Current Conservation: The Bengaluru Magazine Where Conservation Science Meets Art

Current Conservation is a not-for-profit magazine that communicates conservation science to broad audiences through articles, essays and art. Based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, and published in print and online, it works with scientists, science writers and artists across the world to tell stories from the field of conservation in a manner that engages both scientific and non-scientific audiences. Its own tagline sums up the mission plainly: conservation is for everyone, and the magazine helps readers understand it.

What sets Current Conservation apart in Indian science publishing is its conviction that a conservation story should be as beautiful as it is accurate. Every article goes through a detailed art-editing process, and the magazine has become known as a pioneer in bridging art and science, producing nature and conservation illustration alongside serious writing on ecology, policy and human relationships with the natural world.

Overview

Current Conservation describes its task as communicating the latest research concepts from both the natural and social science facets of conservation. That double focus is important: the magazine covers wildlife and ecosystems, but it also covers the people who live alongside them — fishers, farmers, forest dwellers, field assistants, policymakers and researchers — because conservation outcomes are decided as much by culture, livelihoods and politics as by biology.

The magazine is a quarterly in print and online, and it survives on donations and the goodwill of organisations committed to environmental sensitivity and human–nature relationships. Readers can browse its issues and online-only stories on its website, currentconservation.org, subscribe to its newsletter, and support it with donations that help pay associate staff and freelancers and source stories from the field.

History and Founding

Current Conservation was started in 2007 by Kartik Shanker, Meera Anna Oommen and Ankila Hiremath, with a small grant from the Duleep Mathai Nature Conservation Trust. Kartik Shanker, an ecologist associated with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and a founder trustee of the Dakshin Foundation, is the magazine's founding editor. The scope of the magazine grew quickly: it began with readable research summaries — a strand that continues today as its Research in Translation pieces — and expanded to features, perspectives, opinions and book reviews.

The magazine's early years were designed by SU Saravanakumar, and its early special issues included critiques of big international conservation organisations, a tribute to the field assistants on whom ecology quietly depends, and work on human–wildlife conflict. From 2010 to 2012, Nandini Rajamani served as editor and introduced art to the magazine, working with illustrators such as Kalyani Ganapathy, Smitha Shivaswamy and Megha Vishwanath. Managing editors Suneha Mohanty and Manini Bansal then helped establish art and design as the magazine's signature look — a direction from which, by its own account, there has been no looking back.

Publisher and Editorial Model

Current Conservation is run as a not-for-profit magazine rather than a commercial title. It does not depend on advertising or cover price in the way a newsstand magazine does; donations and institutional goodwill keep it going, and that independence lets it publish long, illustrated, sometimes critical pieces about conservation practice — including criticism of conservation organisations themselves — without a proprietor's commercial interests in the way.

Editorially, the magazine is a collaboration between researchers, writers and artists. Scientists bring findings; science writers shape them into narratives; illustrators interpret them visually through a formal art-editing process. The Society for Conservation Biology, an international professional body, counts Current Conservation among its like-minded partner organisations, and has showcased its editor explaining why the world needs such a publication — a sign of the magazine's standing in the global conservation community.

Language and Readership

The magazine is published in English and is written deliberately for readers beyond the academy. Its founding editor has described it as a campfire around which scientists, science writers and artists from across the world tell stories from the field of conservation, reflecting human–environment relations at their core. The intended reader is anyone curious about the living world: the student, the teacher, the naturalist, the policymaker, the artist and the general reader who would never open a scientific journal but will happily read a well-told, well-drawn story about a forest, a reef or a river.

That accessibility is the magazine's founding idea. Conservation research is often published in technical language, behind paywalls, for other specialists. Current Conservation takes the same research and re-presents it accurately but readably, so that the people affected by conservation decisions — and the citizens whose support conservation needs — can actually encounter it.

Editorial Content and Sections

A typical issue mixes several kinds of writing. Features report at length from the field. Perspectives and opinion pieces argue a point of view. Book reviews assess new writing on nature and conservation. Its Research in Translation strand distils published scientific studies into readable summaries — the magazine's original format, still running. On its website, content is organised for browsing into stories to read, visual stories to see, columns by its regular columnists, and online-only pieces published between issues.

