GT: What is a protected area?
JK: Mostly, it is a place created by human beings to save animals and plants from becoming extinct. It can be a national park, a sanctuary or a biosphere reserve.

GT: A place created by human beings? But isn’t it supposed to be a wild place?
JK: Oh, that’s what we think.

GT: What do you mean?
JK: Don’t you watch TV? Beautiful sunsets in the Serengeti National Park, fantastic scenery at Ranthambore. Hnh, its funny.

GT: What’s so funny about this?
JK: What is the meaning of ‘park’? It comes from the Latin word ‘parricus’, meaning ‘enclosure’. ‘Sanctuary’ means ‘a safe place’. And ‘reserve’ is again based on Latin ‘reservare’ meaning ‘to save’...

GT: So...?
JK: Put it all together! You think nature is a pure perfect place of beauty. So you have to save it. Put in an enclosure, like you put birds in a cage. And how does this get done? A country makes a Big plan for conservation. It passes a wildlife Act. Forest officers are employed. If nature is a wild place, why does it require government officials to keep it wild? And what kind of idea is it that has made people suffer the world over? And in India?

GT: You mean...
JK: I mean that at the root of countless conservation policies lies a very wrong idea of nature, the idea of nature as a place separate from human beings. When this idea was applied outside the US, things got horribly wrong. And that is because Africa, India, South America have tropical forests. People live in these forests. So making a park meant wholesale eviction. More poverty. The sad thing is that even today, people in these countries go by the same idea.

GT: When you say "people in these countries..."
JK: I mean city-people. Colonel Mervyn Lowie, who worked with Grzimek to set up Serengeti National Park, used to say that protected areas are "a cultured person’s playground".

To make this come true, Shoshone Indians living in the area were asked to leave. They refused. In 1877, 300 Shoshone were killed in clashes. Nine years later, the park was handed over to the army. The army cleaned up the place.

In time, Yellowstone became the model for national parks all over the world. Bernard Grzimek, whose campaigns to save wildlife in East Africa led to the making of Serengeti National Park, fully believed that local Maasai cattle herders should be kept out of the park area. "A national park," he said, "must remain a primordial wilderness to be effective. No men, not even native ones, should live inside its borders."

Colin Turnbull’s book The Mountain People describes what happened to the Ik people of Uganda, Africa. The Ik were hunters and gatherers. But when Uganda’s colonial rulers created the Kidepo National Park, they were forced to take up agriculture outside the Park area. They knew nothing about agriculture and began to suffer from famine. They became poachers and beggars. Sold their women as prostitutes. But nothing worked. One by one, all of them died.

But national parks continued to live. And became the foundation for the Protected Area movement worldwide. In 1970, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) defined a national park as a large area "not materially altered by human exploitation and occupation, where...the highest authority of the country has taken steps to prevent or eliminate as soon as possible exploitation and occupation of the whole area." Two years later, in 1972, the Indian Parliament passed the Wildlife (Protection) Act. And if you read this Act, you will find the Yellowstone model there. Alive and kicking. Same to same.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Writer and intellectual, Thoreau’s book Walden (1854) will open your eyes to a new and different world. "In wilderness is the preservation of the world," he wrote. For Thoreau, nature’s chief value was that it was not a corrupted place like the town. "I am astonished at the endurance...of my neighbours who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months," he wrote. To him, nature offered freedom. The natural world was a free world, where everyone was the same. Thoreau’s political ideas were quite radical for his times. He was very active in the anti-slavery movement in America. His essay On Civil Disobedience greatly influenced the young M K Gandhi fighting for the rights of Indian labourers in South Africa.