The Forgotten Mangroves of Chennai

     It was a Sunday morning in the month of April, 2011. Walking through the ipomoea matted roads with the sun on my face, felt so relaxing. I was walking to the Broken Bridge (500m from Elliots beach), where the sea meets the river, where the mangrove babies struggle their way out of the earth. Myself and few of my friends from Reclaim Our Beaches decided to visit the mangrove island down the river, where huge mangrove forest exist in secrecy from the city's atmosphere. A walk down the bridge showed me the degradation that the estuary has undergone. Dead fishes floating in the river, few were gasping for their last breath of air and fishermen collecting these fishes in the nets and transporting them to market. It was an awful sight. Couldn't do much!

Mangrove Forest, Adyar Esturay. Photo: Sid Hande

      We had hired a Catamaran to wade through the murky black waters of the Adyar river. Myself and my friend Sid Hande were the lucky two who made it on the boat. More than that and the boat would topple. Getting on to the catamaran and balancing ourselves needed some knack. And traveling for the first time in the estuary where I never would have even imagined, was an experience in itself. We had few crab friends as they hitched a ride with us tickling our foot and resting on our slippers.

Distant shot of Broken Bridge. Photo: Sid Hande

First few meters into the river and we were already amazed by looking at the mangroves surviving in the banks of the river. I was asking myself whether I'm in Chennai or some where else on earth. Moving closer to the islands, I was silently contemplating of how the estuary might have looked few decades ago when it was pristine. My vision was spilling all over. Addition to that Saravanan (fisherman/activist), our friend was telling joyous childhood stories of how he would come to catch shrimps in the estuary and silently sink into the lush mangrove forests. The boatman was telling his own stories of how he survived with group of friends, 18 days lost in the sea and finally found by the Indian Navy.

The boat ride was a revealing journey. Certainly it disproved my ideas about mangrove ecosystems in the city. Our initial ideas were to conserve the baby mangroves which grow near the Broken Bridge, but this boat ride threw light upon the existing biodiversity and the challenges faced by these mangrove forest. Once pristine, now these mangrove islands are flooded with Styrofoam, plastics and what not. This clearly shows waste mis-management practices in Chennai city. Even the uninhabited and isolated islands are victims of our ever growing trash culture.

While trying to look out for solutions, I stop and ponder whether have I been asking the right questions. 

Glimpses:

Photo courtesy: Siddharth Hande

The changing oceans

From pristine habitats to polluted sinks, our oceans has it all. While our knowledge about the oceans is evolving, there also seems to be a collective amnesia which makes humanity forget what is being done and what changes the oceans have encountered. This is what scientists call shifting environmental baselines. Commonly known as shifting baseline syndrome.

In his latest book "The Unnatural History of the Sea", Prof. Callum Roberts explains the phenomenon which is easy to understand. He states "The idea of shifting baselines is familiar to us all and does not just relate to the natural environment. It helps explain why people tolerate the slow crawl of urban sprawl and loss of green space, why they fail to notice increasing noise pollution, and why they put up with longer and longer commutes to work. Changes creep up on us, unnoticed by younger generations who have never known anything different. The young write off old people who rue the losses they have witnessed as either backward or dewy-eyed romantics. But what about the losses that none alive today have seen? In most parts of the world, human impacts on the sea extend back for hundreds of years, sometimes more than a thousand. Nobody alive today has seen the heyday of cod or herring. None has watched sporting groups of sperm whales five hundred strong, or seen alewife run so thick up rivers there seemed more fish than water. The greater part of the decline of many exploited populations happened before anybody alive today was born."



Oceans from Tom de Kok Teachings on Vimeo.

So when these baseline shifts happen, the environment that we live in becomes unpredictable and it takes every organism on the planet to adapt itself to sustain life.That apart, the quality of life degrades too. The present generation is already facing the brunt of our predecessors actions. The next generation, from ours.

These changes happen so subtly, that it is pretty hard to determine the impacts of even the minutest of shifts. If we take the city of Chennai, it is hard to imagine the fact that rich coral reefs and lush mangroves once existed in some of today's popular beaches in the city. When I heard from fishermen about how Chennai looked few decades ago, I literally had to ask them to come over again. What I heard was unbelievable, but true. Madras, as Chennai was formerly known, had rich marine biodiversity as it had been recorded by English scientists when India was under the rule of Britain. This raises the question how and why weren't the resources managed properly. At present, only the remnants of the rich past remains.

 According to the laws of nature, change is inevitable. Determining the changes for good or to its worse is in no one else's, but our hands.

Lets embrace changes and also make sure that the changes are for good.