2018:Vol 3,No.2

Cover Page

Harvest is now 6 issues old. Though multidisciplinary, we remain pledged to our thrust on the Planet and environment. After three years, I would have loved and looked forward to greater participation from our students and the Young Brigade…our true ‘Harvest.’ It is important for us to know and respect your stand, your values, your perspectives. Please take to your pen, please do !

Issues are as multiple and complex, as diverse. When Biodiversity and Conservation is the principle focus of many a symposium or conference, Avni, the tigress with two cubs still suffers a merciless end…with an array of techniques and technology, flora and fauna still go extinct, even in 2019. There are confirmed reports of dwindling insect and bird populations and unabated plastic pollution. With intensifying global warming, even the once vibrant rainforests teeming with life have lost nearly 98% of the ground and 80% of the leaf canopy insect population. Flora and fauna are swiftly changing places from ‘Critically Endangered’ to ‘Possibly Extinct.’Ironically on New Year’s day this year, the lone survivor from the Hawaiian land snail species departed.

Appalling! The first ever human mediated and human witnessed Mass Extinction! With everyone trying and vying for a place and identity on this Planet, desperate to survive at any cost, we often turn cruel and gruesome…killing our own, dismantling the subtle and intricate balance of Survival and Life.  Memories of the horrific death of several canines in a reputed hospital is still raw…the logic being that to ascertain survival you must kill and kill ruthlessly. Is brutal slaughter then the only way to life and continued existence?? !!

‘Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.’  ‘A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole.’

And so we are but strands in this eternal weave. ‘Every season has an end- for a harvest to begin.’ Let us then embrace the process of peaceful and sustainable co-existence!  

Dr. Supatra Sen
Chief Editor