There are those who hope that human beings will learn from history. And there are others that know better. Then there are a few, like Sekar Harikrishnan, who do know better but are not prepared to let things be.
As a middle-aged fisherman, Sekar has lived long enough to see the dramatic transformation of the beaches near his native village of Injambakkam. The village is ten kilometres south of Chennai, off the East Coast Road that runs down Tamil Nadu's coast. When talking of his fast-urbanising village, Sekar is as moody as the horizon over a monsoon sea – remorseful one moment, angry another and resolute a minute later, as he speaks of how he intends to set things right. He has spent years fighting court battles to evict encroachers from the village's common lands, and developers who converted nearby water bodies into residential plots. His legal ventures to enforce manmade laws have not met with much success, but his faith in nature's law has shown more promise.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left over 11,000 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in India. "The tsunami hit them hard; serves them right. The sea went deep into and damaged every property that had come up on the sand dunes of the beach," Sekar says. The object of his ire was a line of opulent holiday homes built close to the shore.
Injambakkam, once considered the back-of-beyond for people in Chennai, is now rapidly urbanising. During Sekar's childhood, these lands were sprawling carpets of brown dunes that rolled westward. "As children, we'd tumble down the dunes for fun," he recalled. The more sheltered folds and watercourses on these hills were occupied by dune vegetation. Vegetation stabilises the sandy hills and makes them natural barriers against the seasonal tantrums of the sea. Moreover, these dunes serve as reservoirs of fresh water that prevent the seawater's subterranean advance into aquifers. By blocking salt-laden air and seawater from moving landward, dunes allow agriculture to flourish on their leeward side.