The subject matter ranges widely: coral reefs and cities, large dams and compensatory afforestation, wildlife law and national action plans, biomimicry and butterfly wings, coastal livelihoods and sea turtles. A single issue — Volume 11, Number 4, published in December 2017 — could carry Madhusudhan Katti urging readers to reimagine cities as terrestrial reefs, Aparajita Datta on large dams in Arunachal Pradesh, and a review of India's National Wildlife Action Plan. That range, from the lyrical to the legal, is the magazine's characteristic blend.

Art and Visual Identity

Illustration is not decoration in Current Conservation; it is half the editorial product. Since art was introduced under Nandini Rajamani's editorship in 2010–2012, every article has gone through a detailed art-editing process designed to create rich, perceptive illustrations that amplify the stories writers tell and deepen the reader's engagement. The magazine describes itself as a space where art meets science, a platform where the visual meets the verbal.

This commitment has made the magazine an important patron of Indian nature illustration, commissioning and showcasing illustrators alongside scientists. For artists, its submission routes invite portfolios and editorial artwork collaborations; for readers, the result is a conservation magazine that can be recognised at a glance — closer in spirit to an illustrated literary quarterly than to a scientific bulletin.

Current Conservation Kids

Once a year, the magazine publishes an annual supplement, Current Conservation Kids — CC Kids — carrying stories in ecology, conservation, climate change and the natural world written specifically for children and young adults between about six and fourteen years old. The magazine's reasoning is that bringing the crucial stories of the time to children in engaging and artistic form matters as much as, if not more than, speaking to adults.

CC Kids invites stories in set categories, including A Day in the Life — following a creature, a tree, a habitat or a conservationist through an average day — Fun Facts, storytelling that may draw on mythology and imagination, and Emerging Voices. Pieces run roughly between 800 and 1,500 words. The supplement extends the magazine's mission across generations: today's young reader of a story about a spider's silk or a nesting turtle is tomorrow's field biologist, voter or donor.

Audience and Community

The magazine's audience is international as well as Indian. Its writers and artists come from across the world, its stories range across continents, and partnerships such as the one with the Society for Conservation Biology put it in front of professional conservationists globally. At home, it is read within the research community around Bengaluru's ecology institutions — the world of the Indian Institute of Science, ATREE and allied organisations — and by the much larger public that follows Indian nature writing.

Its donation-based model also makes its readers a community of supporters. The magazine asks readers who value it to help pay for the staff and freelancers who make it, turning the audience into patrons of a public good: independent, beautifully produced conservation communication that remains free to read.

Notable Editors and Contributors

The founding editor, Kartik Shanker, remains the magazine's best-known name. An ecologist who has worked on sea turtle conservation for over twenty-five years, he has directed the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bengaluru, served as president of the International Sea Turtle Society, edited the journal Conservation and Society for ten years, and written From Soup to Superstar, a history of sea turtle conservation in India, as well as children's books. His profile — scientist, editor and storyteller — is essentially the magazine's own profile in one person.

Later editors and managing editors shaped the title in turn: Meera Anna Oommen and Ankila Hiremath as co-founders; Nandini Rajamani, who brought art into the magazine; and managing editors Suneha Mohanty and Manini Bansal, who consolidated its design identity. Contributors have included leading Indian ecologists and conservation writers, among them Aparajita Datta and Madhusudhan Katti, writing alongside early-career researchers, field workers and illustrators — a deliberately mixed masthead of the famous and the first-time published.

Recent Developments

Current Conservation continues to publish new issues and a steady flow of online stories, with its website organising recent work by issue and theme and carrying its archive back through more than a decade of volumes — Volume 11 appeared in 2017, and the run has continued since. CC Kids has reached its nineteenth edition, and the magazine maintains an active submissions programme for writers and artists, a newsletter, and its donation appeals. Nearly two decades after a small grant started it in 2007, the magazine remains what it set out to be: proof that conservation science, told as story and picture, can find a wide and loyal public.