A filmmaker whose work has won international and national accolades, Pradip Krishen is not your textbook environmentalist. Krishen stepped into the world of ecological restoration in unusual fashion in 1994 when he visited Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh to shoot his film Electric Moon. Krishen would go on “Latin walks” with his neighbour, a forester with an encyclopedic knowledge of trees and a fondness for scientific names.
That was the start of Krishen’s journey with trees, giving India one of its best ecological restoration experts. Krishen went on to shape the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park in Jodhpur and the Kishan Bagh Sand dune park in Jaipur, both considered pioneering projects in the field of ecological restoration.
When starting out at Rao Jodha Park, Krishen said the best bet would be to restore the natural ecology of the rocky desert area of pure rock, with hardly any soil. “I knew, unless we can grow things that can grow here alone, there is no point,” said Krishen. “This is 70 hectares. We can’t go around watering it.”
The first three years were slow: “learning by mistakes and learning by taking very, very careful notes”. Krishen and his team experimented with potting mixes, plants and sites to uncover patterns and thus increase the survival rates of what they had planted.
“There is the whole question of people thinking of restoration as planting trees,” said Krishen. “Unfortunately, that’s the way it has been perceived, because that’s what governments do. And that is such a narrow perception of what restoration is.” Jaya Peter spoke to him at his home in Delhi. Excerpts:
There is a host of restoration work happening in India and there are different schools of thought on the philosophy and practice of restoration. What does restoration mean to you?
There are lots of healthy debates about what is restoration. But at a basic level, you are trying to restore a landscape to what it might have been like before it was disturbed. And you are characterising the disturbance as something that ought not to have happened. Then, there is the whole question of people thinking of restoration as planting trees. Unfortunately that’s the way it has been perceived, because that’s what governments do. And that is such a narrow perception of what restoration is.
How do we look at an ecosystem and decide that it needs to be restored? Are there any metrics by which we can tell that a land is degraded?
If you find reference sites that are much richer and diverse, where you have many systems that are operating, and a much larger cohort of birds and biodiversity, it becomes one way of judging whether it is degraded.
Like the Ridge, for example, here in Delhi. There are no distinct references that I found for the Ridge from the past, but the Ridge was overgrazed and in very poor condition.
The British wanted to plant up the Ridge for a reason that did not have anything to do with restoration. They wanted to plant trees and make it look like some French retreat. They designated the Ridge as being what they called an ameliorative forest.
Restoration might have been implied but it’s certainly not a term that they were using. And because they planted non-native species, the minute they withdrew irrigation they all collapsed. They ended up growing Prosopis juliflora [a kind of a shrub] on the ridge. That is the opposite of amelioration because Prosopis is an invasive species.
So, what is your method of going about a restoration project?
The issue was, what are you leaning on? You are leaning on floras. When I first began, there was no ecological information whatsoever. So if you wanted to understand where to grow a plant and what it needs, books gave you nothing but phylogenetic information. The scheme the book follows only arranges plants according to how they have evolved, what family they belong to. So we have to do all this work ourselves, based on notetaking and observations, learning and making mistakes and finding it out the hard way.
When you are actually planting it, you are faced with the questions, what does that plant need? Does it grow along grading lines? Does it like gravel, does it like clay, does it like sand? What is the kind of site quality that the plant needs? There is none that is actually available to us for restoration.
Taking you back to when you had started, was Rao Jodha your first experiment in restoration?
When I was writing the tree book in 1998, I had a friendly couple who had a lodge in Garhwal. They asked for my help to plant up their property. I don’t remember why using native plants had occurred to me, but it had. It’s common sense, I guess. And we had the most incredible results there in the first year, partly because it is a place with very high rainfall. As a matter of fact, as I think back, I had never had results like that ever again.
That was the first place where I did any kind of native plant gardening. It was an ornamental setting, where things are supposed to look a particular way. It was not about restoration. I was not trying to restore a natural ecosystem or ecology. I was basically planting up a lodge. And then I went back to writing my book.
How did The Trees of Delhi happen?
I moved back to Delhi from Pachmarhi in 1998, with basically nothing to show for the four years of having given up cinema and trying something else. And I remember standing in front of my front gate and looking across and there was a tree there I didn’t recognise. I said, my god, I have lived here for a good 27-28 years and I realised we don’t even know the trees in our own backyard. So I thought, why don’t I use my tree-spotting hobby as a way of writing a short account on the common trees of Delhi.
Luckily at that stage, I was married to Arundhati [Roy] and she’d just written a book. So I didn’t need to look over my shoulder at how I needed to earn a living. So I had this great luxury of being able to spend five-six years immersing myself and the more I read and the more I got into exploring trees and understanding them, the more ambitious I became of my book writing.
So how did the Rao Jodha restoration project come about ?
By 2004, my book still wasn’t out. I was called into a meeting at INTACH Delhi and there were some gentlemen from Jodhpur in the meetings. They approached me to green one of their properties in Nagaur. There they had made a grid, like the forest department does, with every pit equally spaced apart. We changed that up and started planting native species. And again, we had very good results in the year and half. We had two rains.
That’s when I got to know the CEO of the trust in Jodhpur, who took me to the edge of what later became Rao Jodha Park and asked me if I could green it. I said the option they have is to try and restore the natural ecology of a rocky desert. Because it’s pure rock, there is hardly any soil. I explained to them how this is not the kind of land that supports a forest.
I knew, unless we can grow things that can grow here alone, there is no point. This is 70 hectares. We can’t go around watering it. Again, we didn’t know enough about each kind of plant. So we were putting in things, getting typically 60%-65% survival rates.
There is a difference between identifying trees and shrubs and the actual field work that you did in Rao Jodha. In my mind, it’s a huge challenge to be out in the field deciding where to plant what, how long it would take to grow etc because I don’t think that knowledge is available to us. So how did you do that?
I’d say the first three years were learning; learning by mistakes and learning by taking very, very careful notes. We remembered every single place. We decided only to plant in pits vacated by bawlias (Prosopis), which turned out to be a very good decision. So we measured every single pit. We were experimenting with two or three kinds of potting mixes. We’d record that and the plant we planted there as well as the site quality.
We went around after six months to see how the plants were doing and documenting again. If you do this on an excel sheet, and you rearrange your columns in such a way that you only look at one plant species, patterns emerge. So, once these patterns started emerging in color, we got a much better understanding and our survival rates went up.
What does the future look like for you?
I am now at a stage where I have very deliberately given up all fieldwork, partly because I am 75 now. I want to write. Writing doesn’t come easily to me. But it’s hugely enjoyable. I love the difficulty of writing. For example, while writing the introduction to my second book The Jungle Trees, I had enough material to write two books. But I knew I had to condense it into 50 pages, without making it so dense that no light emerges from it.
That became one of the most exciting things I have ever written. I guess it is like cooking with something and then finding it one way, make it loose again, make it dry. It’s just so exciting.
Meera M, a doctoral student at ATREE, helped transcribe the interview.
Jaya Peter is the Communication Head at Ashoka Trust For Research in Ecology and Environment.
