Opinion: Flora, fauna integral part of Smart City dreams

While the ‘why so?’ is an interesting probe to undertake, what is more relevant is to consider how this remarkable diversity could be incorporated into the city’s future.  

Chennai is a coastal city with intermittent hillocks that were intensively quarried in the past. Its ecological merit is evidently supported and enhanced by the diverse coastal habitats such as the beaches, estuaries, creeks and wetlands. These habitats along with the impact created by the human race define the city’s ecological character.   

A city that has grown by leaps and bounds, especially over the last two decades, today, much of the natural habitat remains as fragments and relics. Examples include places such as the Nanmangalam Reserve Forest, Pallikaranai marsh etc, all of which are under the purview of the Tamil Nadu Forest Department. These relics interestingly are also the storehouses of the city’s ecological history.   

The habitat and species diversity that Chennai’s relic patches support indicate that the city was a composite of two cultural landscapes viz. the coast and the associated wetlands, and a human impacted/modified terrestrial system. These landscapes were referred to as the Neithal and Paalai by the ancient Tamil classification of cultural landscapes. Paalai is characterised by scattered vegetation, often in the form of dense thickets, dominated by woody plants that bear latex, some of which are even adorned with thorns. The cactus-like Euphorbia also belongs to this vegetation type. In this type of vegetation, trees are scarce and are generally stunted. A plant that dominated both the Neithal and Paalai cultural landscapes is the Palmyra palm (the State tree) which is also a keystone species.  

The resident fauna of city, especially reptiles, prove strong evidence to this hypothesis. If this analysis is acceptable, the reconstructed landscape of Chennai will be one that is dominated by Palmyra palms interspersed with thickets. The intervening spaces would have been covered with a mixture of grasses and short herbs; a condition that allowed surface water flows to move freely without flooding. Trees were sparse and local and where present, more likely the Banyan. In fact, the present ‘green’ vegetation of Chennai, dominated by trees locally, is the result of enrichment in the past 50 years or so. Examples of such enriched vegetation include Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Guindy National Park, Madras Christian College, Theosophical Society, Adyar Poonga, etc.  

As Chennai plans to adorn a new avatar of being a Smart city, the protection of plants and animals needs to be incorporated as an inherent component. To begin with, it is essential that favoured notions of greening are revisited, and protected patches become part of the urban planning agenda. For the simple reason that plants and animals are the most robust and unbiased testimony of our past, and the guide to our future.