The Singing Tree of Chungliyimti
Weekend Special: Lost Worlds and the Diversities that Really Matter.
I was a deer hunter, and a boar hunter, and a leopard hunter. When I was a child, sometimes these animals could be killed with stones, and with branches from the trees. It is not that way now.
- Ngowang IV, Angh of Longwa.
THE PROCEEDINGS ARE WRAPPING UP now at the Canada-China COP15 summit in Montreal, which is to say the 15th jamboree of the UN member-state parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, established at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
I’m not going to dwell on the details here. I’m trying to dispatch newsletters only twice a week, with the Sunday edition more of a magazine-type thing, or something in long form. So instead of banging on about COP 15 I’m going to tell a story instead.
It comes from one of those vanishing places in the world where biological, cultural and linguistic diversity have intertwined and converged from time out of mind. It’s an origin story from one of those magical places, the territory of the Naga peoples in the Patkai Range of the Eastern Himalayas, along the uncertain and vaguely demarcated frontier with Myanmar.
I spent some time there a few years ago. The longest-running insurgency in all of Asia came to a tentative end there only in 2003. For decades, the government in Delhi had maintained a restricted-area permit system from the days of the British Raj that sealed off Nagaland from the outside world. It was still in place when I made my way to Nagaland. I managed to finagle a pass with the help of a retired Indian Army officer.
I routinely encountered hunters on the barely-passable mountain roads, armed with muskets straight out of the early 1800s. They invariably took me for a doctor, because doctors were among the few outsiders occasionally allowed in. I explained that I was nothing like a doctor, but I sometimes managed to make use of myself by doling out bandages from the huge first-aid kit I’d been advised to bring along. In several of the villages where I stayed I was one of first non-doctors anyone had seen in years.
It was on one of those mountaintops in the Ao tribe village of Ungma that I stayed up late one night drinking rice wine made from mapok paddy and discussing the affairs of the world with Sangyusang Pongener, a beloved Naga patriot, chronicler, folklorist, singer, composer, and my host in Ungma. It was Sangyusang who first told me about the extraordinary tree that grew long ago on the other side of the Dikhu River from Ungma, on Chungliyimti Mountain.
You may be wondering, what does a tree that sings have to do with COP15?
Some Activists are Are Asking Themselves: Are We The Baddies?
Things haven’t been going swimmingly since the Rio Summit in 1992. About a million species of animals and plants and bugs are said to be moving towards extinction’s abyss at a faster pace than ever.
The high-office conventioneers in Montreal are intending to hammer down commitments from one another to protect 30 percent of the earth’s land and water by 2030. Fiore Longo of Survival International says the 30/30 agenda would be the worst possible outcome from COP15, because it’s based on “deeply unscientific and racist logic.”
Quite a few leading international organizations agree, among them Amnesty International, Minority Rights Group International and the Rainforest Foundation. Parks and protected areas can and do wreak havoc among people indigenous to “wilderness” areas, especially in Africa and Asia.
That would explain why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went out of his way in Montreal last week to emphasize Indigenous engagement in Canada’s 30/30 agenda, with $800 million going towards four major conservation initiatives in partnership with First Nation communities over the next seven years.
Survival International’s verdict on 30/30 might be a bit sweeping, but arbitrary and easily achievable targets like those in the 30/30 agenda do lend themselves to “greenwashing” polices that get hardwired into summiteering of the sort underway in Montreal. I’m not going to dwell here on the devil’s eco-bargains in the background to these things. I wrote about a Canada-China version of one of those concordats in my column this past week. You can read the Ottawa Citizen version if you like: Beijing, biodiversity and the 'cooperation' trap.
What I will dwell on is the woeful inattention paid to the relationships between diversity and extinctions in cultures and languages and in functions of both natural selection (“nature”) and artificial selection (as in food crop varieties). It’s all quite fashionable these days to busy ourselves with “racial” diversity, but it’s not at a racial scale that diversity is withering. We’re losing an entire language every two weeks.
Diversity is bleeding out of the human world as quickly as it is in the “natural” world, and the boundaries between the two are far more porous and complex than environmentalists usually appreciate. I wrote a book about all this a while ago titled The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left Behind.
It was published in the UK under the title The Lost and Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions. In Canada the book is titled Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories From The Age Of Extinction. The German publishers titled it Warten auf Die Aras: Geschichten aus dem Zeitalter des Verschwindens, which means Waiting for the Macaws: Stories from the Age of Disappearance, but on Amazon’s German page for the book, I’m called John Glavin. I don’t know why.
