Founders Note

Hermis Haridas & Nisha Purushothaman

It is an instant world that we live in and people demand everything instant. Instant food, instant cures, instant information and instant results. This is also one of the major hurdles in conservation. The effects of conservation are at times visible only a decade or two later. This is a significant time and anything can go wrong during this time. People can lose interest, Governments can change, policies get modified, officials in charge can get replaced, priorities can change, natural disasters can occur, NGOs can run out of funds… literally anything can happen. Any of these can trigger a catastrophic reversal of all the good work in just a short time. The good effects of conservation takes a long while to show but destruction happens faster.  Just open up a virgin forest for mining and we get to see this happening before our very eyes. This throws up the interesting question, how then do we do conservation in a sustainable way?

As we explored before, policies can fail, organizations can fail and regulations can fail. The answer is simple – Relationships. We have often heard about great triumphs and great turn arounds brought about primarily because of the synergy caused by the depth of relationships between two men. Wars have been won, wars have been ended, partnerships forged – all because two people decided to be available to each other and build a relationship. For conservation however, the sustainability does not depend on the relationship between people. Here it is the relationship between people and nature.

What sort of relationship do you share with nature? Is it one based on profiteering or one based on give and take? Is it based on responsibility, ownership or a sense of duty and guardianship? It has got to be better than that. Men should have the purest of relationships with nature. How is this relationships built – is it by attending seminars or reading books on nature? Is it by travelling to exotic locales? All these help, but a purest of relationship can only be attained by spending time with nature while being completely available to all the sounds, feels and smells of nature. Complete availability is different from concentration, in the sense that here you are not selective but at the same time you are not distracted. You are aware of everything happening around you and you are not concentrating on only one of them. It is loads of time spent in this state just being with nature that builds that special relationship. And don’t be shy introducing your children to this pleasure. It is imperative for the survival of the earth that our children build their relationship with nature. Then conservation will not be a task, it will be a way of life.

Please build your relationship. After-all a person without a relationship with nature, does not have a relationship with oneself and there is nothing worse than that!

Hermis Haridas & Nisha Purushothaman
Founders – PT Explorers