Harini Nagendra – Reconnecting With Nature

Click on each image above for a larger view

You have lived in Bengaluru for many years and experienced the real Garden City in your childhood. Your mother planted the seeds of nature in you and today your main interests lie in Ecological Sustainability, a field that promotes preservation of our natural capital for future generations. In your book Nature in the City – Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future you state that “a better, different tomorrow is within reach”. What makes you optimistic about the future of Bengaluru?

I was born in Salem, but have spent a large part of my childhood years and almost all of my adult life in Bengaluru. It is the city of my roots, a city that I love deeply because of its natural beauty, rich ecological and cultural heritage, and the open welcome it has provided for centuries to people from all corners of the world, and all walks of life. It is clear to see that the people of Bengaluru have a strong affinity for nature, preserving, protecting and restoring it in places as diverse as slums, streets, home gardens, parks and lakes – as I describe in my book Nature in the City – Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future. The increasing power of citizen movements for nature protection gives me optimism, and the hope to hold out for a better future.

The book  gives a lot of historical and cultural context to Bengaluru’s fame as a Garden City. It does a very good job of teaching ecology to the common reader in an easily understandable manner. How is the response to this well thought out effort? Any suggestions on how someone can develop a more informed curiosity about nature around us?

It has been a very enriching experience for me to see the response to Nature in the City, from people from so many walks of life – home makers, architects, naturalists, journalists, city planners and so many others. In speaking to readers from different parts of the city, from the young to the elderly, I have learnt much about their diverse perspectives on nature. The one aspect that perhaps gives me the most pleasure, as well as the greatest hope, is that a number of faculty from diverse disciplines including schools of architecture and engineering, art and history, and even English literature have used chapters from the book in their classes, making the ideas in the book accessible and relevant to young people entering a number of different career tracks.

On your second question: how can someone develop a more informed curiosity about the nature around us: I would say that’s easy. The more time you spend in nature, the more you learn. This is especially true for families or groups of friends. If you can weave it into your weekly routine to spend time in nature – it could be something as simple as growing a kitchen garden in pots on your balcony, or a walk in a nearby park or lake on weekends – and then sit in a spot and watch things come alive – a bee or butterfly hovering around, a bird swooping down for food, a flower opening its petals, an ant crawling purposefully towards a dead insect – you learn something new, all the time. And you develop a respect for the beauty and the rhythms of nature.

As our cities like Bengaluru grow, green spaces are in direct conflict with expansion, infrastructure and housing. Often green spaces are perceived to be replaceable and not critical. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), regional and local governments play a critical role in ensuring a just balance between environment and economics. In the case of Bengaluru, the State Government recently recommended that the buffer zone of Bannerghatta National Park be reduced thereby sounding a death blow for our city’s only nature haven. What will be the impact of such decisions on the city?

It’s very sad. Such decisions are short sighted, emanating from a mindset that prioritizes short term economic development over long term health and well being. The Bannerghatta National Park is one of the most important spaces of nature adjacent to Bangalore, and provides protection to a diversity of wildlife, bird and insect species that have slowly been edged out of Bangalore because of urban development. If we reduce the buffer of the park by 100 square km, as is now recommended, we will only increase the intensity of human-wildlife conflict in Bangalore, conflict which is already rather high as can be witnessed by the frequent reports of elephant and leopard incursions into the south and south-east parts of the city.

Once upon a time, Bengaluru was known for its bungalows, gardens, trees and the slow pace of life (aka Pensioner’s Paradise). Without the pressures of today, most people had space & time to start a garden and take care of it. Today, the pace of life and modern distractions take up all our time. No one seems to have time for nature. Do you think our lifestyle change itself is a cause behind reduced greenery? 

The intensity of our urban life is definitely a part of the reason for change. During the time of the country-wide lock down, for instance, we heard many reports of people spending time looking at flowers and trees, and appreciating the sight of butterflies and the sound of birdsong. Time spent with nature brings relief from mental stress and improves healing as well. There are other factors too, of course. In a study we conducted on home gardens, we found that many gardens had shrunk in size because of the pressure on scarce land resources – people sacrificed their garden space to build additional rooms, for instance, while many old homes with gorgeous gardens were demolished to make way for multi-storied homes. We need to think of innovative ways to balance out this pressure for land, for instance by encouraging rooftop and balcony gardening, or replacing landscaped lawns in corporate campuses and apartments with community gardening – this can bring people closer to nature, provide stress relief, and improve the quality of work and home life.

Public land meant for community use is reducing and also being repurposed. Infrastructure and mobility projects are taking a big toll on trees. Some of the projects are resorting to underestimating the impact to circumvent approvals. Even the circles (or roundabouts) we had with small gardens have all but vanished to cater to the exploding traffic. Will this short sighted approach have a long term impact?

