Amid conflict, the lessons we can learn from the humanism of forests

Mint

17-05-2025

Friday, 3pm, Uttarakhand: The oak forest stretches in front of us, the path between the trees rising and falling like the back of a camel.
Friday, 5am, Delhi: The city had been lashed by a furious storm. Rainwater has fallen like bullets, pooling on the streets. Trees have crashed to the earth, never to live again. Cars have stalled, like they are holding their breath.
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In the mountains too, unexpected May showers have rushed down the slope. As we enter the forest in the last of the afternoon, the sun is beginning to break out through the trees, its golden shafts sharp and stinging. It has rained for a few hours and the birds are hungry. They emerge from the leaves, moving across the trees with the energy of ants on their hill, irrepressible and at home. A Himalayan woodpecker, coloured in a pack-of-cards scheme of red-white-black, begins tapping at an oak. A Grey-winged blackbird pair excavates mounds near the base of trees for the treasure of caterpillars, their heads bobbing to keep track of us. A Grey-headed canary-flycatcher bursts into exquisite song, showing us note after note why it's referred to as a canary. The last rhododendrons of the year cling to the trees, wet and pink and tender, with a 'I don't want to leave, mummy" sentiment.
Or maybe I am being sentimental.
The border is tense. The future seems desperate, as uncertain as the coming of climate-change storms. My heart flutters in my chest—is it the climb, or fear for the future? I walk, I gasp; the mountains carry on as they always do, implacable. They have a sternness I have come to love, promising an experience that always puts the onlooker in her place.
When travelling to areas near our international borders, one is struck by the beauty and timelessness of our transboundary areas. The Himalaya and trans-Himalaya bioregion possess a splendour that's full of contradictions—Martian-style starkness and lush, forest richness. You might walk in oak and rhododendron forest that is redolent with mosses, mulch and ferns. You might gasp at high-altitude meadows, taking in the rocks that look as grand as they are jagged. Towards the east, you have the thick, lacy forests of Arunachal, Assam and other states. The air here smells and tastes of water, a contrast to the western desert-border with its dry sand and needle-laden plants.
There are animals that live here, as rare as their ecosystems are special, and they own their hard lives with grit. On the India-Pakistan border lives the Great Indian bustard, one of the heaviest flying birds on earth. On the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bhutan borders, mighty rhinos and elephants live—and sometimes cross over. The Eastern Himalayas comprise a global biodiversity hot spot with scores of endemic plants and birds. The border rivers on the east and west both cut steep banks to flow into the mountains and the plains.
8pm, Friday, Uttarakhand: We wait for more information, on whether there will be more hostilities, whether there will be war. We calculate how far we are from the border, thinking of the billions of human and animal lives near it.
7am, Saturday, Uttarakhand: The mountains stretch ahead of us, suddenly more precious when life, and peace, seem fragile. I laugh nervously in my head. The Himalaya have withstood nearly everything.
We begin looking at the birds, their calls knitting a temporary safety blanket around us. A Verditer flycatcher, powder-blue with a black ninja mask on his face, sallies for bugs from a dry tree. Above it, the sky matches the bird's plumage almost effortlessly. Yesterday's angry and sudden storm seems like it was last year's. Pine trees stick their needles out to snag the cotton-wool of the clouds. The sound of cuckoos rises in the air, a rising crescendo—the Common cuckoo (the call is 'cuckoo, cuckoo") and the common hawk cuckoo (it repeatedly shrieks 'brainfever, brainfever"). There is the buzz and drill of the Rufous sibia, a rufous-and-black bird which is briefly inspecting the last of the pink rhododendrons. The bird pauses and breaks into a melody which sounds like pennies falling down the stairs—warbling, tinkling, making you richer. There are wild flowers everywhere—Himalayan daisies, the hint of strawberries, the rhododendrons on the trees. The plains sigh in the heat, but the mountains always make you believe you are in a different time zone, a different season. It is the closest to being in 'another place" that I can think of.
I wonder if searching for beauty during times of crisis is maudlin. Is it banal to search for colour when times are militarised? Something hard crunches under my feet and I am reminded nature is anything but maudlin. Beauty is just one lens to understand the wilds. Awe is another.
In his lovely book, The Immense Journey (1957), anthropologist Loren Eiseley writes about the power of the seed, and the petal. Reflecting on the abundance and miracle of plants, he writes: 'The golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be indistinguishable… the weight of a petal has changed the world and made it ours."
9.30am, Saturday, Uttarakhand: The birds are retiring to the leaves of the oaks and pines. A hot day gnaws at the sides of the vista in front of me. In Delhi, my friend's garden tree has crashed. The Resident Welfare Association moans about a tree that has fallen on a new car. The storm is gone, but it has taken its toll in heartwood.
In the hills, it is too early for cicadas, but flycatchers' calls ricochet in the air. There is a flash of deep blue— detergent blue—and this is the Ultramarine flycatcher. Near the base of the tree I am looking at, there is a little gecko, out to sun himself. The forest seems to drip with meaning and generosity, feeding literally everything that lives here—people, bugs, birds, flowers, snakes. Somehow, my anxiety has abated. I feel intensely this place is a corner of peace. I realise then that the opposite of conflict is thinking of the future. Thinking about what we can plant today to reap tomorrow—both trees and good common sense. The future must have trees; part of our future is saving our wilds. The future is in taking the high road—through caution, through calculation, and through the woods we must protect.
Most of us don't know about war. But we do know the importance of building corners of meaning, our own personal havens. I look again at the spot the gecko emerged from. It was a hole in a tree that died long ago, now resembling a skeleton of an arboreal giant, useful even in its death. There is something intensely life-giving about every corner of natural ecosystems. Everything is worthwhile. Everything feels like it is speaking a universal language of connection: between the bug and the bird, the fern and the spring, the mountain and the person. Looking at the forest, I feel the humanism of the forest. I realise then that being a humanist is a radical act.
I look at the trees and hope we always stay radical.
Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species. Views expressed are personal.
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