Green Humour- Bringing awareness towards environmental issues, one cartoon at a time
Comics are just pictures and words. Yet they can be powerful tools that shake things up and bring about a movement. As part of our #ComicsforScience feature, we discuss the phenomenal work of a cartoonist, Rohan Chakravarty highlighting the nature-human conflict through his comic strips Green Humour.
Since the early 2000s, thanks to some naturalists like Bittu Sehgal, the founder of Sanctuary Asia, the declining population of Indian tigers has been featured well in the media spotlight. It also inspired conversations about other endangered species, such as the Indian Rhinoceros, and provided platforms to nature lovers and ornithologists, like Sunjoy Monga to drive attention towards the receding urban sparrow population. However, very few understood Forest laws and how they impacted the growing nature-human conflict in the Indian subcontinent. “I sensed a lack of creative conversation happening that would help amplify the voices of the environment,” says Rohan, who after being mesmerized by a tigress at the Nagzira Tiger Reserve-India, left dentistry to follow his passion for animation and illustration to provide visual aids to conversations on wildlife conservation in India.
Green Humour, since its launch in 2013, became the first Indian cartoon series to be featured on GoComics and to be distributed internationally. Since then, Rohan has been a collaborator on several wildlife conservation projects (for the National Geographic Traveller, WWF India, and more), author of several books, and a regular cartoonist for prominent media publications.
Talking about the impact of his cartoons, Rohan narrates a recent incident from 2020, when the Government of India decided to make changes to the existing Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Act during the pandemic (in the middle of a lockdown). The drafted changes diluted various environmental regulations and provided easy clearance to the big corporations and private enterprises. Environmentalists considered this a big blow to the conservation efforts in India. That is when some environment lawyers decided to use social media to dissent and created a petition, Redraft EIA 2020. “The comic made hundreds of readers aware of the draft EIA and was widely circulated online. Eventually, the petition scored more than half a million signatures and succeeded in delaying the effect of changes by an online project alone!”, says the delighted cartoonist.
The Green Humour cartoonist finds his inspiration in the works of several cartoonists, such as Gary Larson, Billy DeBeck, etc. His book, ‘Bird Business’, is a tribute to Gendy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter’s Laboratory. For his research on topics, he often seeks expert assistance from his urban ecologist wife and bat biologist brother, apart from the various naturalists and environmental scientists that he works with.
Today, Green Humour is possibly the largest collection of cartoons on wildlife and the environment on the internet and continues to be a vocal advocate for numerous environmentalists and naturalists in India and beyond.