It is mid-morning in Oxford and a short while after lunch in Bengaluru when Kartik Shanker and I sit down for our interview. In preparation, I had read about Shanker’s life, research, and the many “institutional hats” he wears. However, reading about Shanker, a man who has worked in conversation for nearly four decades, could not, unsurprisingly, compare to meeting him myself.
Shanker’s passion and dedication to science and conservation exudes him, and is embedded - quite literally - in his skin. Through my screen, I glimpse flashes of marine-inspired tattoos on his arm as he gestures whilst talking. These tattoos are material traces of his life-long involvement in conservation.
In the late 1980s, whilst studying for a degree in zoology in Chennai (formerly Madras), he and his fellow students heard about the local hatcheries and turtle walks which protected turtle eggs on beaches. Rom Whitaker, a herpetologist from the United States, had been setting these up since the 1970s.
Riding on the back of this earlier conservation legacy, Shanker and other students formed the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network to maintain their own hatchery and organise turtle walks. “It felt like a hobby in the sense that it was something external to what I was doing academically,” Shanker explains.
When I ask him what first drew him to sea turtles and wildlife, Shanker quips that “I guess my mom kind of likes to take the credit. She says she took me to see Born Free when I was five and ‘That's why you got interested in wildlife’.” Beyond the screen, however, it was the on-the-ground, physical interaction with the natural world that sparked his interest, an experience many others went through.
“You see your first nesting turtle or your first hatchling,” Shanker recalls, “and you kind of get really hooked instantly.” After his initial enamoration to sea turtles, he and others realised that this was the career pathway they wanted to pursue. He thought to himself, “Wait a minute this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life!”
Since completing his PhD, Kartik has led a career in research, conservation, and teaching subsequent generations of conservationists his learned knowledge. This includes, for example, helping to found the Dakshin Foundation in the mid-2000s, a group that works towards healthy ecosystems and communities in coastal and marine systems.
———-
Shanker’s experience of the greatest part of sea turtle conservation efforts renders him an actor in the history of conservation. This history, Shanker recognises, is invaluable to present and future moves towards sustainability. His expertise gained from living this history has shaped his ethos towards the intersection of science, conservation, and history.
There is a certain irony, Shanker tells me, in his advocacy of history. He jokes with a laugh, “I was terrible at history in school and my history teacher really did not like me very much. So to be extolling the virtues, extolling historical approaches, you know, she'd be amused by that.”
Despite adolescent shortcomings in his historical abilities, Shanker recognises the power of history in conservation and sustainability. Indeed, his position on the Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative’s (BSSI) Advisory Board is indicative of such an approach.
Two threads emerge from Shanker’s appreciation of the historical record. The first is that past conservationists, as well as his own years of experiences, informs his conservation ethos. He now favours a holistic, rounded approach to conservation of ecosystems as a whole.
Take, for example, when I asked why sea turtles are important. Shanker flipped the question on its head: “I think I've spent the last few years campaigning that we should be less concerned about sea turtles than we are, and more concerned about the ecosystems, the habitats they live in.”
What Shanker describes as a “blinkered focus” on single species like sea turtles can do more harm than good. Such an approach of prioritising a population can come at the expense of other parts of the ecosystem and people. This dog-eats-dog approach “sets one group of people against another.” A protected species may come to be viewed as a pariah by, for example, fishermen who lose their livelihood because of no-fishing zones. Instead, a more effective use of centring species is “building consensus and building support for conservation at a broader level.”
In a way, this is similar to the discourses surrounding threats to sharks, another topic BSSI has explored. The narrative of declining shark populations has at times ingrained an excessive, albeit well-meaning, focus on shark fins, eschewing other threats to sharks like the consumption of its meat and squalene.
Elsewhere, Shanker and others have written on conservation’s “colonial” and “racist” history. Consequently, many Black, Indigenous and people of colour have been excluded from conservation work, whilst local and indigenous practices have been sidelined for “extractive or preservationist values of European colonists.” These histories leave legacies of inequalities that persist today. By understanding the origins of such problems, we may build more inclusive and effective conservation projects.
As Shanker puts it: “As a conservationist though I think it's important to know how we got here and sometimes why we do the things we do, [Methods of conservation] are historical contingency, they’re historical accident, they were historically determined.” History, then, is a form of diagnosis for why conservation efforts today may fail or succeed. From informing our focus to rectifying past errors, history is a tool in the workshop of conservation.
The second take away from Shanker’s extolling of history involves his conservation practice. It is clear that history is a powerful educational and persuasive device, and Shanker’s own work is evidence of this.
Stories of conservationists, Shanker tells me, “are just wonderful … they’re evocative. They’re inspiring. They’re moving.” Even if history was not everyone’s strongest subject in school, including for Shanker, it can serve as an inroads to a deeper understanding and appreciation of nature, past and present.
Take Shanker’s book From Soup to Superstar: The Story of Sea Turtle Conservation along the Indian Coast. In it, Shanker brings the emotional, historic, and scientific together to tell a captivating account of conservation. Such a project communicates important histories to a varied audience, bringing people to the cause of conservation.
More broadly, Shanker’s science communication incorporates history, the creative arts, and the humanities at large. He views conservation as an all-encompassing way of life, rather than being purely about numbers or the nitty-gritty science. “It's really about internalizing what kind of a world we want to live in, right? And that isn't going to happen with data and numbers.”
Shanker describes science “as a method of extracting, of generating knowledge.” But this knowledge must be “processed.” This processing can take the form of history, arts, sports, and theatre. He invokes “all of those ways in which humans actually discover themselves … through all of these creative modes … I think it's really important to engage with and use all those avenues to connect with people.”
———-
Leaving my meeting with Kartik Shanker, I came away with a deeper appreciation of the history of conservation and the storied lives of those who pioneered protecting ocean ecosystems. In our conversation, it became apparent that these self-reflexive and self-reflective histories can be invoked by conservationists, scientists, and historians as a means to build on past and inform present crises.
Beyond sea turtles and the ecosystems that they inhabit, there are many more histories of conservation that warrant not just acknowledgement, but active engagement. The Blue Sustainability and Society Initiative’s intention is not to romanticise or put conservationists on an excessive pedestal.
Rather, it is to recognise that these individuals, like Shanker, have important stories to tell. It is to argue that conservation groups and policy makers can learn from those whose legacy they build on; their mistakes, successes, and lived knowledge. It is the people with tattoos which trace in ink their dedication to sustainability that we can, and should, turn towards to inform the issues we face.
