Or Lack Thereof
When did you last chase a butterfly? Better yet, when did you last see a child try to catch one?
If you live in Goa, or merely treat it as your personal seasonal playground, take a moment over your afternoon feni to think about that. There was a time when walking down an unpaved village path in Bardez or Salcete meant keeping an eye out for a stray piece of rope that might suddenly wriggle away. It was a tax we happily paid for living in paradise.
Today, you can forget about the cobras and vipers. Forget about the pangolins—they have practically become mythical creatures over the last four years, spoken of in the same breath as honest politicians. The vibrant morning orchestra along the Mandovi river has gone quiet, replaced by the thrum of casino diesel generators. The nesting turtles have missed their cue on the beaches, and the dolphins playing off the coast feel more like a lucky photoshop miracle on a glossy marketing brochure than a daily reality.
GOA'S LANDSCAPE SHIFT (At a Glance)┌──────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐│ Forest Cover Lost │ ~27% ││ Beach Erosion / Affected │ ~27% ││ Desertification & Degradation│ Exceeding 52% │└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘
We treat “desertification” as a script for a dystopian film. We picture the magnificent, dust-blown, arid stretches of Rajasthan, or some distant, skull-strewn corner of the Sahara. We certainly do not picture Goa. We do not look at the land of susegad, emerald paddy fields, fish curry, and lush Western Ghats canopies and think: drought.
But the soil does not care for our vacation postcards or our romantic notions of the tropics. Recent environmental data indicates that over 52% of Goa’s land is actively undergoing degradation and desertification. In fact, recent geological assessments show our topsoil erosion is clocking in at nearly five times the national permissible limit. We have quietly watched roughly 90 square kilometers of pristine tree cover vanish. This is not a lecture, nor is it a moral judgment. Nobody needs another sermon on sin. It is simply a look at the ledger: our foundation is taking on water.
The Monsoon Paradox
Goa is currently trapped in a bizarre, self-inflicted paradox. We are a state blessed with torrential, dramatic monsoon rains that flood our streets every July, yet we are systematically engineering our own thirst.
How do you dry out a land that gets drenched by three thousand millimeters of rain a year? It is an entirely transactional affair. Driven by relentless, tourism-centric development and the insatiable appetites of the land mafia, our evergreen and moist deciduous forests are being systematically thinned out to make room for concrete footprints. In their place, we are left with hardened, degraded scrub.
When the heavy rains do hit this compromised landscape, the water cannot seep into the ground to recharge our aquifers. Without root systems to anchor the earth, the monsoon acts like a high-pressure industrial washer, stripping away the fertile topsoil and rushing straight into the Arabian Sea. It takes about 27% of our beaches down with it.
The Monsoon Loop:[Deforestation] ➔ [Hardened Earth] ➔ [Rain Acts as Pressure Washer] ➔ [Topsoil Erosion] ➔ [Aquifer Failure]
Simultaneously, our traditional agricultural marvels are being abandoned. For centuries, Goa relied on the Khazan lands—a brilliant, community-managed system of dykes, sluice gates, and inner mangroves that beautifully balanced agriculture, aquaculture, and tidal flows. Today, these fertile fields are left to fallow. The enticement of immediate cash from the influx of urban wealthy buyers makes long-term ecology look like a poor investment.
As the land fractures, a new vocabulary has quietly crept into our daily lives. It is the language of lack. Lack of water, lack of fertile soil, lack of local opportunities, and eventually, a lack of hope.
The Bill Comes Due
The earth does not suffer in a vacuum; it passes the bill directly to the people sitting on it. The human cost of our rapid transformation is visible daily in our clinics, our kitchens, and our minds.
As local agriculture declines, our connection to fresh, seasonal, local food withers, replacing the traditional diet with imported, processed goods. Erratic water availability forces reliance on compromised water sources, bringing waterborne illnesses along for the ride. Meanwhile, the constant construction, smoke, and dust are driving up respiratory issues.
But there is another, quieter crisis unfolding beneath the surface: solastalgia. It is the specific existential distress caused by environmental change—the grief you feel for a home that is changing unrecognizably around you while you still live in it.
The traditional Goan fisherfolk or farmers operated on a psychological baseline of abundance. A man caught one fish for his meal, secure in the absolute knowledge that if the need arose, there would be another one in the river tomorrow. That security is shattering. The uncertainty of tomorrow breeds a deep, chronic anxiety.
THE SHIFT IN BASELINE┌─────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┐│ Old Goan Baseline │ Modern Internalized Baseline │├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────┤│ Abundance: "The river will provide│ Lack: "Will there be anything ││ tomorrow's meal." │ left tomorrow?" │└─────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────┘
Traditional knowledge, sustainability rituals, and centuries-old ways are fading. When the community internalizes this language of lack, the social fabric begins to fray. Helplessness turns into quiet conflict, and the authentic, resilient Goan identity is suddenly threatened.
Moving From Scarcity to Stewardship
In my work with the human mind, I often use hypnotherapy as a tool to help individuals reframe their internal narratives. When people are trapped in a “scarcity scare,” they paralyze. They panic, they hoard, or they tune out entirely because the problem feels too vast to conquer.
But if we can reframe that narrative from scarcity to stewardship, something shifts. We build resilience. We move from a state of helpless grieving to motivated, sustainable action.
The global theme for combating these very shifts hits the nail on the head: “Restore the land. Unlock opportunities.”
If we want to restore Goa, we need to rethink what we actually value. We don’t necessarily need more mega-projects or more institutes churning out degrees for export. We need our children to know the land. We need them to understand agriculture, local fisheries, and veterinary skills.
We need to reconnect with why our ancestors revered the Sacred Groves (Devrais). These weren’t primitive superstitions; they were highly advanced, ancient ecological zones left entirely untouched to preserve biodiversity, protect water sources, and maintain local climate equilibrium. It is an indigenous science that transcends modern political rhetoric.
And let us be honest about what “going local” means. Being local in Goa isn’t about buying artisan garam masala made by someone who just moved here from Delhi to find themselves. Being local means actively supporting the students of our local agricultural colleges, ensuring they can learn, earn, and make regenerative farming a viable, respected career.
The Road Back
We are not past the point of no return. Goa has a profound, deep-seated history of community resilience, and we can still choose to restore rather than just watch the decline.
Yes, tools like hypnotherapy and community healing circles can help us process our collective eco-anxiety, overcome the paralysis of grief, and visualize thriving landscapes. But mental reframing must be matched by dirt under our fingernails:
- Revive the Basics: Implement widespread rainwater harvesting and cultivate water-conserving habits at home, in hotels, and in industries.
- Regenerate the Soil: Plant native species of trees. Support urban and community reforestation projects to protect the remaining forest cover.
- Restore Ecosystems: Actively rehabilitate the degraded Khazan networks and implement soft, nature-based engineering to combat coastal erosion.
- Redefine Progress: Promote a model of sustainable tourism and agriculture that works with the unique contours of the Goan landscape, not against it.
By integrating physical environmental restoration with mental and emotional wellness, we can stop treating the earth like a business closing down for liquidation. Paradise isn’t entirely lost; it is just waiting to see if we are ready to stop watching it fade and start doing the quiet, rewarding work of bringing it back.
Parwatisingari's Weblog 
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