From primate scientist to youth activist: Meet Swetha Stotra Bhashyam

What attracted you to a career in protecting the environment?

My fascination with nature started when I was small. I was always fascinated by like, even just looking at the way the branches would grow in different directions. Nature was always a place where I thought I could find adventure. Just being in nature made me feel really happy. But then, when I was in high school I found out that the nature that I thought was so amazing, and I thought would always be there for me, was under threat. I knew I needed to do something about it.

Do you think many youth activists first become engaged with the environment crises through personal encounters with nature?

Actually, this is something we’ve held discussions about within the Global Youth Biodiversity Network when we asked people to talk about how they first fell in love with nature. We heard these stories from young people from all over the world, from Pakistan to Africa, and everyone’s story was different. One person spoke about cooking something with their grandmother that had so many different flavours, another person spoke about watching amazing birds fly close to them for the first time. What the stories had in common was that these young people had felt the warm hug of nature in some form early on in life. And I think once you’ve been touched by nature, you can never be untouched by it.

But on the other side, that means that people who are living in cities with no access to wild spaces often fear nature. There is a disconnect between what is perceived as nature on television, glorified and romanticised, and the reality of what is out there and what needs to be protected. If you’ve never fallen in love with nature, then when you learn about the threats, it doesn’t feel like your loss, it feels like something happening to someone else, and even if you feel sad about it, you don’t want to do anything about it.

Can you tell me a bit about your research area and how that experience set you up to become an activist?

Being a researcher was a beautiful time for me because I got to travel all across India and visit so many beautiful national parks and see our vast biodiversity. I could indulge my curiosity- I heard about a crazy monkey that lives in the eastern Himalayas that wakes up its entire troupe by banging on the trunk of a tree! So absurd. I knew I wanted to learn more. So I studied primate behaviour and followed stump-tailed macaques for six months, feeling almost like part of the troupe, connected even though we do not speak the same language.

I would have loved to just continue studying behaviour. But I realised that if I really cared for these animals, I could not just watch, I would have to do something to take care of them because they live in a fragment of a forest. It is constantly being encroached upon by tea plantations, and by people taking resources from the forest, and cutting it down. I knew that very soon, these animals that I really cared about would not have a home there. And if I really cared about them, studying them might not be the answer, it might actually be to fight for them by looking at the bigger system, and really pushing for wider change.

The journey from studying animals, to publishing your research, and that research influencing change, takes too much time for the urgency that we need to act right now. So, in order to influence policymakers, I needed to be on the activist side, and I have very good skills for this as I can bring people together and excite them, create spaces and movements. So that’s how I became active in the Global Youth Biodiversity Network. That’s where we, as a group of young people from all over the world, are working together to halt the loss of biodiversity.

So what are the main barriers you see facing the young people who want to protect nature?

I think the barriers have been evolving over time. When I started doing this work, the first barrier we had was just ‘Why are you here? Why don’t you just go and do something in your own forest? Why are you coming to our meetings and talking about future generations and what young people need?’

So the first challenge was to really educate the negotiators out there and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), showing them that it is important to engage young people. They needed to understand why young people are important, not just as a voice, but also because we have many outside-the-box ways of doing things. This means we are able to contribute to addressing the crisis or even solving the crisis.

Then, once we had shown them that young people should be engaged, we had to show them how to meaningfully engage with us, not just invite us in to fill a checkbox, but invite us and listen to us because we have something valuable to say. A lot of people have this idea that young people are like half empty boxes that need to be filled, not as fully developed people with their own identities and voice.

But now, after ten years of engaging in this space, we can see that a lot of the negotiators in the CBD value what young people have to say, now every time GYBN speaks at the CBD, almost everybody always applauds, sometimes even a standing ovation. And people all listen to us. So that’s something powerful that has changed over time.

But then the other challenge that we all we still have, as we have from the beginning, is that we don’t have enough funding. Everybody thinks young people are so passionate, that no matter how much we’re doing, they somehow assume that we don’t need money, because we can survive on passion.