What led me to the story of the singing tree was what led me around the world for that book. I’d set out to find what was going on in all those strange places on the various maps of languages and endemic species and genetically unique local food crops where the squiggly lines and dots and shaded areas were all jumbled together.
One of those places that really stood out was Nagaland. UNESCO calls the area a globally significant region of “megadiversity.” And it’s not just a deep reservoir of biological diversity, with a bestiary of strange creatures hardly anybody’s ever heard of.
Only about 2.2 million Naga people live there, and yet they speak at least 30 major languages and even more smaller languages and hundreds of distinct dialects. Among the 300,000-or-so Konyak Nagas, for instance, there are 31 distinct dialects of seven languages.
Okay, big deal, where’s the story your promised.
Hold your horses. To start with I’m afraid it’s going to be on the other side of the paywall down below. But for now there are a couple of things to know about Nagaland, and about why people are all of a sudden talking about “the Sixth Great Extinction.”
The big five extinction events before humans came along were the Ordovician extinction (450 million years ago), the Late Devonian (370 million years ago), the Permian-Triassic (250 million years ago), the Triassic-Jurassic (200 million years ago) and the dinosaur-obliterating Cretaceous-Paleogene (66 million years ago).
We’re currently into the Holocene, or the Anthropocene extinction, and despite what you might think, it didn’t begin with the Industrial Revolution or capitalism or imperialism or the oil companies. The Anthropocene began about 10,000 years ago. Most species driven to extinction by human beings died off long before the 1800s.
In recent centuries, the world has lost more than 700 vertebrate species, but the culprits weren’t human. They were cats, rats dogs and pigs, and the species they obliterated were mostly endemic to islands. You could say humans were ultimately to blame, I guess, but you’d also have to concede that pretty well all these more “modern” extinctions happened by accident.
It wasn’t owing to some wanton rapaciousness innately embedded in humanity. What’s embedded in humanity is a love of “nature” and a desire to be in the presence of other life forms. We’ve extend the embrace of our empathy to other species. This is to the good. The thing is, our damn footprint is so huge now we’re stepping on everything. In just the past 50 years the human population has doubled.
Unless we get ourselves sorted it’s going to be like that huge asteroid that smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula opening up a 150-kilometre-wide wound of a crater in the earth about 66 million years ago, darkening the skies and ending evolution for about three-quarters of all the species on the planet. The thing we call “nature” had to pretty well start from scratch.
In Nagaland, for a hole bunch of geological and climatic reasons, speciation took off like gangbusters. The Patkai Range is one of those exceedingly rare places UNESCO calls an area of “megadiversity.”
Broad-leafed forests shelter nine species of non-human primates, including the slow loris, which looks like a cross between a badger and an accountant. A tiny tree ape known as the long-limbed Hoolock gibbon is about the size of a housecat. There are giant flying squirrels and desperately rare red pandas and musk deer in the bamboo forests, and up in the alpine there are blue sheep and snow leopards. There are hog deer and barking deer, sloth bears and black bears, tigers and jungle cats, marbled cats and golden cats.
Among the birds are also the rarest of their kind. There’s Blyth’s tragopan, Ward’s tragopan, the Derbyan parakeet, immaculate wren-babblers, laughing thrushes and scimitar babblers. There are five species of hornbills, three of which are found nowhere else on earth. The smallest species of muntjac, a type of deer, can be found nowhere on earth except the southeast side of the Patkai Range. The leaf muntjac weighs perhaps 11 kilograms and grows to about 50 centimetres at the shoulder when full grown. The wee thing revealed itself to science only in 1997.
There are forests of alder and pine and juniper and banyan rising up out of 100 local species of fleshy mushrooms, scores of endemic rhododendrons, and 600 distinct species of orchid. There are also 60 indigenous species of bamboo, including a type of giant bamboo that grows as high as an eight-storey building.
Don’t be hard on yourself if you can’t even find Nagaland on a map. The place was closed to the outside world for most of the 20th century, and besides, when you think of India, It looks like an inverted pyramid, right? Careful or you’ll miss something.
In the far northeast you’ll see a narrow corridor, the Siliguri Pass, that opens up into a vast region centered on the Valley of the Brahmaputra and the Plains of Assam. In the ring of mountains all around are the borders with Bangladesh and Myanmar and China and Nepal. Sikkim and Bhutan are up in the clouds to the north. It’s where the Himalayas bend around in an southwesterly arc, in the Patkai Range, that you’ll find Nagaland. It’s smaller than the State of Israel.
Where things get really interesting is in the half-light. There’s the wild, the tamed, and the strange worlds in-between.