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A Tangled Love Affair: What do Mangroves teach us about Reciprocity?

As our tiny boat cruised along the waters of Munroe Island, I gazed with fascination at the first Mangrove I had ever seen. There it was: so enveloping and dense, a multitude of lifeforms. A nature geek myself, I could not hide my childlike enthusiasm as our local friend paddled and screamed: “Pay attention to the animals!”. Brahminy kites, egrets, and kingfishers are just a few of the bird species living in the high canopies of Munroe Island’s Mangrove forest. Some meters below, at water level, the Mangroves sustain a rich entanglement of fish and mammals: a harmonized relationship between terrestrial and marine communities. In the shallow liquid coastline, kids were playing and trying to catch with both hands the huge flies that flew around. I closed my eyes and suddenly the child was me - sitting in a dark-wood school desk, avidly swimming through the pages of the new Biology and Geology school book. “Ecosystems are webs of space and time where plants, animals, and other organisms work together to form a bubble of life”, said the teacher. Suddenly, these words became so obvious.

I was lucky enough to see the Mangrove’s aerial rooting system, which was partly exposed due to the low tide. The inhabitants use small boats to navigate across the group of eight small islets that constitute the island’s inland waters. However, most days of the year, Munroe Island suffers from extremely high tides and floods, making it difficult to observe the roots and to walk around the island. As we transversed further, I sighted a modest portion of land just in the middle of the water. “See that islet over there? No more than five years ago, hundreds of people used to call it home. Now it is completely submerged”, informed our local friend. Apparently, this is also the case for the other two islets. “What about the Mangrove Forests?”, I readily asked. Our friend explained that sadly the Mangroves in Munroe Island were practically all gone. I was petrified. What to my naive amazement looked like a thriving ecosystem, is actually a very small percentage of a currently decaying, once flourishing habitat. Some days later, still intrigued, I dove into one of my never-ending loops of fact-checks, only to discover that the West coast of India has lost 95% of the Mangroves during the last three decades¹. Considering the geolocation of Munroe Island, this means the ecosystem I saw lies in the remaining 5%.


One of the commonly known benefits of Mangroves lies in their heroic acts of atmosphere carbon removal. In fact, Mangroves extract up to five times more carbon than forests on land, incorporating it in their leaves, branches, roots and sediments. Not only do Mangroves help prevent the advancement of climate change, but they also play a fundamental role in hindering its impact. With their trunks, they absorb the crash of waves and protect local populations against extreme weather and disasters. Additionally, they safeguard threatened species by providing shelter and support to a huge variety of plants and animals, many of them important for food production, acting as nurseries for young fish and home to honey bees. Halfway through our trip, we stepped foot inland for a beverage. The day was particularly warm but the simmering cup of spicy chai masala felt oddly refreshing. We chatted for a while with the local shop owner; apparently, his shop was one  of the three shops that still survive in the island. As we were explained, nature-based tourism, popular in Munroe Island for decades, was a sustainable source of income for the local communities living near the Mangroves. Now, there are almost no visitors anymore: the aftermath of years of heavy pollution, unsustainable finishing practices and selective cutting of trees by Indian companies visibly results in ecosystem degradation and loss of biodiveresity in Kerala state¹ .

I believe that the way forward to replenish the liveliness of Mangroves lies in the power of restoration. Restoration of land. Restoration of our behavior towards land. As the writer Robin Wall Kimmerer cautions: “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings² ”. Plants are the first restoration ecologists and we have so much to learn from them: they use their gifts to heal the land, showing us the way forward. In the case of Mangroves, once the biophysical conditions are created, they regenerate themselves naturally, teaching us the multiple possibilities of outgrowth after a crisis.

In my observation, one can’t speak of Mangrove restoration without considering its interconnectedness with indigenous knowledge.  While the tranquil backwaters weave their way around the eight islets of Munroe Island, over 8,000 inhabitants restlessly fight for their homeland. The ghosts of past lives are still visible: fully or partially submerged houses, leafless trees, and hopeless, abandoned cultivations; in turn, the local population’s connectivity, sanitation, and economic safety are severely impacted. Mangroves’ restoration and protection improve the resilience of coastal communities and national economies. Hence, restoration and protection of Mangrove forests not only means retrieving critical habitats for susceptible animal species but also the shelter of local and indigenous populations. Then, shouldn’t we be more mindful to incorporate the local’s worldview in ecological regeneration? Native communities are true custodians of landscape: their understanding of nature is one of deep responsibility, as it is intimately tied to survival, to life. Their wisdom carries the history of generations who have lived in and for the land; and when things go wrong, they are the first to experience direct consequences. Incorporating an indigenous perspective in ecosystem regeneration means acknowledging the relationality we hold with the land. In fact, one of the most effective ways to protect and restore damaged Mangroves is through the recognition and implementation of Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights across the broader spectrum of environmental governance and rule of law³ . This is particularly relevant considering that across the globe, Indigenous Peoples are custodians of 80% of the planet’s biodiversity, with 5000 unique traditional cultures covering 32% of our planet’s land and inland waters across 90 countries. We see positive efforts in organizations around the world, such as the Mangrove Plantation Project in Gujarat, India, in which the women who were born and raised in this ecosystem are involved in the plantations to replenish lost habitats, in return for a monthly income. Other success stories show the role of native communities in nurturing Mangroves, as is the case of Sri Lanka’s large-scale initiative, today named as one of the seven UN World Restoration Flagships⁴.  

Nature is often regarded as separate from society: for most businesses and governmental entities, nature is an economic construct and an asset to extract resources from. As seen over the past decades, climate change will utterly surmount economies that are based on permanent taking without giving in return.  Embedding an Indigenous perspective in conservation and restoration means looking at nature from a relational worldview: we are a part of nature, and nature is a part of us. In an era of rapid environmental shifts, where species configurations are so volatile and susceptible to change, rethinking our collective attitude towards land is acknowledging that we may need to redefine our relationship with it. Hence, restoration also means rehabilitating a kinship of respect and reciprocity towards Earth. Mangrove restoration is in itself an act of reciprocity in which humans showcase their nurturing liability for the ecosystems that nourish them. We can very well listen to Mangroves whisper tales of reciprocity: we restore them, and they restore us. A love affair.

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[1]: S. Sreelekshmi, Bijeesh Kozhikkodan Veettil, S. Bijoy Nandan, M. Harikrishnan (2021), Mangrove forests along the coastline of Kerala, southern India: Current status and future prospects, Regional Studies in Marine Science, Volume 41
[2]: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indegenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2013)
[3]: United Nations Environmental Programme, Kunmig Montread Global Biodiversity Framework: https://www.unep.org/resources/kunming-montreal-global-biodiversity-framework
[4]: Decade on Restoration, Sri Lanka’s Mangrove Regeneration: https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/mangrove-regeneration-sri-lanka