It is well known that you can eat passion…

We have a meme for this at GYBN…

What is the difference between having young people in a room and it feeling tokenistic and having young people being given a meaningful presence in that room?

So we have a tool for this! It is this beautiful ladder, the ladder of youth engagement. At the bottom of the ladder is inviting a young person to come to an event. This kind of tokenisation is to say we have a young person, we have an Indigenous person, we have a woman, we’re inviting them to speak, and that’s it.

The second rung is when you invite them to the space, not just one person, and prepare them by saying hey, today’s conversation is going to be about this topic. Do you know if you or anybody else in your community has knowledge about it? And if not, do you want us to share some material to help you read up more about it before you come? So you are ensuring that young people are more informed and supported for the event.

So then the next stage is actually letting young people design the event with you- rather than doing a project for young people, you commit to running it with them. The final one is, of course, letting young people lead the work. What you’re saying then is that you’re committing to running project, especially those aimed at engaging young people, and telling us what you would like to do but giving us agency to then lead on it.

What have been some of the achievements that you’ve seen over the ten years you’ve been working as a youth activist?

So I think the first thing I would say is that, from the ten years that I’ve been in the space, the number of young people that have been engaged has grown drastically. We had started I think with like a few thousand young people. Now we have over a million people engaging on badass issues.

But we have not just built numbers, we have also built agency for young people to feel empowered enough to say what they want to change in the UN. Before we started doing our workshops, young people did not really know how to engage with the process. They did not know that in their countries they have national biodiversity strategies and action plans that are being regularly updated by the government. The governments also didn’t think that they needed to engage young people. But now we are at the stage that when there is an update meeting, young people are invited to come and engage. It’s not every country, but it’s a growing number of countries.

Something else that I’m really proud of is that we have built a community of young people that share a different set of values and behaviours, that can actually move us towards transformation. We have been very intentional with this, when we start a project, we make sure we start with our shared values, and that means we steer towards different outputs. We are asking young people to think critically, to use system thinking, really understand what the problems are, and what are the drivers behind them. So, we have created a community of young people who understand that the drivers of biodiversity loss are not just cutting of the forests, or consumption, but linked to deeper things about like, the values and behaviours that we hold as a global community.

An example of this is that we wanted to understand that there’s a lot of diversity that exists on this planet and there are also many diverse ways of living. We wanted to celebrate that diversity.

In the beginning for me as an activist, I was trying to emulate who we were colonised by. I wanted to be great at English and wear Western clothes and emulate the American dream. But as I started doing these workshops with young people, I started realising that I should own my identity as an Indian woman. There is a lot of power in being me. I don’t need to be somebody else to be powerful or influential in this world.

We also always said that there are no leaders in our community, what we have is coordinators. As a coordinator, I am somebody who is helping you achieve what you want to do. I say, ‘What do you want to do? What makes you excited about doing something for biodiversity?’ and they say, ‘Okay, I want to do this’ and then I say, ‘Let me help you make this project a reality’.

Thank you, it’s really wonderful to see how the movement uses its values in practice. And also for sharing about how you initially tried to shape yourself to fit into an American box in order to be influential. I wonder how often that happens to conservationists, who have not grown up in Europe or the USA.

How can these spaces be made more inclusive of the different cultures that need to be at the table, so people don’t feel like they have to change themselves and their values in order to be heard?

I think it’s always about creating safe spaces, where people can just feel like they can be who they are. For example, I use my hands to eat food, which is something that people often look at me weirdly for when they come from western cultures, making me feel like my culture is yucky. But that is how we enjoy our food. Early on in my career, I would use a spoon, but now I feel more empowered because difference is more actively celebrated and now I’m like, I don’t care if you find it weird, I enjoy eating this way.

When people holding these spaces are intentional about focusing on understanding and celebrating diversity, I think everyone feels more empowered.