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Gehan Wijeryaratne, Sri Lankan Wildlife
Photographer
Interview by Black Dog Bone
From Murder Dog Volume 15 #2
I saw your wildlife photography books when I was
in Sri Lanka and I was really impressed by your photos of wild animals. I love
nature, and I grew up in Polunaruwa, Kaduruwella. I grew up with birds,
elephants, leopards and snakes. It was dense jungle then.
It’s that dry zone wild land, which we’re now
beginning to lose unfortunately.
You had been living in England for a long time
and then came back to Sri Lanka. How did you get into wildlife photography? When I see the images in your books it really
makes me want to go see the animals and those beautiful places. When people see
the books they want to go to Yala National Park or Wilpattu and see the animals.
Yes. People don’t realize that these are things
you can go and see. It’s not just the stuff you see in National Geographic or
Discovery channel. Another reason I’ve been trying to get the knowledge out is
to try to make the people realize that even in a densely populated city like
Colombo there is still a lot of wildlife. Yesterday I was outside with my two
daughters. I showed them this butterfly called the great Eggfly. In terms of
butterflies it’s one of the larger ones. When it flies it’s amazing because it
has these violet colored wings with white patches that sort hit the sun using
nanotechnology effectively, because it’s created by irises from that
pigmentation. It’s the natural world using nano effects to create color without
using pigments. Then in the evening I was watching 2 or 3 different kinds of
bats flying around. Then in the evening I pointed out a spotted dove which was
calling. I’ve recorded something like 30 different kinds of butterflies around
my house. In Colombo and adjoining wetlands my butterfly list is at 45, which
is tremendous when you consider a country like Britain—their national
butterfly is less than 60 species, and 243 in Sri Lanka. In Colombo area alone
you can find nearly 50 different species. That shows how rich Sri Lanka is for
wildlife.
At one time in England there were so many
different types of wild animals, but they were all wiped out.
They lost the boars and the bears and all the
primeval woodlands. Most of it has been lost. There’s almost nothing left.
Is that going to happen to Sri Lanka too? And
the whole earth?
It’s possible because we have lost a lot of
forest cover. We only have about 20% of our forest cover left. Whereas Japan,
which is the second largest economy in the world and highly industrialized,
still keeps 40% of its landmass as far as cover. If you look at our other Asian
neighbors such as Malaysia, they also have about 40% as far as cover, although
their people per capita is several times larger than Sri Lanka. So there’s
something wrong with our business model in Sri Lanka. One thing is for our land
area we have far too many people. We have gone from a country who had a million
people in the 19th century, and 150 years later we’ve become a
nation of 20 million people. 20 million people is bad enough because we’re one
of the world’s most densely populated countries. But because we’re also an
agricultural based economy our land needs per person is very high. For a
country with a high population density but you’re making your money from
financial services or some other thing where the acres per person that is
needed to sustain the population is less, it wouldn’t create much of an impact.
But for us it’s a real double wammy because too many people and our business
model as a country is very land hungry. The future looks grim.
Do you think a lot of people are aware of this?
I think some people are aware. But at a
political level we’re not addressing it strongly, because politicians know how
controversial plans were in India when they tried to curtail population growth.
At the moment there are still no incentives for keeping families small.
Actually it’s sort of voluntary because people can’t afford to have big
families. They’re now starting to have small families. There is sort of Birth
control planning available, but it’s not like in China where if you have more
than two children you actually lose some of the state benefits. We haven’t gone
down the route of giving penalties, but there will come a time when stronger
measures will be needed to stop the strain on the environment. I approach the
environmental issues using a different tactic because I know that people
sometimes find it harder to connect to the big picture. It’s not that they
don’t see the big picture. But if you say we need our forests because they
maintain the hydrological cycle and to reduce the risk of floods, people
understand it, but it doesn’t really get them emotionally involved. But when I
lived in Britain for 15 years I realized they could see it down to the level of
detail because they had names for the individual things. Especially when you
went down to the countryside people actually campaigned for the environment
more strongly. Like there was a woodlands at risk from a motorway, they would
say, “When I go for my walk I see Tortoiseshell Butterflies there, I see
Speckle Wood Butterflies, I see emperor dragonflies.” They can put a name to a
hundred different plants and animals. The richness of the experience they have
is very different from the richness of the experience Sri Lankans have. It’s
because we don’t have the vocabulary. When I started doing the butterfly
booklet for example, there were no Sinhalese or Tamil names for the individual
butterflies. There was just one word: samanaleya. Although we have 243
different kinds, our vocabulary restricts us to seeing one. We can just say we
saw some butterflies, very pretty, a red one and a white one and a blue one. Because
we don’t have the vocabulary we don’t see 20 different butterflies when we go
on a walk. It’s the same thing with dragonflies. We have 117, half are found
nowhere else in the world, but when a Sri Lankan goes for a walk they’ll see a
dragonfly, but they don’t have the names for the different varieties. The
vocabulary is not there to see the richness. If somebody says, “Let’s fill this
wetland and build on it,” people will say, “We won’t really lose anything. It’s
just a wasteland.” But the Europeans, because they have the names, will say,
“We don’t want this wetland filled in because there are 40 different kinds of
butterflies, there are 30 different kinds of dragonflies, there are 8 different
kinds of mammals, 200 different kinds of native trees.” They see richness
because they have the vocabulary.
Also they appreciate nature because they lost so
much of it already.
They’re more conscious and more educated at this
time because they have lost almost all of it.
We feel like we have so much. We don’t know that
we could lose it.
