India's natural ecosystems and traditional knowledge are under siege, even in its remotest areas. Dr Erach Bharucha began to study and document this phenomenon in his personal research on the country's wilds - first sporadically and then with the immediacy of anxiety. As he saw the values, lifestyles and beliefs of indigenous peoples being rapidly lost to the encroachment of the 'mainstream' and of industry, the documentation grew into a passionate project. Living Bridges is a repository of that research, the story of his travels and of the people he met - and, most of all, it is an introduction to richly diverse worlds. He weaves together historical and biogeographical narratives to bring alive the linkages between biological diversity, anthropology, landscape ecology, and the need to protect and conserve traditional knowledge systems. Juxtaposed with his narrative are images by Sumant Moolgaokar, industrialist and lensman, who travelled across India photographing tribal folk in the 1950s and '60s, and those taken by the author from the 1970s onwards. These pages, replete with rare detail and breathtaking images, are a much-needed record of cultures and spaces that are already fading from memory and from land.
