Special Address: Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC)

Rohini Nilekani delivered a special address at the Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC) 2026 held in Delhi on July 12, 2026.

TRANSCRIPT:

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here in this community of wildlife ecologists, academics, practitioners, researchers, all nature lovers like me. That's the community I can proudly belong to. And thank you so much to the organizers of the
Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC) for having me here on the second conference, where we all of course remember Ajith Kumar and all that he did and how he instituted this unique forum which brings all of you together.

So, thank you organizers and it’s my great pleasure to speak here. I have 15 minutes. I needed two and a half hours. I’ll try to cram everything I want to say in that time. Let me do the caveat first. I am not an academician. I am not a researcher, though that doesn’t make me less than all of you, because I also have a lot of opinions like you and some of them are miraculously grounded in evidence. That’s all I can say for myself.

I will say, however, that I love to be in nature and the slightest opportunity I get, I go out even if all I manage is to go into the little urban forest I have made in Bengaluru. And the recent presentation reminded me that I haven’t seen lizards – the rock agamas around me for a very long time.

So, let’s get to this.

You know it is a very unique forum, and I looked at the agenda and it’s phenomenal the kind of sessions you all have put together. I can see that you have brought together elements of Sarkaar and Samaaj, researchers, practitioners, government agencies, NGOs, and philanthropies. But I think what's missing and if I’m wrong, please point it out, that the bazaar or market representatives are missing from this event, even as spectators, even if they can’t present papers, because I am convinced now and I'm 67 years – older than most of you. So, you might have to listen to me on this, that I do believe that it is a lacuna and that it must be filled before the next conference because at least I cannot see any way of us achieving any of our goals and I think many of us have common goals – without substantially influencing the bazaar. And nor should we assume that it is not possible because I really do believe that India’s wildlife, its biodiversity, its ecology is much too important to be left to the ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts such as myself. I don’t need to tell you today about the ecological changes happening around us , I won’t spend time talking about the problem.

Well, it’s very interesting, very complex and extremely interesting to say the least about climate change, I don’t need to talk about that to you. But we can all see how landscapes are changing, you know, we are seeing the march of very successful invasive species but I’m also seeing a lot of human-wildlife conflict and it’s growing so rapidly that I do want to make a point here that even a nature nutcase like myself, I can see that the animals I’m so much in awe of and love so dearly are creeping unnaturally and unsustainably close to humans, or you can say vice versa from your side of the world. But especially in South India, I seem to constantly bump into
tigers, you know, in even urban locations near Coonoor where there is a tiger standing with a bungalow at the back.

I just wonder whether no matter what my young friend Tarsh Thekaekara talks about co-existence, whether this is very
sustainable and what should we be thinking and doing about it? As many of you know, I'm very proud that I became a
first-time producer of a wildlife documentary, ‘Nilgiris – a shared wilderness’ and let me do a plug, it’s streaming right now on Jio, so those who haven’t seen it, please do, there’s no excuse not to anymore. But during the shooting of the film, how much I learnt about the limits to co-existence, and equally about the possibilities of co-existence!

One of the things I want to say to you is I know you all go deep into your subjects and God bless you for doing that, but is it possible that the broader agenda could be to look at legislation like the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and create some kind of straw man, a new draft which is closer to the ground realities of 2026 – because at least I have begun to believe after being in the wild so much and talking to people around wildlife so much that if we don’t make that new renewed effort and we let somebody else take that agenda – first, what’s going to happen is that humans and animals are both going to be in real trouble. The limits of tolerance are
being breached and when that happens with the conflict that will come, I think ecosystem services that are so well supported now or somewhat supported now at least will really suffer. The question to ask is, is this too much to ask of this community, is it just my agenda, but please do think about it. Many of you are excellent researchers who of course pride in knowledge for knowledge’s sake and I totally respect that.

For more than 20 years, I put my money where my mouth is on that in many institutions. Yet as I look around me, you know at my age, when I look at the gathering of many hopeful youngsters in this room, I do feel that if we don’t broaden our horizons to questions like this which affect everybody, I don’t see how we can positively impact on their future. I think these questions are part of that. I think we can't afford to only focus on narrow technical issues, important as they are, of species behavior and protection, we also have to think like environmental economists of course, but also like green business people, like future minded politicians and like artists, sound recordists and narrators.

It requires what was said in the opening session that I missed, a much more interdisciplinary approach. I know from watching so many institutions that when so many people are delightedly and delightfully immersed in their very deep narrow work, it’s very hard to achieve this goal, but I do believe that this kind of collaboration and especially when it is not imprisoned by over enthusiastic academic bureaucracy, will allow us to achieve a much broader understanding. I am sure nobody disagrees with me, it’s about how to do it that the question comes.

But as part of trying to bring in a lot of different perspectives, some of you may know that we recently instituted together with Dasra, the Samvardhan fellowship. Many of you already have academic partnerships for research, in some sense you are part of the elite of this sector, but there are so many people out there, young people I meet when I travel, who have a burning research question, they don’t quite call it that, but they want to know, located in their experience, lived experiences, how can I ask a question and have some help to answer it, so I can go back into that local area and do something about the question that I have. That’s really what the Samvardhan fellowship has been about and we have really worked hard to make sure that the young scholars whom we shall soon choose from all around the country, from different languages, will hopefully get a lot of mentorship from many of you in the room and whoever wants to join us, please let us know.