We’re losing it and actually in a sense it’s an
illusion that we have so much. If you look at our lowland rainforests, for
example, they are now about 3% of the total land area. Amazingly we do have a
huge amount of species. We probably have 100 times more species than some
European countries, but it is so fragile and so vulnerable because it’s only 3%
of the land area of a small island. It’s a small amount. But the amazing thing
is I think all of North America has something like 60 or 70 species of native
trees. But in Sri Lanka we may have over a hundred native trees within a few
acres. You can see how a few acres in Sri Lanka can have more native trees than
all of North America. That creates the illusion that we have a huge amount. But
when you look at how much of it is left and how vulnerable it is, then you
realize that it’s something that could vanish very quickly.
I don’t think the people in Sri Lanka realize
this.
I think people don’t realize it because change
is always very difficult to see until it’s too late. When I arrived in Sri
Lanka in 1999 I was shown this Colombo wetland. The amazing thing about Sri
Lanka is there are endemic mammals close to Colombo. A half an hour’s drive
from my office, if there’s no traffic, and I can see the purple faced leaf
monkey. And it’s not just a mammal, it’s a primate. It’s the most intelligent
order of mammals. Here is a mammal found nowhere else in the world, and so
close to Colombo. And there’s at least one little troop which actually still
survives in central Colombo. But over the last 8 years I have seen that the
forest cover that was there—there was privately owned land that didn’t
have anything and there were all these abandoned plantations which provided a
secondary forest cover—but in the last 8 years I estimate that about half
of that has gone. Now the building boom has stopped dead in its tracks, but
once the economy picks up again in 4 years, then in another 8 years the other
half might go. In my lifetime I might see the same living mammals disappearing.
It happens slowly. Every 3 months somebody clears a patch and builds a block of
land. And they bring their dogs, and the dogs kill the endemic leaf monkeys or
they might kill the endemic mouse deer. I remember 8 years ago when I first
moved in here there were monkeys and the loris, which is another endemic
primate.
How did you come to work with Jetwing in
organizing eco holidays and excursions?
When I came back to Sri Lanka I combined the
different skills I had developed—photography to conservation and ecology
to identification of species. I decided to bring that experience out through a
business model. I thought it would be too much hard work to set up a
conservation NGO. By working with an organization like Jetwing, the model we
use is it makes business sense to be sensitive to the environment. By rolling
it out through a business model we make it sustainable. Because it makes
business sense you can keep doing it every day, every year. Whereas if you just
did it more of a special project, you will move from one good cause to another,
like a charity project. What we say is, this is not charity, it’s basic
business. Caring for and protecting the environment is important in terms of
successful business, it’s important in terms of our pride and in terms of media
relations. In this way ecology will become part of the corporate DNA.
What specific services does Jetwing offer?
There are two sides of the business. One is the
Jetwing Hotel, that’s the bigger side of the business, and the other side is
the Wildlife tours. At the Jetwing Hotel there is the front end and the back
end. The back end is that the hotel operations is run in an ecologically sound
manner—making sure our waste treatment processes are a the highest
standard, minimizing our consumption—whether it’s energy or other
resources like food, and not using plastic if you can avoid it. That is behind
the scenes, but we have documented it in a series of Green directories. For
instance we have stopped using plastic bottles in the restaurant and went to
using only glass bottles. In terms of what the customer sees, we have various
programs to offer, ranging from going on a guided nature walk access to a
natural wetland habitat next to the hotel. We also take them out to see Lorises
at night or to see various butterflies in the daytime. It’s almost as if we
were a conservation NGO out there educating people, but we just run it as a
business product. It gives clients an enhanced tourism experience, but it’s an
experience which also sometimes transforms them. They come away realizing that
there’s a lot more life than they thought was there. The tour operative site
organizes holidays for wildlife enthusiasts, but we also put a lot of time and
energy producing photographic field guides and books.
Where do you live? Even on the village level people don’t realize
that when you destroy the forest, basically you’re destroying yourself. They
don’t see the big picture.
I think a few people see it, but not enough.
I’ve been at forest villages where there are people who understand that the
streams will go dry if they cut the forest. A few people understand. Whereas in
Europe people will campaign because the motorway’s going to destroy that pond,
and that pond has some amphibian which is not found anywhere else. That becomes
an emotive issue. In Sri Lanka a few people will see the big picture, but not
enough are emotionally connected. But if you tell the place where their
children go watch butterflies and it’s a recreational space for them, something
that they really love, then it becomes more emotive. Then they will resent
their forest patch being cut down. But unfortunately at the moment in Sri Lanka
the number of people who see the forest as recreation space is very small. The
people who are better off will go to Yala to photograph leopards or elephants,
but that’s not representative. So I’m trying to be part of a wave of people who
will get more people to have a recreational involvement. So that a forest is
not just a place with trees, it’s somewhere you can go bird watch. It gives
more reason for preserving it.
Your idea is that when people start connecting
with the wildlife and seeing them, then they will be more interested in
protecting them.
Yes. It’s like if there’s a venue where bands
play and you like going to see the bands perform there, if that place is
getting closed down people will protest. You might muster support to keep that
place open. If politicians are trying to shut it down, people will lobby to
keep it going. But if you ask people to support it for the mere concept of
culture is important and we must support music and the arts, people might agree
but it stops there. But if I regularly go to that venue and I don’t want to see
it turned into a government ministry or something, then I’ll try to support it.
Similarly with our forest preserves, people will always agree at the big
picture level that you need to keep it as a genetic reservoir and losing it
will have a negative environmental impact. But support becomes much more
forceful it there’s a wider audience of Sri Lankans who are now seeing the
richness of detail and it’s more of a recreational activity. The more children
that are going out viewing butterflies as a hobby or birds as a hobby, the more
voices there will be to protect.
Are there any organizations who are protesting
to preserve the rainforests or the wetlands in Sri Lanka? |
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