Human-Elephant Interaction in India

“The elephants didn’t mean them any harm” explained a resident from Bannerghatta, India who has to be careful at night in case the animals trample them. It is about living with nature’s large creatures while farming, especially as changing land use constrains the elephants. Another resident explained how the difficulties with the elephants become “a psychological burden.”

These words are from a recent podcast about the mental health and livelihood impacts of living with environmental change around the Bannerghatta National Park in southern India. Interspersed with sounds of water, insects, and birds, people relay the challenges and opportunities they face when mixing their day-to-day living with external desires to conserve and protect nature.

The London, UK community space (the Wellcome Hub) where the podcast was launched.

Source: Ilan Kelman

Land Body Ecologies Podcast is produced by Invisible Flock and this episode, The Land Has Changed For Them Too, is produced with Quicksand in collaboration with Buffalo Back Collective and Frontier Elephant Programme.

The project connects artists, scientists, and people working in their own communities, typically Indigenous and land-dependent. To research and analyse people’s experiences and feelings—including producing the podcasts—designers, conservationists, activists, scientists, and technologists come together, sharing their knowledges and ideas.

I am one of the scientists on the team, exchanging and learning how people across the continents have been imposed on to deal with environmental changes, human-environment interactions, and the psychological and emotional implications. Through this work, we aim to support people and communities in documenting their experiences related to solastalgia, which refers to mental health distress from environmental changes to home and land. There is also eco-inspiration and climate hope in terms of acting to counter the imposed challenges, fostering positive psychology, and seeking desired and desirable change.

Elephants and people around Bannerghatta, India

For the world around Bannerghatta, it means accepting elephants within farming and forest-dependent communities. The people living there do not always resent the elephants, even when the animals eat their fill of the crops and destroy some of what they do not eat. The communities living around the Bannerghatta National Park do not always see the elephants as intending to cause harm and recognise that the land belonged first to the elephants and then to human beings.

An elephant behavioural scientist explains during the podcast how elephants and people have a long history of living (and eating) side-by-side. Each species has modified its behaviour according to experience from these interactions.

The imposition of the park changed this dynamic, as did human populations, altering their needs and expectations for lives and livelihoods. External decisions delineate what land is “protected” and what is not, while indicating how to move away from traditional and subsistence lifestyles. Human-elephant interaction becomes human-elephant conflict, creating a psychological burden on the farmers.

Adding to the separation from the land is younger generations commuting to the nearby city, Bangalore, for daily work or to live there, visiting the farms and forest only occasionally. Understanding elephants’ needs is diminishing, along with connections to all the other forest animals, including deer, peacocks, bison, and leopards. Even those who settle near the forest need to change their actions to deal with the rules and officials seeking to manage human “encroachment” into what used to be local land for local livelihoods.

Cross-species solastalgia

Cultural memories now include elephants attacking and harming people, in addition to using weapons to attempt to scare elephants away, which does not always work. This contrasts with the previous cultural norm of respecting and living with elephants.

This shift undermines some of the knowledge which people used to thrive on, and so induces solastalgia. It also neglects the intelligence of elephants, their adaptability to different environments, and their distress when their familiar places or access to them suddenly changes.

And so the podcast concludes with how solastalgia also affects animals other than human beings. The psychological burden of what is now human-elephant conflict is not just on people practicing agriculture, but is also on elephants who used to know how to find food and thrive on human-occupied land.