{"product_id":"9781968679088","title":"The elephant jungle: a story of conservation and coexistence","description":"\"A leading expert on the human-elephant conflict in India, conservationist Nitin Sekar opens his book The Elephant Jungle (Books of Change; June 16, 2026) with a quote from a 2010 Indian government task force report, \"The stress, suffering, and loss are all too real. It is tragic for elephants as well as humans [...] Both [are] victims in the conflict. Both are victims of victims.\" In a compelling true story that takes us deep into India's Buxa forest, The Elephant Jungle introduces us to these victims-elephants and villagers left behind by development. Both only want to survive without struggling, but they are locked into an adversarial relationship with each other. Neither can find peace. Nitin, who arrives in Buxa Tiger Reserve as a Princeton doctoral student, weaves his own story of researching the elephants of Buxa with the true story of Netra, who we meet as a boy living in a jungle village with his impoverished family. As an adult, Netra is hired by Nitin to assist the author in navigating the jungle to collect research data. On one side of this tale stands the endangered Asian elephant-grand, roaming the jungle, supposedly \"protected,\" yet their habitat is continually compromised by humans. On the other side are local villagers earning miniscule compensation to work the land-edging into the habitats long occupied by the elephants. As the struggle escalates, village residents come to fear the elephants who enter the village to find food in agricultural fields, and occasionally, human homes-destroying property with their feet and trunks. Sometimes, in the process of securing sustenance, the elephants take human lives. From childhood, Netra was taught a healthy fear of these grey giants who roam the jungle. The elephants are a threat to his and his family's existence despite their connection to the beloved Hindu deity Ganesh, facts that Netra struggles to reconcile. Over the course of The Elephant Jungle, the reader witnesses a vexing tension posed by Indian democracy and development: the region's human communities slowly climb out of poverty at the expense of wildlife and their habitat. The area was deemed a tiger reserve by the Indian government, yet the tigers seem to have disappeared, along with most of the other wildlife. Instead, people illegally collect the jungle's valuable timber while authorities look the other way. Through Nitin's compelling tale, we learn that the story of Netra and the elephants is not as simple as \"good\" and \"bad.\" We see the poverty villagers are subjected to, and the desperation that leads people to illegally take from the forest. We see the constraints that even well-meaning bureaucrats and conservationists face when they try to serve people and animals. And we see that the elephants themselves vary from gentle souls to serial killers. Netra's own perspective comes to reflect this complexity, as he goes from seeing elephants as sacred, to malicious, to diverse individuals that, despite their massive size and strength, are ultimately at the mercy of humankind. Through Netra's personal tale of the jungle, and Nitin's expertise, the reader gains a deep understanding of the complexity of conservation and its relationship to the South's colonial history, poverty, politics, culture, and the sentience of animals. The Elephant Jungle is a personal story of India's Buxa forest, but ultimately it reveals the complex challenges and impacts of conservation efforts around the world\"--","brand":"Books of Change","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55437404897623,"sku":"9781968679088","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0799\/4569\/5575\/files\/25829363482888.jpg?v=1792100066","url":"https:\/\/somiibooks.com\/products\/9781968679088","provider":"Somiibooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}