Kerala is called "God's Own Country" in the tourism brochures, and while that phrasing is embarrassingly superlative, it is not entirely wrong. It is a narrow strip of land on the southwestern tip of India, caught between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, with one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on earth. Growing up there means growing up surrounded by sound: monsoon rains, temple bells, the calls of kingfishers over backwaters, and at dusk in the hills, the strange, looping song of the Malabar whistling thrush.
I did not know, as a child, that I was being shaped by that acoustic environment. I found out later, when I started reading environmental psychology, that this kind of early immersion in natural soundscapes appears to have lasting effects on how the mind relates to nature. The sense of belonging to a place, which I had always associated with growing up in Kerala, turns out to have a measurable psychological substrate.
Three Degrees, Three Countries
I completed my BSc in Zoology at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, finishing in the top 1% of my cohort. At the time, I was drawn to the breadth of it: anatomy, ecology, genetics, behaviour, evolution. Zoology lets you ask almost any biological question about almost any animal, and I kept asking questions that did not quite fit inside a single module.
The MSc at the University of Kerala deepened the ecology and behaviour side of things. I was finishing in the top 5% of the cohort, which mattered less than the fact that I had begun to understand what a research question actually was. Not a topic. Not an interest. A specific, answerable question about the world, with a method for answering it.
By the end of the MSc, I knew I wanted to do research. What I did not know was that the research I would end up doing would sit in a completely different part of the library from the one I had been working in.
Scotland and the Shift
Moving to Glasgow for the MSc Research at the University of Glasgow was the most disorienting and educational experience of my academic career. Not because the work was difficult, though it was. Because the context was completely different: the birds, the plants, the habitats, the climate, the institution, the culture, the food. Everything had to be relearned from the beginning.
My project was on nest materials and breeding success in Blue Tits. I spent weeks at the Scottish Centre for Ecology, checking nest boxes in woods near Loch Lomond, recording what each bird had brought in: moss, hair, feathers, and increasingly, synthetic fibres and plastic fragments. The question was whether these anthropogenic materials affected hatching success and chick development.
It was there, staring into nest boxes and thinking about what materials animals choose when they have less natural material to work with, that I first started thinking seriously about the relationship between human behaviour and animal wellbeing. And from animal wellbeing, the step to human wellbeing is, in retrospect, a short one.
Arriving in Wales
The PhD at Bangor was not my first choice in the sense that I had planned for it. It emerged from following a question: what happens to people, psychologically and physiologically, when the natural soundscapes they depend on begin to disappear? That question sat at the intersection of environmental psychology, ecology, and acoustics, and Bangor, with its combination of expertise, its partner organisation in BTO Cymru, and its location in a landscape that is both ecologically rich and acoustically threatened, was the right place to answer it.
Bangor is a small city in North Wales, flanked by Snowdonia and the Menai Strait, with a university that has been doing field biology and ecology for well over a century. It is, by any measure, a long way from Kerala. The birdsong is different. The light is different. The green is a different shade of green.
But the question I am asking here grew directly from listening to birds in the Western Ghats as a child and understanding, eventually, that that experience had shaped something in me. The research is trying to find out if the same is true for everyone, and what it means if we are systematically removing that experience from the places most people live.
The journey from Kerala to Bangor, by way of Glasgow and Rio de Janeiro and a nest box in Scotland, looks messy from a distance. From the inside, following the question, it has always felt like the only sensible route.
Joseph Roy is a PhD researcher in environmental psychology at Bangor University. He grew up in Kerala, India, and holds degrees from Mahatma Gandhi University, the University of Kerala, and the University of Glasgow. Read more about his work. Connect on LinkedIn.