Yuvan Aves, like many other people in the city, is still grappling with the after-effects of the 2023 Chennai floods. “They were terrible. We lost lakhs worth of equipment,” says the founder-trustee of the Velachery-headquartered Palluyir Trust for Nature Education and Research.
He refuses to dismiss the floods as an unfortunate outcome of climate change. “Everything about Chennai is affected by the fact that you are on the Southeastern coast,” he says, pointing out that the Northeast Indian monsoon, during which the city receives most of its rains, is unpredictable and uncertain and has been so for centuries. “The only way to live here was by conserving water because you did not know whether you would have it for the next few years,” he says.
Man-made water storage devices were once a traditional part of Tamil Nadu’s hydro-cultural history, adds Yuvan. “It was a way of living which was deeply in tune with the ecology,” he says, adding that amnesia about how water behaves is a key contributor to this crisis. “When something as big as urban planning forgets this, it is a problem.”
The book cover
The many issues caused by indiscriminate building and the extremely high cost of “development” are recurrent themes in his latest book, Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary (Bloomsbury), which was released this week. Written in beautiful, lucid prose, this deeply immersive, exquisitely detailed and moving book crisscrosses multiple urban landscapes—Urur Olcott Kuppam, the Kaliveli Estuary, Kovalam, Ennore, Pulicat, even the balcony in his Velachery home—over two years and three monsoons, taking the reader straight into the microcosms these landscapes hold and offering a sense of the writer’s own inner and outer world.
“The word ‘intertidal’ refers to the zone which is uncovered at low tide and covered at high tide. The title is deeply metaphoric, evokes non-binariness,” he says of this formally innovative book, a medley of memoir, meditation, journal, commentary, information, observation and lived experience. “It is a lot of things,” he admits. “It is not a single narrative. There are so many things woven into it,” says the award-winning naturalist, writer and educator.
Of creatures great and small
The book begins by offering a glimpse into his own life and how that shaped his journey as a naturalist and a writer. “I had a very difficult childhood,” says Yuvan, who underwent extraordinary physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather and ran away from home at 16, something he talks about in his book. “My refuge was Nature,” he says, adding that he spent the next five-odd years on the lush green campus of Pathashaala, a residential school under the Krishnamurti foundation.
Wandering on this campus, observing all the life that existed on campus, helped him turn the energy of the trauma within, using the meaning and metaphor that Nature offers. “When you are in a dark place, and there is a sliver of light coming from somewhere, you try and break that open for yourself, “adds Yuvan, admitting that he had decided he wanted to be a naturalist and Nature writer by then, a decision also influenced by the work of other Nature writers like M Krishnan, Annie Dillard and Robert Macfarlane.
Yuvan treats even the very smallest species with reverential respect
This deep, almost obsessive love for the natural world is evident in Intertidal, where even the very smallest species is treated with a respect that borders on reverential. Nothing is too small or insignificant for his discerning eye, whether it is the beached guitarfish with sunken eyes waiting for the waves to take it back in at Urur Kuppam Beach, the vast swathes of Chaetophora algae on which lightfood crabs graze at Kovalam, a white-bellied sea eagle at Nagapattinam or the star-shaped pink flowers on the Trincomalee trees in Kotturpuram. “The most accessible and prevalent and most culture-shaping things are vegetation and insects,” says Yuvan, who firmly believes in the symbiosis between children and Nature and mainstreaming biodiversity-focussed education. “Nature improves children’s cognition and socioemotional capacities and so on. I discovered this myself,” he believes.
Intertidal will be released on December 21 at the Alumni Club, Anna University at 6 pm. RSVP gopivkumar58@gmail.com to register for the event
