Key points
- In today’s world, it is easy and important to “get out into nature” even in busy, noisy, and polluted cities.
- Paying attention to nature is an act of care and an act that can ground us and make us happier.
Many people live among amazing wildness in unexpected places, including noisy, bustling, dirty cities and in their own neighborhoods.1Not everyone is privileged to live in wild environs and among the reasons I was attached to conservationist Neha Sinha’s new highly-acclaimed book, My Wild City: Finding Nature, Meaning, and Hope in India’s Capitalis that she shows how easy it is to get out into nature in unexpected places. Her important message is a wonderful example of what Richard Louv calls “bioenchantment.” In her beautifully written book, Sinha “uncovers the wild creatures, ecological histories, and deep sense of meaning that can be found in any city—and indeed, any place—in the world.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you writeMy Wild City?
Neha Sinha:I think My Wild City came to me through the braid of love and loss. There were many creatures I loved growing up – fireflies, hoopoes, Gyps vultures. They seemed so odd; I wondered how they would speak. The vulture would be polite and aloof; the firefly would be an absolute zinger, and the hoopoes looked like punks in suits. However, as I grew older, I realised these animals were gone from Delhi, and other places I looked at in India. I also realised we were suffering from generational amnesia – many of my peers did not even remember having seen them. Someone pointed at a (still abundant) Black kite and said: look, there’s your vulture. There are worldwide declines of migratory birds and fireflies, and Gypsyvultures are heavily impacted by the illegally used cattle-painkiller diclofenac.
What I loved seemed to be lost, but it was also a private loss, almost like grief, because others did not record it
I realised then I needed to go on a quest to find these creatures again
The book brings together love, loss and this quest, and also tries to create a new vocabulary for life through the lessons Nature offers us
MB: Who do you hope to reach?
NS: I hope to reach everyone who has never looked a wild animal in the eye, or has turned away, because they think animals and nature are something ‘far away’. In many ways, animals mess up the boundaries of our lives – in the way of mischievous cousins coming over for summer. There are jackals howling in the book, nilgai antelope running through campuses, civets and owls making the night their own, large native semal flowers plopping on cars in hospital parking lots, inconvenient but also providing levity – smudging all the order and borders we like to set up. The book suggests that opening our lives to these processes is opening our lives to new pathways of meaning, to a wilder, but ultimately more humourous and connected life.
MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?
NS: I am concerned with ecological memories, and also the frail nature of memory – we remember some things, and forget others. It can be quite random. I remember a House sparrow nesting behind my grandfather’s oil painting every summer, until they just stopped, corresponding with House sparrow decline. Others don’t remember this. I feel, as do other nature writers, that we must mine our ecological memories, and record them, because if we don’t know what we have lost, we will never value it, and never try to restore it.
The second message of the book is that there is a lot of nature even in cities, despite our efforts to the contrary. Writers like JC Niala and Robert Macfarlane also write about how nature is where we are, and there is a wilderness within us that needs to be nurtured. Ultimately, the book talks about restoration of the native – of recreating habitat on the banks of the River Yamuna, of creating biodiversity parks. More parks, not parking lots; and more ecology and less of horticulture, in that we don’t want the same few garden plants being planted everywhere. We have over 400 bird species in Delhi, and I want this to be a source of pride, not another random fact.
The third message of the book is to find community to go outdoors. This book wouldn’t have been possible without the birders, rewilders, and explorers in my life. They are my family that I can lean on – in the blistering heat and the rain, through Covid and illness
Finally, this is also a book about post Covid recovery. I draw an analogy about how native plants are thorny, spindly, but resilient. They have a kind of fierce beauty, and strong spines. That is how people can be too – we are climate survivors, Covid survivors, city survivors – and going outdoors and observing nature creates a much-needed resilience to life. Birdwatching can be a way of finding ‘restorative attention’ as Stephen and Rachel Kaplan put it. I am saying paying attention to nature is an act of care, an act that can ground us, make us stronger, happier.
MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
NS:My Wild City is ten years of my personal research and observations. And the book also deals with many of my own experiences navigating a city as a young woman. Cities are exhausting and exhilarating both, and being a woman going out in the dark has many challenges, safety being one of them. I have mostly read nature through male perspectives, and this offers a female one, and one which tries to explore what happens if you go beyond convention. So really the book is for anyone who might have felt bullied, or overlooked, or like a misfit. I find you can craft a life of personal meaning despite challenges. You can find belonging even in the bustle.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about their neighborhoods they will come to treat and animals and flora with more respect, dignity, and compassion?
NS: Yes! I want people to name the wildflowers around them, grow them in their gardens, and create ecological corridors through hundreds of gardens. I also want people to discover the industriousness of a bird like a pitta that makes a nest and raises her chicks at great cost, and with great intricate care. Dignity is a wonderful word you have used – yes, I want to award dignity to the non-human, to look at a plant beyond it being a weed, at an animal beyond it being a ‘nuisance’. To look at them as part of the rich tapestry of our lives, not someone else’s.
In conversation with Neha Sinha, a conservation biologist and an acclaimed author. With over a decade of wildlife conservation work under her belt, she is on a lifelong mission to make the joys and challenges of nature accessible to everyone, and to re-look at the ordinary through a new lens
1. For more information on the benefits of spending time outside see: The Psychological and Emotional Benefits of Getting Outside; The Biophilia Effect: Exploring the Healing Power of Nature; A Rewilding Manifesto: Compassion, Biophilia, and Hope; Healing Our Connections With Animals, Nature and One Another; The Art and Power of Connecting to the Sounds of Silence; ‘Future Sacred: The Connected Creativity of Nature’; Easy Ways to Connect Kids to Animals, People, and Nature; Transforming Trauma: Healing Through Connecting with Animals; A Mindset for Normalizing Coexisting, Rewilding, and Caring; The Perks of Simply Pausing and Appreciating Wildness; The Importance of Getting Kids Outdoors.