And we really hope to create a different kind of fellowship, and I hope to bring a lot more funders into that going forward, so I do hope we can find some good work coming out of that. And for the young people here, I want to reiterate what you already know, that there was no perfect past. The planet has always been in flux and always will be with or without us humans. But we humans naturally, because we are so idealistic and we are so imaginative, we want to create this ideal place of our imagination. But to all of you I would say, you know, rethink this vision. Humans are not some super villains in this story at all and we are part of nature and like so many elements in nature as all of you know so deeply, we are experimenting, we are evolving, we are following both our primitive brain and our more evolved parts of our brain.

We are failing, we are succeeding and we are going on. And I feel really inspired by Chris Thomas’ book and his optimistic
ecology. There are many critics of that here. I can also easily critique his work. I don’t know if some of you have read it. It’s called Inheritors of the Earth.

But I do want you to read it, those who haven’t, with a very open mind. He argues that in fact humans are enabling enormous biological diversification on this planet by redistributing plants and animals around the globe, accidentally or on purpose. And he does not obviously deny that we are in a massive extinction for many species.

But he also suggests through many examples and rigorous data that nature is still thriving in an age of extinction. People
critique him saying that he overestimates nature’s resilience. But to me that sounds like I need to tell those people to watch
the hubris a bit. Because I can’t believe that nature is not exactly that resilient. I am sure you have been hearing about just that in the last two days at this conference.

Now there can be a big critique of Chris’s work. But you know that evidence, that line of thinking allows me at least to be optimistic, hopeful and ready to act. We are in the process, for example, of restoring, regenerating, I am not using the word conservation, we are enabling maybe the recreation, something new of enhancing some wooded areas and some forests in our tea estate in the Nilgiris.

I cannot tell you what an incredibly exhilarating and humbling experience it has been in the last three years. And instead of looking at the invasive species as an enemy to be absolutely slashed down and burnt and pulled out from its roots, I have now begun to admire the beautiful flowers it produces, the lantana and its incredible ability to succeed in its new rather hostile environment.

I am not suggesting we grow lantana or create lantana forests. I am just saying after understanding and reading so much
more, I began to have a new respect for successful invasive species. I also donated a lot of money trying to remove lantana and it comes back faster than we can do it. But certainly, a lot of money is used by the forest department for it. I do not want to say anything more on that. I do not want to be part of losing battles. I want to be part of battles that continue to inspire young people. We can have the lantana debate later. You can still admire the beautiful flowers while we try to remove it. At the estate, while we are trying to bring back indigenous plants, we have created one of the largest private nurseries now.

There are thousands of plants, and we use what we can and share all the rest. Nature Conservation Foundation is working
with us. It has been a truly marvelous journey.

I am really learning to remain humble and to keep my mind very open and the work very flexible and that is what I want
to share with you and maybe that is what is helping me a lot. I do not want to get into the am I a neo-conservationist or am I a traditional conservationist debate. I do not want to say am I biocentric or anthropocentric. Those who have been with me in the field would probably lean towards me being on the biocentric side but my mind is open to understanding that humans are the dominant species on this planet and what does that mean? How should we deal with it? What new moral frameworks and ethical values do we need to incorporate that convince other people and not just the people in this room?

I want to look around me with hope and not despair. I have always felt despair serves very little purpose. It is like a
rocking chair. It moves around a lot but does not go anywhere. Hope on the other hand is that thing with wings. It can make us fly with the power of its thrust. I just want to say as I close – let us keep our mind open to all possibility and work hard to understand and help others to understand.

Your work is so critical, the work of each one of you in this room. What is happening? What is happening to our forests, to our oceans, to our cities and our lakes and to the earth that we live on? I want to say please all of you carry these stories further than you already do.

Much further afield into the hearts and pockets of philanthropists.We need many more philanthropists coming into this space. Please carry these stories into the budget heads of bureaucratic files. We need more government public spending coming into this space and please carry them into the balance sheets of businessmen. And of course, most of all we need to talk and walk ourselves
into the minds of citizens everywhere about how we can be better trustees of the treasures around us. But we need to understand those treasures first and that is where you come in. I often use this analogy in my talks.

Many of you know I love tigers, but I also love spiders. Sujit from Kabini showed me the utter beauty and cleverness of all
the spiders around us. So now I am very careful as I walk around and see a sliver of a web. But I started to say even when I was young, how do these spiders do it? Spin webs across empty space? It is always a marvelous mystery. And then I realized as you all
probably know already that they actually wait for the warm gentle breeze to come that allows them to throw their silken thread across empty space to a point across and then make the connecting web.

Now imagine that. These skilful spinners have to wait for a gentle breeze to allow them to do that. And I think the role of
that gentle breeze is very important. And I think that all wildlife ecologists – all of you – are actually like that gentle breeze. It is the gentle breeze that allows a worldwide web to be spun to protect and to renew this marvelous planet home on which we live. I end by saying wildlife biologists, I pray you yourselves become a flagship species for biodiversity conservation.

Thank you very much. Namaste and all the best.