Thread by @ikukreti

1. Hey guys. I have been off Twitter for a while. With what's been going on, especially in Delhi, I just couldn’t bear to be here. I was between jobs and felt completely useless and unable to do anything meaningful. 
Now, I am resuming work & have a personal update to share.

2. After 4 years of politicising environment at @down2earthindia, I am joining @scroll_in
I will be writing about policies and problems related to environment and sustainability.

3. Before I start sharing my new stories , as a way of seeking validation and a token of my appreciation for the great people at DTE, I want to share with you some of the stories which I did for DTE and am extremely proud of. (Thank you @richiemaha for being an amazing boss :) )

4. This is going to be a long thread, so please bear with me. In my defence, selecting from a list of around 500 stories is not easy and my desk which looked like this at the end of it, is proof of that:

5. Starting with my last story at DTE, a good old story about environmental regulatory framework. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

6. Back in April, I brought some of the best minds in environmental conservation to talk about how arming forest guards isn’t a simple black and white issue. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

7. This is from back in Feb, when our environment minister told the Parliament that a senior conservationist, who had passed away six years back, was still serving on the National Board for Wildlife. Epic. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

8. This one was about how MoEF ignored the warnings of its own scientific body to give clearance to Highway Projects in Protected Areas. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

9. I am really proud of this. If, like me, you get really passionate about conservation's political ecology & find yourself fuming at the mouth, feeling frustrated, read this.
Thank you @earthjournalism for supporting this story. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/i…

10. And here we have a story about how a government forgot to update its law and created a situation where the judges are asking prosecutors the definition of a rabbit. :D

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

11. Are you concerned about illegal wildlife trade? Here’s something else to worry about- legal wildlife trade. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

12. One would have thought that we have left the people vs environment debate behind, but, no. Here’s how conservation policies are still being framed in exclusionary terms. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

13. What’s the human cost of conservation in India, a cost that was completely discountable. Read here: 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

14. What happens to you if your village is in a city and all village level institutions are erased? You have to learn to swim. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/rai…

15. This has to be, has to be from the Hitchhiker’s Guide. But, it isn’t. We have been doing virtual plantations and even that we managed to get wrong.  

downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/c…

16. Tigers are burning bright, day and night and in PAs and outside, what about the others? Light, for all practical purposes, has been turned off for them:

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

17. Here, the Great Indian Bustard seems to be explaining the age old economic principle -one person’s spending is another’s income- to the Indian government during a year of pandemic and economic lockdowns. Like, sort of explaining. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

18. Then, the Asiatic Lion keeps dying, and the Gujarat FD keeps denying it. The lion cannot be the king of the jungle, because never, not even during the Boshevik revolution or the Roman Republic period, were kings treated in such a manner. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

19. When the regulator is raazi toh kya karega kaazi?
 
downtoearth.org.in/news/complianc…

20. I remember writing this story after the CMS CoP last year in Banaskantha. What satisfaction it is to read British District Gazetteers and find that three big-ass wildlife sanctuaries have been lost to the paper shuffle of Indian bureaucracy. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/mining/jh…

21. Here is the Indian government batting for the elephant at an international conference, when its domestic conservation policies around the species and its habitat are meant to send the elephant back to the pavilion for good. Typical.  

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

22. In a way, Andaman’s problems started from here. Honestly, it was just the bureaucracy trying to find solutions. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/w…

23. That time when the Indian government tried to sell as much forest land in J&K as possible before the state was truncated to a UT.

downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/w…

24. And that time when the state first forced forest dwellers to move out of the forest for the greater good of god knows who and then decided to dupe them (so to speak). 

downtoearth.org.in/news/governanc…

25. When you are legally ambitious about forest land and then decide to create a metro in its place. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/w…

26. When the state tries to undo its own logic and seeks to mine the areas it decided was to be preserved. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/mining/ce…

27. When you count tigers and they are happy everywhere, but not in the states with the highest rate of forest land diversion for mining, what does that tell you? I don’t know, duh?
downtoearth.org.in/news/mining/st…

28. This is a perfect example of that famous and beloved international bureaucratic saying, “Local to global”, but in a negative sense. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/economy/r…

29. Man, this was just sad. I attended one of the hearings and it was chaos. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/o…

30. When someone tried to send to Ministry of Tribal Affairs FRA data in acres and the ministry thought it was in hectares. Classic bureaucracy stuff. 

downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/t…

31. Elephant ivory nahi hai, toh mammoth ka hi dedo. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

32. First you uproot people from the mining area, then you uproot people for the area you use to plant trees to offset that forest land diversion for mining. Like, what even is this, a cruel oops?
downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/u…

33. Back when the India government tried to decolonise forest governance and ended up making the colonisers blush in their graves. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-c…

34. Move over #Sherni , cause in the words of MC Sher, bhag bhag bhag, aaya sher, aaya sher. Rakshak bana bhakshak bhi sahi hai. 
downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/w…

35. Oh, if you can find the DTE cover on CDV deaths of Lions in Gir, please read that. That’s my Mukul Sharma’s Green and saffron kind of conservation story. Here’s the short online version:

downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-…

36. And to cut the list short, my first cover story at DTE. It fells like I was working on this yesterday. :)

downtoearth.org.in/coverage/agric…

37. As any environmental journalist will tell you, our stories all point to the one thing that is known to kill democracy and make a nation fail- the death of institutions...

38. ...From conservation to pollution, the only environmental story that is emerging out of India is that we are gutting our environmental institutions and are headed towards an ecological crash and god knows this is not just limited to the environment.