I
grew up reading the haunting stories of man-eating tigers written by
the great Jim Corbett or the rousing adventures of Salim Ali spanning
throughout the Indian Subcontinent documenting unknown birds. Their
incredible portrayals of the unique, unscratched, unbroken and
unfathomable wild India and Bengal left me fascinated to the core.
As
a teenager I have fancied to ramble through our rainforests, to
surmount our dwarf-mountains, to sail across the cryptic narrow creeks
of the Sundarbans, to see the splendor of the sundown sitting bewildered
by the winding river and to listen to the captivating calls of the
night owls in our Sal forests.
The
solemnity of being close to nature, the remarkable colors of birds and
butterflies and the liquid beauty of the rolling rivers of the Bengal
have been genuinely praised by Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das and
many other Bengali polymaths in their poems, songs and novels.
Cherishing
those beautiful verses and stories of endless wilderness in my mind and
soul, I stepped out to explore what I have read in those dusty old
pages and to craft those words into reality.
I imagined a
dark-forest where sunlight would be blocked in the top canopy; moisture
would be entombed in the lower canopies, the litters on the forest floor
would be soggy where insignificant life would flourish and birds would
fly without fear.
The reality revealed something different --
most forests in the northeast are thinned, trimmed, tortured and thus
threatened, where sunlight slickly touches the ground and the foliage on
the forest floor is dry enough to crunch and crumble under your feet as
you walk through it.
With the destruction of forests and
pressure of hunting we have lost Tigers, Bears and Gaur in mid-19th
century. There have been reports of Sumatran Rhinoceros from northeast
Bangladesh in the 18th century and the last record of the Great Hornbill
from Lawachara National Park was in 1990.
Rural
Bengal is still green with miles of paddy fields but not the kind of
green I wanted to see, there are hardly any trees left, and even if
there are trees – they are mostly nonnative Acacias and Eucalyptuses
planted in unflattering rows. The dry plain land of north-west
Bangladesh was a heaven for mega fauna even a few decades ago; there
were Striped Hyenas and Blackbucks until the end of 19th century, Gray
Wolfs and Nilgais until the 1940s.
All those stories from the
past puzzled me much till I passed through our rivers and streams,
freshwater lakes and marshes, haors, baors, beels and estuarine systems
with extensive mangrove swamps. Most of the inland wetlands are now
converted to agricultural fields and other development pushing once
common species to the last remaining pockets of wetlands in northeast
Bangladesh. The Cotton Pygmy Goose (Balihash) once occurred in every
village, in every wetland but now has become a rarity. I imagine that
the Pink-headed Duck was also common in the 18th century but now
globally extinct and last confirmed record from Bangladesh was near
Benapole in 1923. The incredible Indian Peafowl occurred in our Sal
forests and existed until the early 1980s.
I believed that the
forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts would be so thick that one would
see sunrise or sunset only from a few vantage points. The foliage would
be so dense and the trunks of trees would be so huge that it would
obscure the horizon. Windfall or fire would poke holes in the forest and
the tree canopy would be closed for hundreds of square miles. Tigers,
Elephants and Rhinoceros would rule the ground and bird of prey would
master the sky. The history of CHT is indifferent from my imagination;
the last Sumatran Rhinoceros was captured from there in 1868.
All
is not gone from our land. Our forest in the northeast still echo with
magical calls of the Endangered Hollock Gibbons and Elongated Tortoises
still twist the leaf litter to find fallen fruits. The mighty
Sundarbans still supports our last Tigers and the murky waterways still
hold globally threatened Ganges River Dolphins and Masked Finfoots.
Elephants still silently wander through the Jhum lands and some claim
that the Tigers still occur in remote CHT. Asiatic Wild Dogs or Dhoals
still hunt in packs, Clouded Leopards still skulk and the Great
Hornbills yet make whooshing sound while taking off high in the canopies
of Kassalong and Sangu-Matamuhuri Reserve Forests, CHT.
gered species like the Baer's Pochard and the Spoon-billed
Sandpiper. Padma and Jamuna rivers have undisturbed sandbanks where
riverine birds nest and possibly the Gharial still basks in the sun. 
Our
country has already lost a majority of her biological diversities; we
cannot afford to take on any more loss. Is it too late for interventions
to preserve whatever is left of the Bengal, and can there be measures
taken to put an end to the destruction? Is it too late to protect the
green Bengal that so many poets have romanticized about? Will
Jibanananda Das not get to return to the Bengal and listen to the cry of
a Spotted Owlet from a Shimul branch? Will we not find him amidst
herons returning to their nests in the darkness? Will the shrilling
calls of cicadas during dull summer afternoons not sting Tagore's senses
anymore?
All
hope is not lost yet, we can still conserve and restore what is left
and leave the chance for our predecessors to love and cherish the sobuj
Bangladesh that we know as home. Bangladesh has seen enough damage to
its resources even prior and post 1971 and now 42 years after
liberation, perhaps it is time to stop the selfish agendas, cutting and
destroying and initiate the restoration what was once already there, for
at least the chance of a greener tomorrow.
