Nagahood is rooted in forests, mountains, rivers, watersheds and extraordinary biodiversity and our legacy is the ecological condition we leave behind.
Nagahood is rooted in forests, mountains, rivers, watersheds and extraordinary biodiversity. Our history, traditions, livelihoods and collective identity have evolved within this inheritance. Yet belonging to a landscape does not necessarily mean understanding its ecology. Familiarity with nature is not necessarily ecological intelligence.
Consider a conversation overheard and joined during a chance encounter at a saloon near Kohima High School Junction. The subject was a bear, reportedly weighing around 120 kilograms. The discussion moved effortlessly from its size to its culinary possibilities, the bitterness of its gall and its supposed medicinal value. There was even a suggestion that such delicacies appealed to influential consumers. One observation stayed with me: “The skin is thick and tasty.”
Nor was this an isolated curiosity. There are accounts of elephants being shot and butchered, their body parts repurposed as magazine containers and rustic decorations. On another occasion, someone remarked enthusiastically, “I hope they come our way. I have never tasted elephant meat. We have plenty of guns!”
We have also developed an extraordinary pharmacopoeia around wildlife. Almost every creature appears to possess some medicinal virtue. Squirrels and foxes are reputed to cure asthma; deer meat acquires medicinal credentials from the tender leaves the animal consumes; civet cats and monkeys join an expanding catalogue of presumed remedies. Nagahood's peculiar brand of alchemy seems to have turned the forest into a pharmacy.
When folklore is accepted as medical evidence, belief can become an incentive for hunting, consumption and trade. Every animal risks becoming a potential prescription, and the forest a dispensary stocked at the expense of its biodiversity. Mortality, meanwhile, remains stubbornly unimpressed by our culinary pharmacopoeia.
These conversations raise an uncomfortable question: can we learn outside the classroom? Our ecological problem may not be unfamiliarity with nature, but a failure to distinguish familiarity from understanding, folklore from evidence, and personal experience from verified knowledge. A similar disconnect is visible in our relationship with water. Catchments around Kohima, Zunheboto and Tseminyü form interconnected watersheds whose consequences extend beyond the communities in which they originate. Plastic, household waste and other pollutants discarded upstream travel downstream, affecting water quality, aquatic life and dependent communities. Doyang Reservoir is downstream. The only recognised spring well Etsü Chukha in Wokha is tottering near demise.
Catchment logging and unmitigated boring well in the town
What happens upstream rarely stays upstream. Nature, unfortunately, has no municipal boundary within which to file a complaint.
The Doyang catchment offers a particularly important reminder. Its waters connect landscapes, settlements and livelihoods across district boundaries. The reservoir is an important resource, electricity and fish, but its health depends on the entire catchment. Protecting it while neglecting the streams and slopes that feed it is an exercise in misplaced priorities. The plastic debris collected at the reservoir's confluence is alarming; these accumulations reportedly trace back upstream to Kohima.
Ecological intelligence begins with understanding the relationships between forests, soils, rivers, wildlife, agriculture and human settlements. It also requires recognising that ecological processes do not conform to administrative or customary and tribal boundaries.
There is a reason Wokha is often described as a land of plenty, a description publicly associated with Chief Minister Dr Neiphiu Rio. Its citrus, bananas, vegetables and other produce reflect favourable conditions and generations of cultivation. The quality of this abundance is not measured by quantity or rural efforts alone. The sweetness of its fruit, the succulence of its produce and the distinctive aromas of its harvests are part of its agricultural character.
There is, however, a less comfortable side to this abundance. The same landscape contains resources attracting commercial and industrial interest. Stone from the Bhandari region finds demand in construction markets wherever in Upper Assam. Hydrocarbon occurrences around Changpang and Baghty have drawn attention to the district's energy potential. Coal-bearing areas around Mekokla and Akukla Villages add another dimension to its geological wealth.
The presence of a resource does not establish the wisdom of extracting it. Every proposal raises questions about environmental impact, carrying capacity, rehabilitation, water security and cumulative consequences.
The wetlands around Akok and Mekokla, including Wozhü Tsopho near Old Akuk, deserve particular attention. The reported rediscovery in the area in 2016 of the black softshell turtle, thought extinct and subsequently supported by DNA testing, illustrates why apparently ordinary landscapes can hold considerable ecological significance. Such places are not empty spaces awaiting commercial use. Their value may not be immediately visible or adequately represented in a financial calculation.
The lesson is not that every resource should remain untouched. Extraction should follow informed assessment, transparent decisions and enforceable safeguards. Geological surveys, biodiversity assessments, hydrological studies and cumulative-impact evaluations should precede irreversible changes. Extraction without ecological responsibility is liquidation.
The same principle applies to energy security. India's dependence on imported energy is a legitimate national concern. The RBI records imports of petroleum, crude and products at approximately US$185.8 billion in 2024–25. Reducing external dependence is a legitimate objective, and domestic exploration and production will remain part of the energy debate.
But energy security cannot become a licence to disregard ecological security. A project that brings immediate returns while leaving degraded water sources, damaged habitats and long-term environmental liabilities is not an unqualified development success.
A curious local story illustrates another aspect of our relationship with the landscape. Near Chümoukedima, before the Chathe bridge and the turn towards Peren across the Chathe River, stories circulated of a cave through which a dog could supposedly enter and emerge in Meluri. A hunting party was said to have wandered inside for days. Another version suggested that members of the Naga National Council had taken refuge there while evading the Indian Army.
The story acquired a life of its own. Then came the four-lane road construction. An excavator reportedly went about fifteen feet into what was believed to be the cavern. The subterranean mystery, it seemed, disappeared beneath a bucket of mud.
Our imagination had completed an excavation that the excavator could not find. There is nothing wrong with imagination, oral tradition or the stories through which communities make sense of their surroundings. They are part of cultural memory. But the cave story illustrates how readily Naga imagination can outrun evidence.
Nagahood is not immune to this tendency. A compelling account, inherited belief or confident assertion can acquire the status of fact without examination. The answer is not to dismiss tradition, but to test claims through observation, documentation and scientific enquiry.
Scientific enquiry does not diminish imagination or cultural memory; it disciplines them, helping us distinguish what is known from what is merely believed. Curiosity should lead us towards investigation, not replace it. This distinction matters when environmental decisions are made.
Village councils, Hoho, customary institutions, civil society organisations, government departments and scientific bodies all have a role. Their responsibilities differ, but their interests are connected. Ecology has unified us, whether or not our institutions have fully recognised it. The response requires more than occasional clean-up campaigns or expressions of concern. It calls for watershed protection, responsible waste management, biodiversity documentation, scientific monitoring and meaningful regulation.
Institutions need to look beyond individual projects and consider their combined impact on a landscape. Also, local knowledge should engage constructively with scientific research, rather than treating the two as competing authorities.
Nagahood cannot remain confined to the vocabulary of identity, history, traditions and constitutional rights. These are important inheritances, but their significance is also measured by how responsibly we exercise the agency they give us. Our relationship with the land is one of the clearest tests of that responsibility.
Our inheritance is what we receive. Our intelligence determines how we understand it. Our responsibility determines how we steward it. Our legacy is the ecological condition we leave behind. The land of plenty, whether Wokha, Mokokchung, Phek, Mon or Kohima, should not become a landscape of depleted possibilities. Awareness is the beginning. Intervention is the responsibility.
(These are personal reflections following the Lotha Hoho Committee on Environment Studies’ assessment tour of Wokha, 19–22 October 2026, convened by Natural Nagas founder Steve Odyuo. They are not a report of the committee’s findings.)
Limhachan Kikon
Duncan Bosti