Tackling climate change and sustainability through Green Humour

Environmental conservation, wildlife protection and sustainability are the need of the hour as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are on the rise, consistently inducing climate change. Encroachment of forest land and grasslands by industrial plants and deforestation due to human greed has had a massive impact on endangered species. It is, thus, important to bring public attention to these burning topics, and what better way to gain knowledge and express concern for environmental issues than through the visual medium of comic strips and cartoons?

Nagpur-born Rohan Chakravarty has carved a niche as an environmental cartoonist – creating comic strips on sustainability, climate change, wildlife, environment, and nature conservation. His website and column Green Humour for The Hindu brings to the fore the intricacies and trivia surrounding the natural world, making it accessible to the common man and nature and wildlife enthusiasts alike. His cartoons motivate readers to reflect on environmental issues that would have missed attention.

He has been awarded several awards and widespread recognition for his work in the field of wildlife conservation. These include the Sanctuary Nature Foundation‘s Young Naturalist Award in 2012; WWF International President’s Award in May 2017 for young conservationists; The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) award, and The Royal Bank of Scotland’s Earth Hero Award in 2017.

In 2010, when Chakravarty was dabbling in cartoons and trying to find his feet as a cartoonist, it serendipitously struck him that combining wildlife with cartoons would result in something new and exciting as nobody else was doing it. “It was also the need of the hour as creative communication of science and ecology was something that I saw as very important. This realization came to me when I was volunteering for an organization called Kids for Tigers, which needed me to update my knowledge about wildlife as I was taking kids out for nature trails and bird-watching,” he said.

Humor, with its subtle satire, is Chakravarty’s way of indirectly encouraging readers to think about pressing environmental issues. Cartooning has always been a means of remembering something as he says he has been bad at retention. He retains better when he draws and learns. It is a better way for the human mind to retain information rather than feeding it direct facts or scientific jargon, he explained.

He feels his work is no different from other cartoonists. It just happens that he works on the niche theme of environment conservation, nature, ecology, and wildlife, not touched by many other cartoonists, at least not the mainstream ones. “There is a certain visual identity to Green Humour because it’s a style that I have developed over years of practice. One of the identifying features or recurring themes of my cartoon strip is that you don’t see any recurring characters because the issues are new, and the animals that are being spoken about are different. So, even if there are two cartoons about tigers or two cartoons about snow leopards, they are treated differently,” he added.

There are multifarious ways in which Chakravarty brings wildlife into the narrative. These include interesting trivia about a wildlife species or a discovery that scientists have made, or it could be about the ecology of an already known species that he feels even a layman should have knowledge about, he said. “In many ways, the lives of animals are connected to ours and they are also connected to our well-being. For instance, the most common insect in our neighborhood, the dragonfly, eats mosquitoes. Not many people are aware that dragonflies do so much service to us,” he said. Presenting trivia about animals in the form of cartoons goes a long way in creating awareness and compassion about wildlife species, he added.

Apart from this, a lot of Chakravarty’s cartoon series Green Humour focuses on politics and governance of the environment and current affairs around environmental issues that always go unnoticed as we have bigger political issues such as the elections to worry about. Climate change and the environment are issues that not many people like to read about, he said, adding that when individual narratives are presented in a simplified and attractive manner, they are more likely to click.

Chakravarty consistently reads about nature as and when he gets time to keep himself updated on the latest news and happenings related to climate change and environment conservation across the globe. He also interacts with other kinds of art forms and reads a lot of history and geopolitics as he feels it is important for a cartoonist to keep himself updated about not only what you are doing but also about the world, and this, in turn, filters into his work as well.

A lot of research goes into the making of Green Humour cartoon strips and this involves reading and researching about the behavior of a species or discovering little-known details about the latest discoveries. “I make it a point to read the scientific papers, journals, and publications related to wildlife to accurately portray the morphological details of a species. If I am drawing about an animal that I have already seen, it goes a long way in getting the description right. Species that I have not personally encountered require a lot of homework and need digging up literature from books as well as online articles, and watching documentaries whenever they are available,” he shared.

One of the recent issues that Chakravarty has brought into the limelight is the upcoming Nicobar transshipment port in the Great Nicobar Island in India. “I have been consistently addressing this issue in my Green Humour column with The Hindu as it is a major environmental catastrophe that is waiting to happen,” he said.

Amalgamating cartography & wildlife distribution

Apart from his Green Humor comic strips, Chakravarty has created illustrated maps of wildlife of India and several other countries for various national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, including the Wildlife Trust of India, the Maharashtra forest department, Bombay Natural History Society, WWF India, Save Our Seas Foundation’s Shark Education Centre in Cape Town, WWF Hong Kong, Red Cross Red Crescent Centre, Bulgarian Society for Protection of Birds, and Birdlife International Asia, Singapore, among others.

