Guest lecturer to highlight conservation conflicts in India

Sea turtle in India.

Conservation in India will be the topic of a lecture to be hosted Friday by SNRAS. Kartik Shanker, assistant professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and founder trustee of Dakshin Foundation, will discuss the conflict between turtles and fishers.

Shanker works on the distribution of diversity, from genes to ecosystems, and at various scales from local communitis to macroecological regional scales. His group studies the community ecology and biogeography of amphibians, reptiles, birds and small mammals, as well as coastal and marine fauna.

Shanker wrote:

Conservation today is characterized by conflict in various forms, not the least of which is what is known as ‘human-wildlife conflict.’ The vast majority of studies quantify conflict in terms of losses incurred to humans and wild species as a direct result of this conflict - a long litany of loss of life or livelihood that seeks to accurately account for the intensity of this conflict. In many instance, however, there is a large unexplained gap between what scientists can measure as conflict and the perception of that conflict by the communities themselves.

These interactions can be broadly classified as 'first order conflicts,' and they result from a clear, direct set of impacts that wild species and human communities have on each other. Beyond these, however, there are often a whole class of interactions that can be termed as 'second order conflicts' that are the outcome of a complex suite of indirect pathways that may, at first glance, be invisible. Because they do not involve directly measurable losses, they may be difficult to quantify, but are nonetheless equally significant drivers of discontent.

We examine second order conflict from two contrasting social and ecological contexts, one in the Lakshadweep Islands off the west coast of India, and the other in Orissa, on the east coast of the India. In both locations, turtles and fishers are pitted in a fierce conflict over the loss of livelihood. In both instances, indirect, second order interactions drive the conflict. In the Lakshadweep, the pathway of conflict is primarily ecological, and involves the complex interaction between green turtles and the ecosystems they use and modify. In Orissa, the pathways have more to do with socio-politics than ecology, where conservation itself could be playing an important role in fueling second-order conflicts between olive ridleys and fisher communities.

The lecture will be held in O'Neill 201 at 2:30 p.m. Friday, April 22. For more information contact Associate Professor Susan Todd. (Dr. Shanker is pictured above.)

Further reading:
Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter
Conservation and Society