All things are connected

One of the advantages of having been a pioneer nutritionist is that many of the aware people who walked into my very first health food store in Mumbai in 1990, have since become friends. My current business, although without a retail outlet, still prompts enough off-the-beaten-track people to search me out. It’s one of the perks of the work I do. One such unusual individual who sought me out was Nigel Whittle. Recently I caught up with him in Sussex, where he spent a day with me at my aunt’s lovely country home. She and her husband, retired medical practitioners, were completely mesmerised by Nigel as he explained the connection between tigers, organic food and commercial banks. Nigel has been obsessed with tigers from the age of six. At age 11 he read Jim Corbett’s Man Eaters of Kumaon which prompted him to study zoology. Subsequently he started a charity, Life Force, which he has been steering for over a decade now, with his base in Madhya Pradesh. You can check out his work on www.lifeforceindia.com. The basic proposition of Life Force is that tiger conservation is people conservation. While writing this column I have drawn generously on the voluminous literature published by Life Force and some passages are taken verbatim. Whatever their colour, race or religion, most people are concerned only about their work, family and putting food on the table. But they need to think beyond these boundaries. About what their food and work ultimately depend upon. Some of the following principles and facts may be familiar to you. But they bear repetition because they remind us that the cycle of life starts from the same place. With sunlight, water, air and soil, plants and forests grow, providing food, cover and shelter to insects, birds and herbivores, which, in turn, provide food for carnivores. Each group of animals forms a level in a hierarchy. Each level does not merely rely on the level beneath for food. The benefits are mutual. For example: insects and birds pollinate or fertilise flowers and other plants. Herbivores and monkeys eat fruits and distribute their seeds in the surrounding environment. Nature favours diversity of species. In similar ways to examples given above, predators reduce competition among prey species, so that no single species crowds out another. For example, in the rock pools on the west coast of the US, the community is made up of starfish and 15 other species (including algae, sponges, barnacles, mussels and limpets), three of which the starfish feeds on. The starfish is on the top of the food chain (like the tiger in the Indian ecosystem). Researchers removed the starfish from some of the pools. In these pools mussels crowded out barnacles and all but one specie moved away for lack of food while the number of species dropped from 15 to 8. The other pools where starfish remained, maintained the original community. So, removing a top predator from the complex food web has an unhealthy cascading effect. That’s the argument…