Anu Rai: Conservation thrives on community

A woman in a teal and black coat and a rainbow winter hat stands on top of a snowy mountain, facing to the left. She holds a red hiking stick and smiles as she stands on the summit. — Anu Rai stands on top of a mountain over 5,000 meters high in the Eastern Himalayan landscape of Nepal. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and an Interfaces of Global Change fellow at Virginia Tech. Photo courtesy of Anu Rai.

The following story was written in Fall 2025 by Faith Casey in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

About 5,000 meters above ground in the Eastern Himalayan region of Nepal, facing altitude sickness and severe conditions of field work, Anu Rai arrived in a remote community to take part in a large research project. Black bears were destroying crops, and villagers lived far from the main market. They would have to spend days on foot to get food from the market, and it was not affordable for many villagers. Not only was Rai tasked with encouraging the community to find nonlethal methods to solve the conflict, but she also felt it wouldn’t be fair for her, an outsider to the community, to tell these people to stop defending their one food source from black bears.

However, Rai was no stranger to this kind of situation. A Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, Rai studies forest resources and environmental conservation. As an undergraduate, she studied forestry, focusing on human-wildlife conflict, and later received her master’s degree in wildlife ecology and conservation. She focuses on how relational values and feelings of belonging help the success of conservation institutions. In her years of undergraduate and graduate school, she’s been provided with resources to conduct field work and research. Yet the highlight of her research isn’t the specific methodology, she says; her knowledge of conservation lives and breathes in the Indigenous community where she grew up.

A woman in a blue jacket holds a piece of paper while she talks to an elderly woman in a pink and brown dress across from her. They sit on a log with a mountain in the background. A child in a pink coat stands behind the woman in blue, and another woman in a pink coat crouches in front of the group facing them, while taking notes on a piece of paper. — Anu Rai (center) speaks with a woman from an Indigenous community in the Eastern Himalayan Region of Nepal, a critical habitat for endangered species like snow leopards. Such face-to-face interviews are important for understanding human-wildlife conflict. Photo courtesy of Anu Rai.

She grew up in the village Baghjhoda (‘Bagh’ means tiger and ‘jhoda’ means thick forest) near a community forest, Sukuna Samudayik Baan, in Eastern Nepal. Young Rai would often argue with people taking firewood illegally, walking beside her mother on forest patrols. She attended community forestry meetings, where the local community had autonomy in conservation policy. The Sukuna trees were more than just a place to perform a ceremonial blessing. They held a lot of memories for Rai: studying for her board exams, spending time with friends on picnics and after school, and lots of peaceful teenage reminiscences woven into the bark and shade. There was a strong emotional connection tying her to the forest.

After school, the trees listened to Rai recite her speech for school. The school taught Rai that cutting down trees was bad, and when her mother cut down trees, Rai lectured her about what she learned.

“My mother said ‘We have no gas money to cook food,'” recalls Rai. “We needed to cut down trees. For generations and generations, we were doing that: conserving, utilizing, managing natural resources, which scientific people have never addressed or thought of.”

A woman in a blue jacket sits cross-legged next to a crouching man in a white shirt. The man is holding a colorful umbrella and they are engaged in conversation. They sit in front of a large tree. A pink bicycle leans against a large group of bamboo shoots next to them. — Anu Rai (left) sits under a big bamboo tree’s shade with a man from an Indigenous community who has lived for more than 50 years inside the protected area of Chitwan National Park, where wildlife and community members live in close proximity. As part of her master’s research on understanding barriers to women’s participation in community forestry, Rai says, she needed to build rapport with the man before implementing a participatory method for collecting data. He expressed pride in knowing that Rai was an Indigenous woman pursuing higher education and doing research on Indigenous issues, she said. Photo courtesy of Anu Rai.

Rai faced a comparable situation through her work with a community forestry organization. The organization placed restrictions on tree cutting, limiting the community to certain days and specific trees for cutting. One couple, however, depended on firewood for survival. To meet their needs, the organization allowed the couple to cut trees year-round with fewer restrictions.

Over and over again, Rai witnessed the necessity of local voices in conservation. An outside organization doesn’t know the needs of a community quite like the very people living there, she has learned through experience.

For instance, Rai recalled an initiative to double the tiger population in Nepal.

“When the number of tigers doubled, we celebrated it. But because their populations increased, the number of tiger attacks also increased, and people rarely talked about it. Nobody thought of those consequences faced by local communities,” explains Rai. “Conservation doesn't think about the societal part adequately, and I will always advocate for local communities.”

During her master’s field research, she studied the way women interacted with the community’s governing body and the barriers they faced (CGIAR Equality and Inclusion, 2025; SCB Social Science, 2025). Worldwide, fewer women are involved in decision making. About 13-24 percent of senior positions, based on data from 42 countries, are occupied by women, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“And my position was that men and women interacted differently with the forest, which means their experiences and knowledge of the forest differ. So, if you do not involve women, we lack entirely different ways of managing forests,” Rai says.

Women in cream colored T-shirts sits at the front of a circle full of women and young girls, speaking to them all. They all sit on the floor on blankets and pillows. — A group of Indigenous women listen in as Anu Rai shares about her research on women’s participation and her description of the participatory method of “cards sorting” before collecting data. Photo courtesy of Anu Rai.

Gender discrimination runs deep in community work for the researchers, as well. In addition to the challenges of doing field work and collecting data, women often experience harassment as they conduct research. This alone might change the trajectory of a young woman's career in conservation.

“My friend has been told, ‘You have to be my girlfriend to get this internship,'” Rai says. For an entire day in her third year, she cried, mentally debating whether this field of work was the right choice.

Similarly, students conducting field work in communities will ideally collaborate with the community’s leader. But when a different friend sought help from the leader, she was harassed.

“She was not able to explain it because of power dynamics. She was there for research, and the conflict would impact the entire project. It also brought on feelings of being incompetent,” says Rai.

Rai often thought about her personal impact when completing her master’s degree work. How could she change the world? What important thing could she do to help?

“A single person cannot change the entire world, but I will do my best,” Rai says. She is currently considering written words to tell the stories of Indigenous people and women. She hopes that she can provide scientists in the field with a new perspective, or create a platform for voices that often go unheard, such as the stories of uneducated women taking care of the children and in-laws but taking leadership roles in protecting natural resources.

“I have learned that it might not be you changing the whole world, but it could be a community or a group of people, even a person. Even if I would be able to do that, that would be meaningful to me,” Rai says.