12 "the hungry tide."

The following are just some thoughts I posted on my class discussion board after reading The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. I know that you may not understand the specific references to the book, but I think the issue of Human vs Nature is one that everyone can get a feeling for.

Having read this book before without the lens of environmental issues, I have to say that the second read meant a lot more. The first time I read it, I was so enthralled by the love story that I found myself skipping the chapters narrating Nirmal’s experience with the island issues of Morichjhãpi. This time around I would actually skip the Piya and Fokir story to hear more about the people that seemed to be doomed to be evicted. There was one point that grabbed my attention, because it’s something that I grapple with all the time. Kusum tries to explain to Nirmal what it was like during the siege, that the police were yelling that their lives were worthless. In her words,

“ ’This island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people all around the world.’ … Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their name? … As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil,” (p 216-217).

Since I started this program, I’ve had to think a lot about this human-nature paradigm. Who or what is more important? Are we willing to kill humans in order to save nature? It seems to me that there are people who value nature more than human lives, I’ve met some before in fact, but I’ve come to the realization that I’m not one of those people. The entire time I was reading the book I was rooting for the humans. Human vs. tiger: I’m not really sure I care if the tiger goes hungry. Human vs. jhor: I actually started to tear up when I remembered what happened to Fokir. I’ve put a lot of effort into helping people in my life, and while I understand the importance of conserving nature and living in harmony with nature, I still have a feeling that people are always going to come first for me. I want my career to be centered around educating people on how to live sustainably off their land, but if it comes down to using fertilizers to produce more food or someone going hungry, I know that I can’t live with myself if I were to choose the second option. I’ve decided that I’m going to invent/develop the second Green Revolution. That’s my new career dream. Find a way to increase yields all over the world while doing it in a sustainable way. People need to eat and nature needs to be taken care of – it is, after all, a quite vulnerable thing – and that’s the balance I’d like to find in this world. And this book solidified my feelings on the subject.