. The Climate Change Curriculum has been and continues to be a work in progress while also being rolled out actively for schools and individuals to access and engage with. Most climate change response, he finds, centres around temperature increase and carbon dioxide emissions. Arun believes that tinkering around with carbon is not enough anymore, it only has the effect of delaying the impact of climate change. We need more revolutionary changes that enable root change. This comes from the ways in which we use resources and our consumption practices. The curriculum encourages participants to reflect deeply on these aspects and take action in whatever capacity possible. Some among the many themes in the modules available include – sentience and sapiens, women and the environment, understanding power, growing food. The hope is that a participant will engage with two or three themes per year since each module goes into great depth in truly understanding it, encouraging self-thought and reflection, and finding ways to act and respond. Actions are most often localized, but the understanding is rooted in local and global perspectives. The communities that are having to take action aren’t always the ones contributing to the problem but are required to respond in whatever way they can for they face the immediate consequences.
Amidst the rather energy-draining challenge of having to convince individuals of the threat of climate change, Arun grounds himself and his work in the question of ‘We have a say in what we do with our lives. Are we exercising that? Am I holding the narrative of pointlessness or one of being action-oriented? In aligning with the solution, there is happiness.’

Charlotte Jeffries, in a very short span of her lifetime, has moved from holding deep admiration for the natural environment to also working on protecting it. A childhood spent with family holidays that always had an element of the natural environment gave her an early start in nourishing her connection to nature. What started as an internship during her undergraduate program in biotechnology, has her now contributing to Palluyir Trust, an organization working towards making nature-education a part of mainstream school curriculum. She is also a fellow of the Earth Education program at YouCan (Youth Conservation Action Network).
Her core work includes designing and facilitating experiences for young people and children to observe nature, which is then connected to realities of what is happening to these pockets of nature. Living in the coastal city of Chennai, she guides shorewalks, engaging with the youth on first taking note of the biodiversity within the ecosystem and then diving into the quick depletion and loss of these ecosystems owing to human activities such as sand-mining, release of industrial pollutants and waste into the water-bodies, etc. Engaging youth from vulnerable communities, she has found is extremely impactful. These are the communities that are immediately impacted by climate change even while being those that have almost negligible part in the cause of the problem. Yet, empowering them with strengthening their connection to their land, reclaiming their ecosystems and enabling them to secure their livelihood and space is deeply called for.
She states tackling misinformation as one among her significant challenges. She shares the example of ocean pollution and ghost nets. Fishing communities are often blamed and held responsible for polluting the waters with their ghost nets. Charlotte points out that the artisan fishing folk are not the ones using mechanized boats or leaving their nets in the ocean. They care too much about their equipment, which come at a significant cost to abandon them in the water after use. Further, they have an intuitive and ancestral understanding of their ecosystem, knowing which type of net to use based on the fish being fished out, when to let the fish be so they may reproduce and grow, when to stop fishing not emptying out the ocean. It is the commercial fishing that causes this pollution. Even more so with the developing culture of associating food with status and prosperity; shark-fin soup hasn’t been a local delicacy in these parts and yet there is now demand for it through the seasons. This means an increase in non-seasonal consumption, over-fishing and disregard for the breeding season.
While the need of the hour, she recognizes, is to quickly become aware and act on mitigating climate change, Charlotte understands that it continues to be a slow process to get people involved. Even more so when there is a commonly-held value system of ‘nature is free, so nature education should be free’. Working in the space of nature education and citizenship empowerment comes with its challenges, even as it continues to be a dire need for today’s children and young individuals.

Ismat Fathi, now a Clean Construction Manager at C40 Cities traces her journey of being an environment-protector back to her childhood days of watching her mother care for and tend to a home-garden. At a very young age, she realized that in nature, she finds vastness and boundlessness. In seeing vastness, one feels vastness she discovered and also that she thrived in that state of mind. Ismat would find this admiration for the natural environment surface while studying architecture in how quickly and jarringly the contrast of natural infrastructure and concrete architecture stood out. She chose in all her internships and work to engage with green and sustainable architecture, learning ways to use natural materials and design in creating buildings. She saw the coming together of economics, people and nature in these projects, even if sometimes challenging to find a profitable balance of all three elements. Owing to an accident that left her unable to easily visit building sites as an architect for a while, she found herself working on sustainability and cities, creating experiences for children to engage with these ideas. She observed that a single person’s influence goes only part of the way in ensuring thriving communities on sustainable models of living, and that policy is what brought in scale. She then went on to study environmental management and policy at Lund University, Sweden.
Cities are dense concentration of civilizations. Population and migration to urban settings continue to be on a rise, which among other things also demands for increased infrastructure in urban environments. Construction contributes to 23% of global green house gas emissions. There is operational emission in keeping a building running which may be addressed by using energy efficient solutions such as solar panels, recycled water, etc. Then there is also embodied emission which comes from the materials being used to construct – where is the material being transported from, how is it processed, what happens to demolition waste, etc. Ismat now works on creating awareness of these aspects of construction and offering technical and knowledge assistance to those in power to take into account these aspects and choose more environment-protecting means in their designs and plans while taking up urban construction projects.
Getting people to acknowledge that what we live in today, is a world with a climate emergency has been a deep challenge, she says. “I don’t know if there is hope, but I cannot watch the doom. So, I do what I can,” Ismat holds while she navigates her way working to mitigate climate change, while also actively finding ways to be joyful in her life and nurturing her connection to the natural environment.

Yuvan Aves is a nature-educator, naturalist, activist, and a writer. For a large part of his life, nature has been a space for healing and meaning. He has been working in the space of nature-education and action for over 10 years now. He works within a school program with 2.5 to 17 year olds on themes including landscape and biodiversity observation, farm environments, organic agriculture and citizenship. Children and adults seem to have an increasingly shrunk self-hood that doesn’t include other lifeforms. There isn’t a sense of ‘inter-being’. A lot of Yuvan’s work is in creating opportunity to discover this state of inter-being experientially. The Palluyir Trust for Nature Education and Research came to be within this quest, with an intent to be an equalizer for and from nature-learning. A group of passionate naturalists work together to reach out to children and young individuals across social and economic backgrounds to educate and provide learning experiences within the sphere of nature and environmental learning. ‘Seashells’ is one among the several resources available on open access to learners and facilitators to study ocean and shore ecosystems.
Protecting spaces that are crucial climate buffers is another core aspect of Yuvan’s work. Several protected and vulnerable spaces remain prone to industrial threat. Bringing awareness to and about these spaces in his writing and advocacy is one way he responds to the threat. Yuvan also recognizes that for land-rooted people, the threat of climate change is rather abstract. There are more immediate concerns of livelihoods and encroachments. He finds ways to engage with communities starting from immediate concerns and connecting them to the larger reality of climate change while discovering means to take action and empower communities to respond effectively.
Amidst challenges of systemic threats and the unimaginative-ness and disconnectedness of policy makers, Yuvan continues to work on creating and enabling spaces for more and more people interested in taking up nature and environmental protection and education work. This takes on several forms such as writing regularly for publications to bring awareness, creating activity books on bird-migration, local environmental history, the Wilderness game, etc., running a six-month internship – Urban Wilderness Walks (with the Madras Naturalists’ Society). Finding personal happiness in his own connection to nature and recognizing his place within it seems to be at the core of his understanding of the environmental reality we live in and in how he chooses to mitigate and respond to it. Yuvan perceives his place in the world within a multi-species community, where the thriving of all is the true indicator of planetary wellbeing.

Malika Virdi, now a second-time Sarpanch of the Van Panchayat lives in Munsiyari, Uttarakhand. It was in the early 90s that she and her family moved to the hills, quickly then owning land and committing to live in and with the community here. This she says was her experiential journey of realizing what it is to advocate living a certain kind of life and to doing it oneself. Malika wanted to learn to be a farmer and connect to the land she lived on, being actively part of the inter-species community that we all inherently belong to. She would find herself having to gradually win the trust and welcome of the local community there, who are rightly wary of outsiders. It was in 2003 that she was asked by the same community to consider being in the van panchayat for she had by then made it evident that she cared deeply about the environment and had several questions and ideas to ensure its wellbeing. The forests here are common property that the community lives, depends on and uses for their everyday survival. With all forest land being taken under the wing of the forest department, the community shifted from being owners to managers of the land. With ownership comes care and responsibility. In commons access to the forestland, there come mutually agreed on rules on how to use and ways of being in the forest. Taking away ownership meant loss of that commons ideology and connection.
In the village ecosystem, collaboration is integral. The democratic impulse is strong and this seeps into the functioning of the van panchayat. It allows for the power to rest with the right-holders, every individual within the village has a right on their forest land and historically approach it with reverence and responsibility for their life depends on it. Being a sarpanch of a panchayat body like this comes with aiding the thriving of the forest land and its people through careful study and response to what’s happening to the ecosystem. In her current term, the village is faced with a scarcity of water and warmer climate with more frequent instances of extreme weather conditions. Malika shares the instance of how the community came together to revive a water-body, the Mesar Kund. Women and children came forward, supported by funding from the forest department and NGO(s), to reclaim and make usable again what used to be a water-source for 12 villages. In her previous term as sarpanch, Malika worked with the community to bring together conservation and livelihood in the establishment of a community based nature tourism group – Himalayan Ark. This became a space to train and empower the community to be local guides, high-altitude guides, home-stay owners and more, while engaging actively with the upkeep of the forests.
It has been increasingly challenging Malika shares, to keep the commons ideology and way of life alive amidst systemic challenges, market influences and an ever-strengthening hold of capitalism equating all things to monetary value. Ecosystem services, as is the term used for all that nature offers in its inherent existent for the wellbeing of humankind, are today defined within the holds of capitalism. This breaks the sense of being unified within a community that is inclusive of not just our own kind but also of other species and ecosystems. What one is not part of or related to, one will find hard to care for and take care of.
Resources and trusts/organizations mentioned in the writing:
• The Forest Way: https://theforestway.org/
• Marudam Farm School: https://marudamfarmschool.org/
• Climate Change Curriculum: https://curriculum-for-a-changing-world.thinkific.com/
• Palluyir Trust: https://palluyirtrust.org/
• Youth Conservation Action Network: https://www.youcan.in/
• C40 Cities: https://www.c40.org/
• Himalayan Ark: https://www.himalayanark.com/
• Seashells: https://palluyirtrust.org/index.php/ocean-and-coasts-curriculum-kit-and-handbook/
• The Wilderness: https://palluyirtrust.org/index.php/biosphere-card-game/
• Shorewalk: https://www.tulikabooks.com/non-fiction/shorewalk.html
The author is an educator and nature enthusiast. She enjoys working with children on nature and art based explorations, spending time in the natural environment, observing and documenting small happenings in nature. She has been working as an educator for over seven years now. She can be reached at 27.ankita@gmail.com.