Chakravarty has always been fascinated by cartography and maps, and the distribution of wildlife has never really been a focus of cartography – it was a gap he wanted to bridge with illustrated maps. He first pitched the idea to the Arunachal state forest department in 2014 and it commissioned his first wildlife map for the Pakke Tiger Reserve, after which he has drawn about 45 maps in the last 10 years.

The latest map was for the BR Hills Tiger Reserve and Wildlife Sanctuary in Karnataka. Chakravarty has also taken up cartography projects abroad for WWF Bhutan, WWF Hong Kong, and the Beidaihe Wetland Park, China, and hopes to take it to newer places soon.

Chakravarty counts the Wildlife Map of India, a self-assigned project, as one of his most memorable works. As no organization had commissioned this project, he had the freedom to work on it on his terms. It needed a lot of research, including consultation with scientists, and almost a year to complete it, he told Indian Printer & Publisher.

He now only takes commissions on wildlife-illustrated maps from organizations and forest departments that work on wildlife conversation. Maps always have a mutually agreed and discussed scope, he said. Depending on the requirements of the map’s illustration, it could either just be biodiversity, or an amalgamation of biodiversity, culture, and heritage.

Researching for maps involves field visits. During such visits, he gathers first-hand references such as clicking pictures and jotting down notes. “I make a lot of notes on what the habitat and the terrain looks like and what kind of vegetation is found in the surrounding areas, and what kind of biodiversity is concentrated in which parts of the park,” he said.

“I interact with forest department employees and the on-ground staff of the organization that commissioned the map. If I am drawing tribal hamlets and indigenous people that live in and around the national park, I make it a point to visit their homes, see their way of life, how they interact with the forest, and how they are dependent on the forest. I try to understand how these people celebrate the forest as a part of their culture. All this is illustrated on the map,” he added.

Though he travels as often as he can, map illustrations mostly take him to areas that need to be explored first-hand. “My hometown Nagpur is still very green and has a lot of scope for activities such as bird-watching and nature trails. I try to make the most of it by going for bird-watching every day,” he shared.

Books & beyond

Chakravarty has also published several books on wildlife and nature conservation. His latest book Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints: A Green Humour Collection is a collection of Green Humour strips published in The Hindu by Penguin. Naturalist Ruddy- Adventurer Sleuth Mongoose published by Penguin was adjudged the Best Book, Children’s non-fiction, at the Bangalore Literature Festival and Atta Galatta Book Prize for 2021. Green Humour for a Greying Planet, also published by Penguin, was included in the Pennsylvania University’s Best Books 2021 list.

Bird Business (BNHS) was the runner-up for the best illustrator at the Publishing Next Awards 2020. Making Friends with Snakes published by Pratham Books in collaboration with Madras Crocodile Bank was the winner in the children’s category at the Green Literature Festival 2021 and nominated for Valley of Words Book Awards 2021. The Great Indian Nature Trail for WWF India was nominated for best non-fiction book of the year at The Hindu Young World Goodbooks Awards 2019.

He has also worked as an illustrator for several books – Where’s Gaju’s Herd? – a comic-cum-coloring book for WTI’s Gaj Yatra elephant campaign; Who ate all that up?, Wild Cat! Wild Cat!, Did You Hear, and Watch Out, the Tiger is Here! for Pratham Books; a food book Something to Chew On for Kalpavriksh, The Secret Garden for Nature Science Initiative; Seasonwatch – a children’s activity book on trees for the Nature Conservation Foundation; A Day Out with Delphie – comic-cum-coloring book on dolphins of the Mediterranean and Black Seas for ACCOBAMS and the comic book A Walk With Shamsher the Tiger in Dudhwa for the Wildlife Trust of India.

Naturalist Ruddy- Adventurer Sleuth Mongoose is another of his most memorable projects. It deals with a mongoose which thinks it is a detective and goes around observing nature and treats everything it spots in nature as crime scenes and when the reader sees it solving these crime scenes, they get intimate with the workings of nature, he said. “This was a book I had fun doing. It’s a completely different format from what I otherwise do. It became popular among young readers,” he added.

Bird Business is a book that describes bird behavior. “In India, most people in the birding community or otherwise are only concerned with identifying birds and are not bothered about how a bird behaves and how it goes about its day-to-day activities. The book illustrates a hundred bird species and what they do in their daily lives,” he concluded.