Humans make up only 0.01 % of all living beings.

And yet we’ve destroyed two-thirds of the planet’s wildlife in the last 50 years.

Uprooted a third of its forests.

Contaminated a third of its oceans.

Humans have authored catastrophes for others, but as a consequence a biblical one now stares us in the face – climate change. 

Meet wildlife filmmaker Rita Banerji, 3-time ‘Green Oscar’ winner and founder of Green hub, a collaborative enabling future’s young change agents, who can tell how ecological disasters are birthed, how they take shape, and the devastation they cause when they finally arrive. 

Meet the Wildlife Whisperer

Extinction is an evolutionary phenomenon tasked by nature to reboot the planet’s storage. It is meant to account for 10 to 100 disappearing species every year. Human activity, though, has driven the number up to a whopping 27,000. In the race to turn the planet into an unliveable clump of mass, humans are playing the role of steroids. Big Tech monopolies claim they have solutions but do they even understand the problem? Banerji is of the opinion that to save the future, you must raise and nurture changemakers on the ground. It’s precisely what she is doing with Green Hub fellowship in 18 different Indian states.

Banerji’s tryst with photography began with an old Agfa analogue camera gifted to her by her father. After graduating in 1991, Banerji joined a plucky filmmaking studio in Delhi led by renowned conservationist Mike Pandey. Alongside Pandey she made The Last Migration(1994), Asia’s first Green Oscar winner, on the capturing of a herd of wild elephants in eastern India. Later she was part of Shores of Silence (2000) an unsettling chronicle of the plight of whale sharks in Gujarat. 

By 2002, Banerji launched her own studio, Dusty Foot Productions, alongside longtime collaborators Shibani Chaudhury & Shilpi Sharma. Banerji chanced upon ‘an eerie silence’ that had descended on the forests of northeast India. Five years of treks, trails, and toil later Wild Meat Trail, a stirring document of the illicit trade of exotic meats in the region, was released. In 2010, the film won two Green Oscars. Her films and activism has sensitised native populations, engineered revivals, raised conscious communities and in one case, forced the Indian government to intervene.

Crisis. Creativity. Conservation.

According to Banerji “if you have to protect something I think you have to also be able to record it.” Chronicling, to her, is an act of preservation. Because to understand the ‘reality on the ground’, you have to walk its many wild, unwieldy and at times life-threatening paths. Which is exactly what she has done for 30 years.

From walking alongside the honey-hunting Kurumbas in the Nilgiris to capturing the plight of sea turtles in Orissa, to framing the disappearing weaver communities of the high Himalayas, Banerji has tread the length and breadth of this impossibly diverse country. 

Her work, therefore, sits at the heart of an ongoing global crisis: the planet is rapidly heating. Biodiversity is under threat. Valuable natural resources are on the brink of vanishing, wildlife is being squatted aside and an extinction level event – this one for humans – seems imminent. Do we have a solution? Or more importantly, are we even asking the right questions?

Tech-solutionism and its challenges

If there’s a crisis in the world, Big Tech believes it has a solution, if not ‘the’ solution. From AI armed researchers to EVs, renewable energy to relocating to a different planet entirely, Silicon Valley can offer you a fistful of ‘moonshots’ for every finger pointed at them. Sustainability is their morning pledge, ‘tech-solutionism’ the only radar they refer to. Unsurprisingly, they are also some of the biggest contributors to global carbon emissions and environmental exploitation at large. Do they even get the problem they claim to be working for?

Banerji believes that “nature knows best”. Not all forms of knowledge can be absorbed through algorithms. Some has to be witnessed, captured and chronicled on the fields of battle. Which is why the war to save the planet isn’t necessarily being fought inside remote data centres, but by tribals and enlightened communities living on the fringes of urban civilization. It takes “looking at the ecosystem from the perspective of the wild” to understand this. 

At SYNAPSE 2025, Banerji will open her compass of experiences, funnel the realities of the ground through the doomsday data we know about, unmask the unknown challenges of the future, frame how extinction arrives and what it leaves in its wake, and reveal where tech-solutionism ends and the opera of nature begins.

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