[Scpg] TODAY Nov 10 4:30pm/"Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad" Suprabha Seshan, Ecologist/The Bren School of Environmental Science & Management

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

The Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents
http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/events/suprabha_seshan.htm
A COMMUNITY COLLOQUIUM

"Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad"
Suprabha Seshan, Ecologist
Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, Kerala, India

Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011
4:30 p.m.
Bren Hall 1414



"Suprabha focuses on restoring natural habitats through integrated 
conservation practices — those that account for existing links between 
plants, climate, lands, humans, and livelihoods. She seeks to create a 
healthy alliance between people and the environment." - Mary Collins, 
host and Bren PhD student

Co-sponsored by the Bren Student Environmental Justice Club

Abstract
In this talk, Subrabha draws on her twenty years of experience in the 
forests of southern India to share the lives of plants, animals, and 
humans, as well as her mountain home in the Wayanad District. She 
invites an exploration of a life in community with non-humans,and of the 
two contrasting aspects of nature that ecosystem gardeners work with: 
resilience and fragility. The forest and its myriad inhabitants can 
return, but only when certain conditions are met and only with the right 
kind of help. This is critical: with the right kind of help, the forest 
and its beings grows outward again. The truth, however, is that 93 
percent of the Western Ghat mountains are already destroyed. The 
remaining habitats are fragmented badly. Suprabha calls attention to the 
beauty of these mountain forests and their precarious toehold in an 
India where the environment is frequently sacrificed to economic 
interests. The questions that drive the sanctuary’s work echo through 
her presentation: What must we do to bring the forests back? What is it 
to listen to the natural world? What do the plants have to say? Whom do 
we love?
Biography
Suprabha Seshan is an ecologist and educator at the Gurukula Botanical 
Sanctuary (GBS), a forest garden in the Western Ghat mountains of 
Kerala, India, dedicated to the preservation of plant species, 
restoration ecology, and environmental education. She won the 2006 
Whitley Award (UK’s top environmental prize), and has traveled widely 
speaking about the ecological basis for a healthy planet that maintains 
wild plants, wild animals, and their wild environments. Suprabha is 
currently on a speaking tour through Europe and the United States, 
sponsored by writer Arundhati Roy and singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, 
both sanctuary supporters.

NOTE: Community colloquia are generally talks of broad interest geared 
toward a diverse, sophisticated audience. Their purpose is not only to 
enhance knowledge and understanding, but also to bring people together 
and promote interaction that will strengthen the community.



Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
2400 Bren Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara CA 93106-5131
A professional graduate school founded in 1991

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