The Thing About Wildlife

Madhuri Ramesh is a faculty member at the School of Development at Azim Premji University. Madhuri has worked in deserts, rainforests, coasts and islands, she’s a herpetologist who turned to political ecology for her PhD and later work. Her research in the Andaman Islands focuses on nature-society relations, and the consequences of these negotiations for conservation and sustainability.

Manish is a phenomenal storyteller, who uses his lived experiences to talk about the people and ecology of the islands with extreme clarity. Our recording with Manish ran into hours, and so I'll be bringing his voice to you in two parts. In the first epsiode featuring Manish, The Thing About Discovering The Islands, he talks to us about how he stumbled into the Andamans nearly three decades ago, what it was about the place that got him involved in several projects there, how he came to know and live with the local communities intimately, introduces us to the who's who of early ecological and anthropological work in the islands, and provides us with a window into how he began working with restoration.

In the first episode of our Andaman and Nicobar series, storyteller-supreme, Manish Chandi speaks to Ishika and Akshay about his early years in the islands through riveting anecdotes. Manish Chandi, an affiliate with the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team and Nature Conservation Foundation. In the last 25 years, Manish has worked on a wide range of projects in the region: herpetological surveys, forest restoration and anthropology - for his PhD, he lived with the Nicobarese people studying community sharing mechanisms and how they were disrupted by the 2004 tsunami.

Happy 2023, listeners! This year, The Thing About Wildlife is kick-starting with a 10-part series on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Stay tuned for more!

Order The Living Museum today!

To know more about the book, head on over to our website.

This production and distribution of this book was made possible with the support of Bengaluru Sustainability Forum, Nagarathna Memorial Grant and published by the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning.

Artwork for the book and the episode thumbnail by Sunaina Coleho.

After a little break, TTAW is back with The Thing About Reflections #2, where I'm joined by guest co-host Dr Krishna Anujan to look back upon Season 2. We spoke about the range of guests and topics we had on the podcast and dissected this season's highlights and shortcomings. We also fantasized about upcoming episodes and seasons. 

Let us know your thoughts and feedback too! Write to us at [email protected]

Tejaswini Nagesh is a product designer who works with the World Wide Fund for Nature - India in Tezpur. Her current work focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to elephant collisions with trains in Assam, so as to minimize them as far as possible. She is on a mission to explore how she can bring her unique skill set to this field of wildlife conservation through creative collaborations and her focused problem-solving mindset. After doing her Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and her Masters in Product Design from the National Institute of Design, she found her way, rather serendipitously towards creating solutions for conservation problems.

Instagram: @tejaswininagesh

The Jumbo Problem

You can find her Behance profile here.

Labonie Roy is a multi-media illustrator and educational content designer with a passion for nature-based learning. She has worked alongside various environment and education initiatives to bring both children and adults closer to nature through creative perspectives like upcycling, art and theatre. You can see a lot of her work featured in the educational content at Nature Classrooms, an initiative by the Nature Conservation Foundation. She's now a freelancer, and her interests lie in issues surrounding sustainability, gender and education.

Instagram: @labonie.roy

Her work for Current Conservation can be found here.

Connecting school communities in peri-urban Bengaluru to their local ecology and biodiversity

How the Myna Ate the Sun, a children's book by Labonie Roy.

~~

Deepika Nandan is an illustrator, animator, and stick-poke tattoo artist. With an interest in the environment, wildlife and traditional knowledge, she investigates the biosphere and people's detrimental impacts on it through art. Her creative practice often involves natural, sustainable and found materials that combine analogue and digital techniques. She began working with the Centre for Wildlife Studies, and now is a freelancer as well! She is also the fab artist behind the scenes of the podcast, and is responsible for making us look so good!

Instagram: @deepikanandan | @dipandpoke

Behance portfolio here.

Her work for Current Conservation can be found here.

Creature Conserve

Munib Khanyari has just emerged from having completed his fascinating doctoral work in the Himalayas. He did his PhD from the University of Bristol/University of Oxford, and has been associated with the High Altitudes Program at the Nature Conservation Foundation as a Research Scholar for quite some time. His work focuses on the ungulates of the mountains – how they survive, how they interact with livestock, and even their health in the up-high cold deserts. He is also a conservation optimist!

Instagram: @munibkhanyari | Twitter: @KhanyariMunib

Munib is a prolific academic! You can find and download all his research publications here.

To know more about Conservation Optimism, check out this link.

To follow the Conservation Optimism India page, follow them @conservationoptimismindia

Parvathi K Prasad is a Research Affiliate at Conservation Initiatives and PhD student at Deakin University. She began her journey into this field through a human-animal interactions project in the Western Ghats with the Centre for Wildlife Studies, following which, she found her way to the dynamic ecosystems of Assam in Northeast India. After being introduced to Kaziranga and its megaherbivores, she chose to stay put and study its elephants for her PhD.

Twitter: @ParvathiKPrasad| Instagram: @e.minimus

Journal Articles:

1. Patterns of human–wildlife conflicts and compensation: Insights from Western Ghats protected areas

2. Towards a reliable assessment of Asian elephant population parameters: the application of photographic spatial capture–recapture sampling in a priority floodplain ecosystem

3. Conservation opportunities and challenges emerge from assessing nuanced stakeholder attitudes towards the Asian elephant in tea estates of Assam, Northeast India