Every time I see a blue tiger moth, my mind travels to the forest of Matheran, a pocket-sized but incredibly biodiverse hill station a stone’s throw from Mumbai. Every time, I relish the memory of a crisp January morning spent observing moths and butterflies sipping salts and other minerals – in a behaviour known as mud-puddling – on the muddy bank of a waterbody.
A blue tiger moth engrossed in mud-puddling. (Photo by Rizwan Mithawala)
After making this portrait of what looks like a handsome male (those elaborate comb-like antennae are a guy thing, used to detect female pheromones in the air), as I moved my eye above the camera viewfinder, I saw another moth of the same kind, wings flat, floating on water’s surface, making only meek attempts to lift off. I decided to try a rescue.
The moth was more than a metre away, so I anchored one foot in mud and stretched my hand, holding out a long twig. I gently nudged the moth and it climbed onto the twig. I left it to dry on a boulder right under the sun. In a few minutes, it began to move its wings and walk around the rock. Then it took off, fluttered in circles in front of my face, and spiralled sunwards. I sat down smiling. The contentment I felt was the kind you feel when you have helped a kin or a friend. I will never know if the act of fluttering in circles was an expression of gratitude, it certainly was one of grace.
A sense of kinship with nature, with the more-than-human world, is the need of the present ‘human age’ wherein, we, a single species, are driving mass extinctions of other species. Seeing ourselves as part of the natural world, and not superior to it, was the way of life of our ancestors, and we must return to it, to a democracy of species or, in the words of medieval historian Lynn White Jr., to a ‘democracy of all God’s creatures’.
In March 1967, the academic journal Science published a seminal essay by White, titled ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis‘. It has since become the most cited and studied piece of writing on theology and environment, as it traces the origins of our separation from, and our dominion over, nature. In the essay and its follow up titled ‘Continuing the Conversation’, White explained how the current environmental crisis is not simply the product of our technological ability to tame the Earth and degrade its environment, but a product of our Western worldview – an ideological problem. “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them,” he wrote. Tracing the journey from animism to dominion, he wrote, “In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit… Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism,… (it became possible) to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects… The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.”
Though White’s paper focuses on humanity’s separation from nature as a product of Western traditions, his argument is pervasive and now relevant across cultures and continents. This is so because the anthropocentric worldview is now all pervasive, irrespective of nation and culture. Unless we rekindle an ethic of kinship, we will not be able to reject the human-nature dualism and shed ideas of our dominion over other life. Even the modern focus on ‘ecosystem services’ is purely based on benefits to people; and debates are yet unresolved on its anthropocentric focus and the exclusion of the intrinsic value of different entities in nature. Applying newer sciences, while holding on the same worldview that led to the environmental crisis, is not likely to bail us out. White’s warning is as telling as it gets: “We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the… axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”
About the author: Rizwan Mithawala is a Conservation Writer with the Wildlife Conservation Trust and a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers. He has previously worked as an environment journalist with a national newspaper.
Disclaimer: The author is associated with Wildlife Conservation Trust. The views and opinions expressed in the article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Wildlife Conservation Trust.
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