Student Conference on Conservation Science 2024

Plenary Speakers

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Pranay Lal

Jagdish Krishnaswamy

Stephen Alter

Talk title: India’s ecological futures, challenges and opportunities: water from the woods and water for wetlands

Talk summary:

Bio of Speaker

Jagdish Krishnaswamy

Hydro-ecologist

Jagdish Krishnaswamy is the Dean, School of Environment and Sustainability (SES) at IIHS. As the Dean of SES, Jagdish leads the build-out of the School, providing strategic direction and operational guidance to expand its academic footprint, research activities and network, practice portfolio, and capacity-building initiatives. Jagdish helps in the development of the IIHS Kengeri campus and its environs as India’s first Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO) and strengthens IIHS’s profile in ecology and conservation science.

Jagdish’s research has spanned the entire continuum from the semi-wild to the urban, covering USA, Costa Rica, Africa, and India in ecohydrology, landscape ecology and biodiversity. His work on conservation science and planning led to the nomination of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot as a UNESCO World Heritage Site besides informing the investment of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) civil society-led pilot projects. His work in ecohydrology, impact of invasive species and ecological flows in rivers has influenced policy and management at the state and centre. He is also part of the team that released a report for policymakers on state of the art on ecological restoration in India as well the first ever mapping of priority sites for both biodiversity and ecosystem service both sponsored by the Government of India’s Mission on Biodiversity and Human wellbeing. Jagdish’s work spans climate science, impact of extreme rain and warming on ecosystems across India, urban policymaking and overall research and practice that connects food, water, ecology and biodiversity in an urbanising context.

Talk title:
The Naturalist's Gaze

Talk summary:
Drawing from his recent book, The Cobra's Gaze: Exploring India's Wild Heritage, Stephen Alter will discuss the many ways in which we observe wildlife and how these unique and wonderful creatures look back at us. Combining scientific narratives with mythology, folklore and natural history, he seeks to understand our cultural connections to wildlife and wild places. Using examples from his personal experiences in a variety of forests, coastal areas, deserts and mountains across India, he will explore what motivates a naturalist and how we respond to species other than our own. He will also reflect upon the ethics of conservation as it relates to national parks, so-called wastelands and sacred groves.

Bio of Speaker

Stephen Alter

Author

Stephen Alter is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, and much of his writing focuses on the Himalayan region. His novel, Birdwatching, received the 2023 Green Book of the Year Award at the Green Literature Festival, Bengaluru. Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (Aleph 2019) received the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in the Mountain Environment and Natural History category and the 2021 Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature. It was also shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Prize. Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (Aleph 2014) received the 2015 Kekoo Naoroji Award. In The Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett (Aleph 2016) was shortlisted for the DSC South Asian Literature Award. He has written extensively on natural history, folklore and mountain culture, particularly in his travel memoir Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga. Educated at Woodstock School and Wesleyan University, Alter has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he was director of the writing program for seven years. Following this, he was a writer-in-residence at MIT for ten years. Among the honours he has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the East-West Centre in Hawaii, and the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture. His most recent novel is Death in Shambles: A Hill Station Mystery and his latest non-fiction book, is The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage. Stephen Alter is the founding director of the Mussoorie Mountain Festival.

Madeline Green

Jennifer Powers

Talk title:
Roots and Branches: Building a Collaborative Science of Conservation, Restoration, and Ecology for the 21st Century

Talk summary:
We are all too aware of the looming environmental and social crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, land-use change, and pollution. It can be challenging to maintain hope, both personally and professionally in the face of the many threats to the planet. In this talk I will trace the “roots” of disciplinary sciences, illustrating key themes in some of the work our lab group has done to understand the structure and function of tropical dry forests. Our projects include work to document rooting depths of different plant life forms, and modeling and field studies of secondary forest succession. These studies illustrate the roots of ecological understanding; in essence, how tropical dry forests are put together—but they do not amount to much if they are unconnected from other fields or potential applications. I will then discuss how we can build interdisciplinary bridges—or “branches” that connect different fields of inquiry and practice. We now have new ways to communicate and collaborate. We can leverage these tools in creative ways to link scientists from all over the world to participate in research networks, to bring together practitioners, scientists, managers, and community members to focus on ecological issues, and to connect community members to nature. I will next discuss examples of these branches including a radical project to reestablish forest cover in Costa Rica through application of agricultural waste, the TropiRoots collaborative network that brings together root researchers from all over the tropics, and ways to disengage from the digital world through making observations in a nature journal. We are living in challenging but exciting times, and forging a new, collaborative science and practice of conservation, restoration, and ecology is one way to cultivate care for our planet.

Bio of Speaker

Jennifer Powers

Professor, University of Minnesota
Editor-in-Chief, Biotropica

Dr. Jennifer Powers is a Full Professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Microbial Biology at the University of Minnesota and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Biotropica, which is the journal of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. She received her PhD in Biology from Duke University in 2001 and then completed postdoctoral studies at the State University of New York- Stony Brook and the University of Minnesota. Her research program focuses on understanding how land-use and climate change affect biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes, and plant communities seasonally dry tropical forest landscapes, which are spectacular ecosystems but also highly threatened. Her lab includes graduate students from Costa Rica, Colombia, Vietnam, Tanzania, and the United States. In addition to using scientific approaches to studying tropical dry forests, her lab embraces using art as a way to connect ecology to society, and she never goes to the field without a journal to sketch what she sees.

Talk title:
A Case for the Long Perspective: For Life, Writing, and Healing the World

Talk summary:
While working on my novel “Everything the Light Touches” I came to realise the importance of the long perspective. What is this long perspective? The ability to contextualise issues within deep (geological) time. It helped me rethink many things, and come to new realisations—realisations pertaining to the self—to try and place humility and gratitude at the centre of our being so we may live lightly and gently—to the act, and craft, of writing—to write characters, for instance, that carry not only their own stories but the stories of their ancestors—and also to the rethinking of issues like climate change—that as much as it feels “contemporary” and urgent in the here and now, the wheels were set in motion a long time ago, in the West, and perhaps this is where we ought to begin to find realignment. This talk places the long perspective at the center of our quest for “solutions” or, as I would like to offer, our quest for healing.

Bio of Speaker

Janice Pariat

Poet & Writer

Janice Pariat is widely known for her unique literary style that blends creative non-fiction with folktale, local stories, magical fiction, and socio-ecological knowledge from her native Meghalaya. While nature has been a consistent theme across her writings, her more recent works directly tackle indigenous identity and nature conservation. She has written numerous articles on environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change on the Himalayas for publications like The Hindu and The Wire. Pariat teaches creative writing courses on a range of issues, including conservation. She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Her novel Everything the Light Touches was published in October 2022 by 4th Estate, HarperCollins India, HarperVia USA, and Borough Press UK.
https://janicepariat.com/?page_id=3582