stanford: ECO-EVO Lunch on April 19 @ Noon: Deconstructing Conservation: The Riddle of the Ridley in India

apr 14th, 2011 CE

oops, forgot to send this out

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sangeeta Mediratta

EcoEvo Lunches are an informal venue for students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and visiting scholars to share research and ideas over a complimentary lunch.  This event with Kartik Shanker will be held at noon in the Twitty Room (Herrin Labs, Rm. 423). Further directions are available at: 

http://www.stanford.edu/group/luolab/Contact.shtml

Deconstructing Conservation: The Riddle of the Ridley in India

 

Olive ridley sea turtles nest en masse at a few sites in the world, including Pacific Central America, and Orissa on the east coast of India.  More than a hundred thousand turtles nest at these beaches each year, but several tens of thousands are also killed in mechanised fisheries, while habitats are degraded by coastal development.  Alongside the various threats that have affected this population over the past three decades, there has been a slew of research and a suite of conservation responses and actions.  Here, I examine three important questions about conservation using the sea turtle conservation scenario in Orissa, India: (a) what is the ontogeny of conflict (b) does biology inform conservation (c) do flagships help conservation and (d) who are conservation partners?

 

First, I trace the history of conflict in Orissa, and provide a contemporary socio-ecological view of the conflict between sea turtles and fishing communities. In order to examine the second question, I document the conservation biological research in Orissa over the last three decades and compare this to the threats to examine if and how the research assists conservation and management. Third, I examine the implementation of conservation in Orissa using sea turtles as a flagship. Finally, I dissect the conservation actors – including the State, international organisations such as IUCN, Greenpeace and WWF, and several national and local conservation groups –  in the state to examine their roles in alleviating or aggravating conservation and conflict. Here, I will ask: do all the players (the state, conservationists, corporations, academics, fishers) intentionally or institutionally continue to pursue agendas and strategies that are geared to helping themselves regardless of whether it helps conservation in the long run?

 

Kartik Shanker is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Founder Trustee of Dakshin Foundation. He works on the distribution of diversity at various levels of organisation, from genes to ecosystems, and at various scales from local communities to macroecological regional scales. His group focuses on the community ecology and biogeography of amphibians, reptiles, birds and small mammals, as well as coastal and marine fauna.

 

Kartik also works on the biology and conservation of sea turtles, and has ongoing projects on olive ridley turtles in Orissa, and leatherback turtles in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He has worked on sea turtle conservation in Orissa for the last decade. He has been conducting research on the ontogeny of conflict in marine systems, using socio-ecological and political ecology frameworks. He has also been involved in establishing networks for marine conservation in India. He is the editor of Conservation and Society, Current Conservation and Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter.