Mother and daughter, Ranthambhore 2014

Since I was a child, I have felt some sort of ineffable contact with nature. Not connection, that's too passive a word. Contact. It feels like a living spark passes between myself and a tree, myself and a rock, myself and a goose or a snail. I'm a secular person, but oh yes, there is a sacredness, and a one-ness, and a spirit, and it is this living earth. I have been on a hillside of waving golden grass in northwest India, at my daughter's side, watching as a tiger moved silently through the landscape. It is my deep love for the beauty of the natural world, and my deep love for my daughter and our bewildered species, that drive me to climate activism. Despite all the damage and the crises and the work to be done, it is easy for me to imagine a smaller, quieter, greener world in which my daughter and her loved ones breathe easy.

In my fantasy of that world, life and work, family and community, are intertwined because the commons are restored. My daughter, her family, and I, come together with neighbors to work in our forest garden during the day, and tell stories and make music when night falls. Our forest garden needs no fossil fuels. The work is done and the food harvested by ourselves, and by nature. In the world that's coming, there is no plowing that kills the soil and its microscopic life, there are no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers. My grandchild plays among bees that pollinate, birds that fertilize, and trees that enrich the earth.

That's the world I work for when I work for climate sanity. I work for restoration and for right relationship with the earth. I do it out of a deep sense of biophilia, and belief that our species will finally find its place. I do it for love.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver

In Memory of a Tiger Man

The tiger-tailed comet named Fateh Singh Rathore blazed across our collective skies, dousing itself in the forests of Ranthambhore on March 1, 2011 after 73 years.

I am not a superstitious person. But like everyone fortunate enough to have spent time in his company, I know, without hesitation, that Fateh will spend eternity among Ranthambhore’s tigers. He will occasionally take a little time from his beloved forest to haunt bureaucrats and government officials in Sawai Madhopur, Jaipur, and Delhi foolish or short-sighted enough to fail to do everything in their power to protect the tiger, thus incurring the Tiger Man's wrath. By the same token, whenever they take steps to ensure the tiger's future in India, they will unaccountably feel the most genial presence.

I first met Fateh, in the mid-1990s, in my living room in New York, in the pages of Geoffrey and Diane Ward’s beautiful book Tiger Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats. The Wards devoted a long chapter to Fateh that will become a treasure and a refuge to those who will miss him so deeply. Anyone longing to spend a few more minutes in Fateh’s company, if only on the printed page, can find solace here. Before I had finished the first paragraph, I was mesmerised by this whiskey-swigging, ghazal-singing tiger guru who in person turned out to be as welcoming of wide-eyed American admirers as he was of the most significant Indian or international VIP.

Fateh’s campfire was a place of wonder. Night after night, stars overhead, happy humans drawn together by the warmth and passion of Fateh’s personality, the occasional tiger or leopard roaming just outside the fire’s glow... was there any more meaningful place to be on this lovely planet? I can picture that campfire as if from outer space. It is burning bright.

It was awe-inspiring to watch Fateh, with consummate grace and his unique panache, balance the demands of protecting Ranthambhore with the more prosaic comforts of his guests. I remember one night at the campfire banquet, laughing as he piled chapatis on my young daughter’s plate, dubbing her “Princess Chapati,” a name she’ll carry with her always. On her first trip into Ranthambhore, Julia sat beside Fateh in the front of his jeep, her face spellbound as she listened to his whispered interpretations of the vocalisations coming from a tigress and cubs invisible in a hillside glade.

The forest found Fateh after he had wandered through his youth, uncertain of his place in the world. Interviewing him for this magazine in March 2008, I heard from his own lips what Ranthambhore’s tiger-filled forest was like when he arrived decades ago:

The beds of the three lakes where people see all the wildlife today were farms where water chestnuts and wheat were cultivated. There was very little water for wildlife. There were shops near the Fort! Everywhere you looked, there were agricultural plots. The forest was completely denuded by cattle, by people, by lopping and browsing. You couldn’t see a blade of grass on the ground. There were 96 villages on the periphery, 20,000 people and an equal number of cattle. People used to camp everywhere. At night, if you climbed the Fort and looked out over the entire park, you saw nothing but campfires. Every hilltop was occupied. No one today can even imagine what it used to be.

If we wish to never see what Fateh witnessed in those first months and years of his work in Ranthambhore, we must follow in his footsteps, giving our own heart and soul to ensuring a secure future for tigers in the beautiful landscape that Fateh returned to Nature. Chinese folklore claimed that the wind was the breath of the tiger. When tigers are secure in Fateh’s vision of India, people of all stripes will breathe easy as well.

~ Written by myself for the April 2011 issue of Sanctuary Asia (www.sanctuaryasia.com)

~ To read an obituary of Fateh in The New York Times, click here.

The future is bright.

Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Happy 205th birthday plus a day, Mr. Lincoln.

    February 12, 1809 - February 13, 1214.

      We miss you still.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

~ Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932)

In joy and thanks for your life, which has touched mine, my parents', my siblings', since I was a child... and my daughter's.

Pete Seeger, 94 years.