The nibbling away at fragments of public spaces collectively has a large and major effect. Many insect, bird and mammal species depend on small patches of green space such as those in vacant plots, roundabouts, grassy verges and roadside trees, for feeding and nesting. In this way, Bengaluru supported an impressive diversity of bird and butterfly species, and even rare mammal species like the endangered slender loris. With the loss of public space, the biodiversity they support is also endangered. Through our research, we have also found that a large number of people from low-income communities, especially older women, forage for wild plants and weeds from these open spaces, using them to supplement their food, and to prepare herbal and home medicinal remedies. The importance of public spaces in supporting the nutrition and health of poor communities, and in maintaining an invaluable cultural heritage of ecological knowledge which lies in the daily use of these plants by local women residents, is not acknowledged at all. We need to have a better planned approach where we map all the patches of green space, keeping even the smallest patches in sight, and work out a way to network them across the city, so that each part of Bengaluru has sufficient access to public spaces of nature, across all size gradients, offering a variety of services from pollution control and groundwater infiltration, to recreation and mental stress relief, nutritional inputs, and biodiversity support. 

Everyone is focused on making maximum use of available land for building structures. Vertical gardens, terrace and balcony gardening is replacing traditional greenery. It may grab headlines today, but it seems to be a poor alternative. Do you think this will last long or help in any way?

We need some viable long term alternatives. Land prices will continue to rise. Unless the Government acts decisively to set aside large swathes of land to protect the ecological and environmental health of the city, people will continue to build on every available square foot of land. Balcony and roof gardens will certainly not offer the same services that open land will, but are far better than nothing. Vertical gardens are often very water and pesticide intensive, however, and may not be as relevant. Another important factor we need to focus on is the increasing space given to ornamental and landscaped lawns, whether in parks, lakeside spaces, apartments or corporate campuses. These are water intensive, and often consume great amounts of pesticides and fertilizers as well. They need to be “rewilded”, by planting multi-layer food forests, replacing manicured grasses with runners and herbs, and converting them into herb gardens and other innovative, biodiversity-friendly community spaces.

In one of the surveys done by ​ichangemycity.com ​ , it was found that 79% of the parks and playgrounds in Bengaluru are in the inner wards, which means that the newly developed or integrated wards lack community space. It almost seems like we have two distinct cities in one –  a ​‘Halé’ ​ (ಹಳೆ or Old) Bengaluru and a New Bengaluru.  Also, the same survey found that 54% of the parks had garbage or debris and 21% were closed to the public. It paints quite a sorry picture for a Garden City, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. I lived in the ‘halé’ (ಹಳೆ) Bengaluru for decades, and now live in the New Bengaluru area. There is a massive difference between the two. The older Bengaluru is dotted with parks and public grounds where children play, and elders can get together to socialize and exercise, open to the rich and the poor. The green spaces of the newer Bengaluru are reserved for the wealthy, whose apartment complexes or gated communities provide them with access to safe walking spaces and play areas. Even in the old Bengaluru though, parks are gated, and access is restricted to the mornings and evenings. During mid-morning and afternoon, which is the time that children from Government schools would like to use the parks as play spaces for example, or mothers and grandparents would like to visit the park with young children and infants for much-needed fresh air and exercise, they are restricted from doing so. Many parks have been handed over to builders or used for Government buildings, and others are used as garbage dumps. When public spaces are so scarce, it is very sad to see that we do not even use the few spaces we have to their full capacity, and fail to maintain so many of them.

As you have written in your book, greenery and water bodies co-exist and need each other. Given the water shortage that is plaguing our city and the depleting ground water levels, this will also impact any efforts to grow trees or plants. One can see signs of that on our streets where plants in the median or on the sides are dusty, drying up due to lack of water. How much is this affecting our trees and how can we overcome this problem?

We need to rethink our approach to tree plantation. Many of the trees we see planted at the edges of lakes in Bangalore are water hungry species – Eucalyptus and Acacia auriculiformis (an evergreen tree that grows between to 15–30 m and is native to Australia and Indonesia) for example. There are many drought-tolerant locally adapted species such as neem and honge that we can plant instead. In the medians of our roads we have planted ornamental Ficus species and other ornamental trees and bushes that require a lot of water, are sensitive to dust and pollution, and will not thrive in the median– we can replace these with local bushes and slim, water tolerant tree species that will have a better chance of survival. We should re-look at species we consider as weeds such as the castor plant and Calatropis – these grow very well in all kinds of difficult situations, and plants like Calatropis support incredible insect diversity. But for this, we first need to change our mindset and embrace wild and weedy plants, instead of remaining fascinated with ornamental and landscaped species.