BY VIVEK MENEZES
With poetic symmetry, it was Justice Gautam Patel who summed up the potential of the Miramar Dialogues initiative of Aditya Kakodkar and his team at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Goa office, just off the sands of the iconic beach. Amidst the onslaught on Goa’s environment being unleashed with total impunity across the state, the distinguished jurist delivered a sterling message of hope at the eighth and final discussion of the series last week. “People were becoming a bit pessimistic,” says Kakodkar, about the multi-generational audiences who packed in for each session: “I could sense they wanted to know about their options on how to have an impact as ordinary citizens. Justice Patel’s free-ranging interactions with the audience made it quite easy for them to understand the difference between personal grievance versus an effective people’s movement. It also highlighted the nuances of the legal system, and gave an important perspective on why it is worth it for ordinary citizens to strive to protect the environment around them.”
To be sure, WWF itself has invaluable potential in Goa, with so many other institutions in tatters, and civil society still rebuilding after the pandemic. In less than four years since he took over the Goa office, Kakodkar and team have made several vital contributions and interventions: working with 30 villages in the River Sal basin to curb the inflow of plastics into the Arabian Sea, helping indigenous fishing communities – including at next-door Caranzalem - to understand the importance of saving guitarfish (the species featured in the Miramar Dialogues logo), and encouraging citizen science initiatives to document biodiversity, with programmes like the City Nature Challenge, while monitoring wetlands, and preparing ecological health cards for them as per Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change guidelines.
Miramar Dialogues was sparked by the crisis playing out in front of Kakodkar’s eyes, as with everyone else who passes by that once-beautiful arc of sands. Entirely pristine after the Covid-19 lockdowns, it has been non-stop destruction ever since. Hundreds of trees have gone, and an ocean of garbage blankets the shore. Highly damaging road-side concretisation keeps extending towards Dona Paula, while various “authorities” have kept dumping shoddy “infrastructure” at the beach entrance, which inevitably falls apart almost immediately. The crowning insult in this disgrace of misgovernance is the wooden-style walkway that massacred the very last stand of casuarinas, and has already crumbled to bits, with an even more destructive concrete promenade - left half-finished – that was bulldozed alongside, and is now frequented by hawkers. It has become like the worst of Calangute, virtually overnight.
Kakodkar says “we wanted to create a platform for citizens to interact with the foremost experts on all the various aspects of our environment, and learn about the real issues we face in Goa from the expert perspectives of the people who are striving to protect it. It was also a means to create a collective understanding of the baseline in relation to all aspects of where we are at the moment – with sessions on the Mhadei, on plateaus, on waste management etc - and a clear picture about what needs to be done to protect the environment. I believe we achieved much more than we had initially expected. It was the first time that such a comprehensive 8-week-long campaign was organized at the Goa office of WWF, and we are very happy with the results. So many people from across sectors, disciplines, and sections of society came to attend and engage in these dialogues, and this enthusiastic response made us realize there was always a need for such an initiative in Goa, and Miramar Dialogues has all the ingredients to become the ideal platform which has a potential to touch the hearts and minds of people, to spark some of the changes that are the need of the hour.”
The “first season” of Miramar Dialogues was filled with memorable highlights, starting with the discussion held in Konkani with Rajendra Kerkar of the Goa River Conservation Network in conversation with Prakash Parienkar and Nirmal Kulkarni. There was a surprise mid-season addition of brilliant Goa wildlife films by Doel Trivedy and the Miramar-to-Manhattan star Malaika Vaz, and a lively back-and-forth on the theme of Conversation Lessons for Generation Next with the wise and wonderful Norma Alvares of Goa Foundation and a flood of eager questions from Adrianna Faleiro and Shaurya Shetgaonkar of Vidya Vikas Academy School, the winners of the WWF’s Wild Wisdom Global Challenge
competition.
Everything came together in the potent presence of Justice Gautam Patel, a most formidable figure in the Indian environmental movement who began his career as the bulwark of Bombay Environmental Action Group in its pleas on behalf of mangroves, Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and Melghat National Park.
Patel is famously eloquent, and refreshingly informal. He got to the heart of the matter very quickly, outlining ideas and examples that can work in Goa. There was even a broad show of hands, with an agreement to keep the impact of Miramar Dialogues going forward into collective commitment. In this, of course, there was an uncanny reminder of his own stunning 2017 judgement (along with Justice Nutan Sardessai) that saved the beach from a previous mortal threat, after the Lucky 7 casino boat owned by Haryana politician Gopal Kanda ran aground. As a special treat last week, he read out these lines for the audience to appreciate in his own voice, but it was also a stark reminder of how far we have fallen so fast: “We make ourselves abundantly clear that we will hold the petitioners responsible for the slightest environmental damage and loss caused to either Miramar Beach, the city of Panaji or any of the beaches downstream such as Caranzalem. We are aware that after mid-July 2017 when MV Lucky Seven beached herself on the sands of Miramar, there have been a series of issues, one of which we believe is now a sizeable hole in her hull. We will not accept any of these as excuses, or any other excuse about “inclement weather”.
The monsoons and tidal conditions at this time of year can have come as no surprise to anyone. MV Lucky Seven ran aground after the monsoons began. She will leave before the monsoons end. Casinos will come and go. They are replaceable. Our beaches are not. The most terrible judgment of all is the judgment of history, and history will judge us all not by the way we care for things we can replace, but how we protect the things we cannot. Therefore, our beaches and rivers first; casinos later.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature
Festival)