TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, James Baldwin wrote a meditation on the polymorphous nature of human sexuality and the irrational fears awakened by it. For its title, he chose an old, possibly apocryphal phrase used in ancient maps to mark the region where America would one day be discovered: “Here Be Dragons.” For what are dragons but potent symbols of our deepest anxieties (and farthest hopes)? Some are ancient, others are new. None is as novel or as unprecedented as climate change, if only because there is nothing imaginary about its effects.
Governments have been talking about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions for almost three decades, from the Rio Earth summit of 1992—on the whole, to very little effect. Some fifty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution was added after 1990. Currently, the best estimate—provisional like all estimates—tells us that if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there is some chance of avoiding the worst. Above this, large swathes of the natural world will cease to exist. As it happens, this state of nature is not very old—a mere twelve thousand years or so, when the last glaciation ended and the current interglacial began. Homo sapiens is much older than that, but most of the achievements we associate with our condition date from the Holocene: agriculture, cities, states, culture in the sense of artifacts, writing, art and the built environment.
It seems all but certain that global warming will go well above two degrees—quite how high no one knows yet. A popular response—because it doesn’t involve changing anything as fundamental as our dependency on fossil fuels—is the exhortation to plant more trees. This is because trees sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide. Burning them releases it, which is why the scale of forest fires in the Amazon basin last year garnered headlines. Planting trees is regarded as a painless way of doing, or appearing to do, something about climate change. In the relatively empty forests of the boreal zone, logged intensively for timber, this presents few difficulties. But in some temperate and most tropical forests, the problems are of a different order. They are much more diverse and fragile to begin with, and exposed to a much greater range of pressures. Global warming magnifies these problems; planting trees does nothing to offset them. In some cases, it transforms a natural landscape into something artificial and dead.
The problem of forest fires illustrates this paradox. Almost all forests burn to some degree. But some forests are fire-adapted in that the interlinked communities of plants and animals that thrive in them can only be maintained by periodic fires. These inhibit the spread of trees, keeping the canopy open. Savannas—a patchwork of woods and grasslands—are a prime example. The result in some, but not all, cases is a landscape more diverse than one with trees alone.
Fire shaped the savanna landscapes of Australia and Africa. The forests of the Amazon basin rarely burned before the advent of humans, and are, in consequence, not fire-adapted. There, human settlement created a mosaic of small savannas and humid forests that alternately shrank and expanded until fairly recently. As global warming alters the frequency and intensity of droughts in the region, the effect is to dry out its forests and make them flammable in an entirely new way. Even fire-adapted landscapes are being overwhelmed—witness the unending bushfires in Australia this season. According to The Economist, “Australia’s mean temperature [in 2019] was the highest since records began in 1910, 1.5 degrees Celsius above the long-run average. The amount of rainfall … was 40 percent below the long-term average and at the lowest level since 1900.”
Forest fires are common in India as well, but their ecological effects remain unknown: there is no agreement on whether some forests are fire-adapted or not. Among other things, this tells us how unprepared we are for climate change, not just at the level of awareness, but also of science.
The effects of climate change are generally divided in two for purposes of discussion—on “us” and on the rest of nature—although they are, in practice, indivisible. Our current existence is tied up with the living conditions of the Holocene. So is the survival of the crops and animals on which we depend. But climate change also uncovers our dependence upon ecosystems that only a tiny fraction of human beings will ever see: on ice caps, under oceans, in forests, grasslands and high ranges. Many of them are poorly understood in the first place. This ignorance is global, but also local: it finds reflection in the current state of ecology in India.
In 1947, ecology was a small and relatively insignificant discipline. India had every opportunity of participating in its subsequent efflorescence. Yet our institutions ignored it until the 1980s and continue to regard it with indifference. This makes it much more difficult to predict climate change and deal with its consequences. We know comparatively little about our ecosystems; despite a series of legislative and policy enactments, and much spilling of ink, we have also failed to conserve them effectively. The roots of this dual failure lie in the institutional history of forest management and conservation in India.
MANY INDIAN FORESTS CATCH FIRE during the dry season. In early 2019, fires of considerable severity swept through the protected areas of Bandipur, Mudumalai and Wayanad in south India. Two years before this, a group of ecologists—Tarsh Thekaekara, Abi Tamim Vanak, Ankila J Hiremath, Nitin D Rai, