Questions on Conservation Education

This post shares a recently drafted piece. 


Conservation Education: Few Questions!

I work on Conservation Education at Saiha (Mizoram). Efforts are undertaken with school-going students (and their teachers), youth-associations, village councils, forest department personnel and our neighbours. Attempt is made to understand nuances associated with the process as also to encourage local youth (and others) to continue the efforts beyond the project in a fashion that appeals to them. This has led to an invigorating journey with intensive process-documentation and interactions with personnel at other conservation organizations in India as co-travellers. These efforts are in no way perfect nor do they suggest a road-map and the person who has benefitted the most from the program is undoubtedly me. Experiences ranging from abysmally stupid mistakes to moments of pleasant atonement have enriched me with confusions and questions, some of which I share in the lines below. I however believe that we have reached a point where we need to look beyond organizing one-off events or talk of tigers to children and bestow the time and efforts for conservation education that it more than deserves.

WWF defines environment education as “A life-long process that encourages exploring, raise questions, investigate issues and seek solutions to environmental and social problems.” One time talks, preaching on wildlife and laying our rules may not work; we need to be open and interactive. I look at conservation education as an opportunity to create platforms to deliberate on wildlife conservation issues (and facilitating such deliberations) with different segments of the society (forest department, ngos and researchers working on issues other than wildlife and many others) as opposed to imparting of messages. And also as a corollary to the wildlife-research and conservation action undertaken by many of us. Presentation by Romulus Whitaker at a recent conference in Karnataka referred to conservation as “10% science and 90% negotiation”. Is it this exploration, deliberation and negotiation that we talk of when we talk of conservation education?

I ponder at times on the need to bring conservation education to mainstream of the society we work with; the idea being to bring wildlife issues in day-to-day talks.  This could tantamount (in Mizoram) to actions like carving out space and time for conservation education in annual-gatherings of youth-associations and contributing to Church-newsletters. The dilemma I am confronted with is that of wildlife-centric gathering themselves not willing to allocate additional (or is it due!) time for deliberations on conservation education. This when, in the few workshops on wildlife conservation that I have been fortunate to attend, I have come across co-attendees and organizers who conveyed (during presentations as also tea-time talks) that conservation education is vital to conserve the wildlife values that still exist on our lands. Is it worth our time to plan if (and how) we can utilize and build on the spaces available within existing practices and structures for conservation education?

Still on workshops; I was surprised in no small degrees when during a workshop in Rajasthan I saw reading-material that was shared with participants had print on only one side. I wondered if rather than talking of connections it made more sense to give message by way of our actions. The irony of our unwillingness to put in extra time and efforts to save resources (paper in this case) and then talk of say relocation at these events did strike me. I was reminded of a meeting we had at Navdarshanam where our hosts made it amply clear that at the venue they utilized electricity only to the extent that they could generate. This meant projector was out of bounds and I recall we did manage fine with laptop-computers. While some elements may be difficult to work on it may augur well to make a beginning, however small, with others. Can we can ask ourselves difficult (but pertinent) questions when we organize events?

I was once asked the benefits of playing games like “Web of life”; whether they helped raise knowledge or sensitivity levels in participants and how? I had no answer, pondered over it for some days and then conveniently forgot the matter. The issue resurfaced while talking with a close friend working in South Rajasthan some time ago. He said how tools (exercises, activities and games) with people he worked with on livelihood issues were passé and a dire need to sit together and talk with people had emerged; on account of more than one reason. Drawing parallel with conservation education I recalled Frits Hesselink. In his Communicating Nature Conservation: 10 frequently made mistakes he states “We often forget that the most powerful tool is a face to face communication”. I recalled some of the events where we had played such games and wondered (not very happily) on the impact (if any) they had had. Do we feel the need to question our actions?

Another aspect of conservation education that continues to surprise me is the lack of importance ascribed to communication. Conservation education I understand requires a level of dexterity in wildlife and communication. While considerable efforts are put in collating information on wildlife that can be disseminated and bringing out booklets-modules; there appears to be a dearth of understanding (and corresponding investment of efforts) on how best this information can be shared. Whether we need further information collation in this age of ‘information-overkill’ too is debatable. Do pace, language, simplicity, depth, familiarity with topic, brevity, local customs (and other aspects) figure in our deliberations to augment knowledge and interest levels on wildlife?

A wildlife biologist (highly respected for his work on elephants) once wrote to me saying it is easiest to work with children on conservation education for they do not have the options of saying no or walking away while a (very active) member on an internet based discussion-group stated that the easiest thing for ngos to do was to take up conservation education program on periphery of national parks. Guess we have some work to do before we can confidently say they are wrong!

Links.

Navdarshanam: http://www.navadarshanam.org/

WWF India: http://www.wwfindia.org/