The Northern Wildlife Corridor

The Northern Wildlife Corridor is a simple yet highly impactful proposal to unite disparate but closely located Auroville forest areas through the creation of a corridor. A relatively small investment in a handful of plots would create large scale benefits.

Rapacious land speculation in the Master Plan area and the population growth of Puducherry is threatening the environmental sustainability of Auroville, which is why innovative and immediate solutions like this are needed to address these threats. We need to create as many forest spaces as possible for the health not just of Auroville but for what it represents: the first turn of the tide from the destruction of nature to living in harmony with her. 

To stand inside an abundant forest next to a plowed cashew nut tope or denuded land is to see two human futures in one snapshot; one richly diverse and the other dystopian. Two worldviews divided by a thin fence. Will we live on a bountiful earth or a dead moon as Mother so presciently warned in 1958? 

The proposal is simple; that the existing sanctuaries of fragmented forest areas in the northern greenbelt be joined together to create a north-south corridor. It would link Revelation Sanctuary to Kamataru sanctuary via the Ridge-Top Sanctuary at the heart of the northern forests of Auroville, to create a thin wilderness zone stretching from the city area to our northernmost border. Once linked, these sanctuaries will be a place for nature to be left alone. There will be no human habitation, no cutting of trees, and dead wood will be allowed to decompose to benefit the top soil and the whole forest ecosystem. 

While the actual acreage needed to be purchased is only four to five acres, this proposal maximises all the benefits we currently enjoy from forests. Firstly, it gives the bigger mammals more room to breed. At present we have deer, jackals, monitor lizards, porcupines and civet cats in our forests. Rare eagles, often an indicator species for ecosystem regeneration, have been nesting for twenty-five years in the sanctuaries. For an animal, even a thirty foot wide corridor is wide enough for it to journey safely over distances. 

“Fauna follows flora” is a well-known saying among foresters. In Auroville this is already evident from the noisy and colourful birdlife which has accompanied and, in turn, assisted reforestation. Birds eat the fruit of indigenous evergreen trees and deposit the seeds in the neighbouring areas so that, season by season, more trees are found outside and inside the existing sanctuaries and forests. In short, creating a greater acreage of forest leads to greater diversity of flora and fauna, and so to greater sustainability.

This proposed project also has some specific benefits for water conservation. Rishi Walker of Kamataru mentions that the Rayapudupakkam watershed starts around Kamataru forest. He points out that the top of the watershed is important for water conservation and that if the top of the watershed is degraded then there will be lots of run-off in high rains: ‘The health of the hills is the wealth of the plains’. Rishi suggested in our previous issue that hydration, the water percolation of the soil, should be our prime focus. This corridor would be another step towards achieving that goal. 

A large enough contiguous forest of closed evergreen canopy will affect the local micro-climate, lowering the temperature in relation to non-forested areas outside. A north to south green wall would also provide a buffer, a pause, a geographic in-breath from the assault of shops, hotels, roads and money that is viscerally, visually and audibly imposing itself upon the eastern part of the Greenbelt. Here different values, the value of nature, would be prioritized.

The Land Board is supportive of this proposal and the idea of nature corridors in general and will do what they can to facilitate the purchase of strategic parcels of land. When these lands are bought, in the first year they would be fenced, bunded and planted with trees. In subsequent years, more trees would be planted and the fences maintained. Fencing alone will allow natural regeneration to occur.

Should this green corridor be manifested, two more potential corridors are immediately available for unification, and these would be in addition to the four planned city parks which would stretch from the centre of Auroville all the way to the periphery. One step, one acre, one seed, one nest, one insect at a time and, hopefully, the green fingers of these corridors will eventually link us not only in human unity but also in forested unity. 

“I am telling them that they are in the process of withering and ruining the earth with their idiotic system…With what they have at their disposal they could...oh, transform the earth so quickly! Transform it, put it into contact, truly into contact, with the supramental forces that would make life bountiful and, indeed, constantly renewed – instead of becoming withered, stagnant, shrivelled up: a future moon. A dead moon.”

– The Mother, saying she wishes to put a challenge before the ‘whole financial world’. Mother’s Agenda, October 4th, 1958