Harini Nagendra the Azim Premji University Prof prides herself on barking up all trees, right and wrong
DH Illustration
Climate change, biodiversity collapse, air and water pollution – the impacts of the triple planetary crisis, as the United Nations Environmental Programme terms it, are clear and visible to all of us. We have seen its effects in Bengaluru this year, in prolonged heat waves, unseasonal rains leading to flooding, air pollution spiraling out of control, and hospitals filled with patients battling respiratory diseases. Nothing will change unless we, the people, demand solutions from those we elect to positions of power. Sadly, as a citizenry, we seem to have become apathetic to the signs of environmental collapse that are all around us. Absorbed in battling the challenges of living in a dense and crowded city like Bengaluru, where much of daily life is spent on the road, surrounded by traffic, we are left with little time, or energy, to think of larger issues, even those that fundamentally shape the quality of our life.
Public education can play a major role in changing the way we think about our environment. An annual climate festival is running now at Azim Premji University’s Bengaluru campus, and the goal of this festival is to inspire people to re-engage with nature, approaching the environment through joy, wonder and discovery. Each year, we focus on one concrete, easily visualisable and omnipresent theme. In 2022, it was rivers, in 2023 forests, and in 2024, we focus on mountains. The theme of the festival this year is Mountains of Life, and we draw on this theme to celebrate the essential role that mountains play in shaping our culture, civilisation, architecture, ecology, and daily life.
These are festivals for the young – we get close to a thousand visitors each day from schools – and by the young, drawing on the experiences of many interns who travel across the length and breadth of the country to document stories of mountain songs and cuisine, travel diaries, tales of living root bridges and ancient stone monuments, and more. There are interactive three-dimensional models, activity-based workshops, film screenings, music and dance performances, quizzes and art workshops. We also get some very interesting older visitors. Shantha, a woman in her 70s, saw a story in this newspaper about the exhibition and came to the university for two days, looking at every exhibit in detail. She had trekked many of the trails we describe in various parts of the country when she was younger, and talked to us about the changes in India’s landscapes over the past decades. Her main complaint? Young people these days spend hours on the road, stuck in traffic jams. What a waste of life, she told us; we couldn’t help but agree.
A young student from a nomadic grazing community in the Himalayas sang beautiful songs that described the allure of the mountains. Her mesmerising voice filled the hall and captivated the students, its reverberations lingering in their minds, and ours, for hours afterwards. A group of young students looked at the large globe hanging above the trees, debating whether the land mass they saw near the Himalayas belonged to Afghanistan or not, and was Afghanistan a country or a continent? Elsewhere, women from Ladakh and Spiti, working with the Nature Conservation Foundation, talked about their experiences with setting camera traps to document wildlife. Experienced naturalists from WWF showed three-dimensional raptor models to students, making them flap their arms like birds to understand how much muscular effort this involved.
Experiences like this are essential for students to engage with the rich diversity of India, in ways that go beyond the rote memorising that has become a sadly commonplace feature of most curricular and classroom material today. These efforts are crucial for the times we live in because they facilitate new ways to connect with the environment, and can inspire people to work towards its protection. The hope is for similar efforts that help initiate conversations around reimagining a better Bengaluru, and a better world for us all.