Whose Needs Outweigh the Other?

by Lucy Benson

When we first began to learn about Ranthambore national park and Dastkar Ranthambore my initial thoughts surrounded the people who had been displaced and their right to that land. The park was beautiful and peaceful but I couldn’t understand why it was worth uprooting 40-some villages to build. It wasn’t until we visited Wildlife SOS that I began to think about the issue in a new way. Here the elephants had been abused and mistreated and could never again make it in the wild. When we discussed our day visiting both Dastkar and the national park I was thinking about who has claim to land and that one person’s claim to land is not more important than others just because they are in a position of power.Thinking about how the leader at the time had made conservation a priority and made the decision to move the villages, but also of the U.S. and how indigenous people had been forcefully removed from their own land.

What I began thinking about with the perspective of the care center was: what claim do animals have to land and what makes our claim more valid? We need animals and wildlife to survive, but we actively take from them and push them out of existence. I drew parallels between the question of whether it is ethical to listen to music by artists who have done a bad thing and whether it is ethical to be at this park that has done a bad thing, but where it gets trickier is the park is also doing a good thing. Which makes me think too about stores like H & M with their “eco-friendly” clothing lines but when I think about how the items were produced it was likely by someone paid only dollars a day. In that situation I don’t think the good outweighs the bad, especially since it is within the companies means to raise salaries and improve working conditions. I also think back to the actions of Wildlife SOS and how when they removed dancing bears from people, and in turn a source of income, they created an alternative. Work in the facilities for the bears and education brought to villages. They developed a sustainable alternative to jail that was beneficial to all the communities affected, both people and animals.

I also tie this back to how the Ranthambhore foundation was somehow a supporter of Dastkar. That they didn’t want to take this land for personal gain which we also see in the fact that, though it is a tourist destination, only 20% of the park is open to the public, while the rest is kept for the animals.

Though the flip side of this is that the remaining villages on the land often become caretakers for the animals and receive no compensation. The same goes for if one of their cattle is eaten on park property. I also think about how the park didn’t do what Wildlife SOS did. The women of Dastkar came together on their own, though I am not sure what if anything they were given for the park to be built. And Dastkar only includes some of the people who were displaced. There are many ways the government could have planned their removal and also accounted for them as human beings who need places to live and work. But, then again, the land would have too gone to industrial development had it not been preserved.

When there are disenfranchised groups, whose needs outweigh the other? In the U.S. the conflict is usually between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised, where the solution should be easy and isn’t. Meanwhile, here the issue is complicated and yet they are finding solutions. Back in the states, there are definitely people who work towards justice daily but as a whole we fail to recognize that the actions of our past still echo loudly today. With indigenous people whose land we’ve stolen and now live on, the government makes no movements or plans to help people who the lasting legacy of colonialism impacts on the daily. We need to follow suit of what many of the NGOs we visited are doing: acknowledging a problem and recognizing our past and finding ways to move forward and reconcile.