Why We Do What We Do.
The Western Ghats of India is a special place.
This is a narrow belt of mountains running across the western coast of Southern India. The ever-so-unique habitat is created by the warmth of the coastal summer, torrential rains through monsoons, and cold winter with bone-chilling drafts of breeze.
This landscape is dominated by trees, which support an abundance of life above the ground and below. These trees hold the earth together during extreme weather conditions, creating opportunities for microbes, mycelium & nematodes to exist and thrive. The dense canopy above creates a fantastic habitat for lichens, epiphytes, birds, reptiles, and mammals. In the afterlife, they add to the soil's nutrition, allowing more diversity to thrive.
"Vibrant canopies captured by Abhishek Jain highlight the rich biodiversity beneath them."
This ecosystem is a treasure trove of ecological wonders, which we are still to discover. While there are various other tropical ecosystems worldwide, this narrow belt keeps our home's weather system in shape. This landscape covers about 3% of the Indian landmass but hosts more than 35% of its biodiversity.
We have lost over 40% of this diversity to various man-made developments. To say that this loss is catastrophic may even be an understatement.
In his bestseller ‘Indica’, Pranay Lal starts his narrative by comparing the timeframe of the Earth's existence with that of a woman’s life; every year in her life was considered 100 million years of the planet’s existence.
In that parlance, the woman is around 46 years old, and humanity has been in her life for less than a year.
Before our existence, the landscape was nothing but a dense forest throbbing with life. During our short stint on this planet, we have managed to destroy these intricate balances quite a bit. This destruction could be attributed to various reasons, starting from our very basic need to exist to our greed and need to establish ourselves as dominant species.
Destruction so far has not been a tough job- we just had to walk into this landscape, bring down the trees, plant, or build whatever we thought we needed. But to recreate what we have lost is not going to be that convenient, for that matter it may even be impossible. The least we can do now is conserve what we have and learn from it to be able to create a future that’s more resilient and in harmony with the magic that life is.
We at Mycelium seek to create and share natural spaces and knowledge for us and future generations to observe, interpret, learn, nurture, and propagate what’s native to our very existence. The least we can do for our kids is expose them to the reality of life rather than keep them away from it in pursuing pure capitalism, devoid of life and our sensitivities as sentient beings.
‘Connecting the Dots’, as the name suggests, is a platform for various thinkers, creators, doers, and dreamers to share their thoughts, perspectives, knowledge, and projects that stimulate more of these conversations and help build a community that cares and wishes to join a much-needed paradigm called ‘conservation through harmonious coexistence.’
- Nishanth Prasannan