Missing the forest for the .....

Question: would you agree to having a fine tooth removed and replaced by an implant because it helped GDP?
No?  Well, you are holding back India’s growth story.
Read on…
 
I am going through an old issue – December 2000 - of Sanctuary mag and there is a feeling of depressing familiarity. It quotes the then Director of Project Tiger as stating (at the Millennium Tiger Conference in 1999) that, in about 25 years since the launch of Project Tiger in 1973, India had lost half of its standing tiger forests – 150,000 square kilometres of forest land that would never again see another tiger pugmark.
Let’s put that in perspective:
That is 15 million hectares. 37 million acres
About 70 times the combined size of Bandipur + Nagarhole + Wayanad.
…and we now know that in 2000 the destruction had only begun.
 

A ghastly haircut this. Meghalaya 2022

In 2020-21 – just one year, mind you – we are told that about 31 lakh trees (largely in forests) were cut for public infrastructure projects: largely roads, which are now a national obsession. We are told that you need to break an egg to make an omelette, so this is inevitable. An equal number were planted somewhere, we are told, so there’s no problem. And then, voila! We are told that India’s forest cover has increased. 

Fiction flows.
 

Fact: few planted trees survive.  

Even if they did, a forest is not a collection of trees, it is a living, dynamic, complex, interactive ecosystem about which we know, well, nothing really.  

We do not know what we do not know.

 
Yesterday was World Water Day and you must have read the odd trite tweet as a tribute, perhaps a eulogy.  The day earlier was International Day for Forests and we must wonder if these are different.
Forest = water.
 
Stand up for our forests. 
They need you.
You need them.