T.R. Shankar Raman's Blog, page 2

A rough draft of conservation history

Newspapers, as someone famously said, publish the first rough draft of history. If this is right, then the book under review can be said to provide a first rough draft of the conservation history of India from the mid 1990s to the present. Conservation Kaleidoscope: People, Protected Areas and Wildlife in Contemporary India by Pankaj […]

The post A rough draft of conservation history appeared first on View from Elephant Hills.

After a hiatus

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here and this is just a little note presaging stuff that’s coming. I’ve a couple of new posts in store, which I hope to publish in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the last few weeks have not been word-less, so to speak. There’s been articles and book reviews I’ll […]

The post After a hiatus appeared first on View from Elephant Hills.

On the Green Lit Fest Longlist

My book The Wild Heart of India is on the Green Lit Fest longlist of general fiction and nonfiction. It’s in some really good company as you can see below (cover images courtesy Green Lit Fest via Twitter). Extremely excited to announce the GLF Longlist for General Fiction & Non-fiction! Your search for the best […]

The post On the Green Lit Fest Longlist appeared first on View from Elephant Hills.

Speaking Up Against Commercial Scientific Journals

My interview with Brazilian Society of Tropical Medicine (SBMT) on scientific publishing: Commercial Science Journals: A Luxury Market? Publicação: 10 de September de 2021 Most of the research produced in the world is still accessible to a few, while rivers of money drain from public safes to large publishing corporations An article published in the […]

The post Speaking Up Against Commercial Scientific Journals appeared first on View from Elephant Hills.

The Life of a Small Bone Hunter

My brief review of The Night Country (1971) by Loren Eiseley, a writer I greatly enjoy reading. Loren Eiseley has this to say about nature writers such as Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, and W. H. Hudson, but the words apply equally to himself: Even though they were not discoverers in the objective sense, one feels […]

The Passing of the Endlings

Two bullets passed through three brothers and killed them as they sat side by side. The secretary wrote, “The first bullet killed one and… the second bullet after having gone through one struck the other, which was behind it, and killed it also.” Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo pulled the trigger in 1947. In Surguja […]

Freedom in the Time of Covid

Wild and free: in one sense of each word, to be wild is to be free. In nature, each life form is free to grow and flourish, free to confront every peril, with the wisdom of survival encoded in genes, volitions guided by intelligence, thwarting vagaries of contingence. But to an ecologist, such freedom remains […]

India’s Revenant Forests

Leonardo DiCaprio may have a lesson or two for India’s ministry of environment, forest and climate change. The Hollywood actor, as protagonist of a 2015 Oscar-winning blockbuster, plays a character who is ­att­acked, gravely wounded and left for dead, but who nevertheless recovers to live on as The Revenant of the film’s title. Now, ­imagine […]

The Animacy of Language

My book review in Biblio (Apr – Jun 2021) of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species by Neha Sinha (Harper Collins Publishers India, 2021, 232 pp., Rs 599, ISBN 978-93-5357-829-9). Engaged, urgent and political writing rarely achieves the cadence, structure and pace one expects from literary works of poetry, fiction, or creative […]

Why I will not review or write for Elsevier, Wiley, and other commercial scientific journals

A few weeks ago, a message pinged into my inbox asking if I would peer-review a manuscript submitted to a reputed scientific journal published by Elsevier. I was tempted. The topic of the manuscript was related to my own research on what happens to wild plants and animals when previously forested landscapes are transformed into […]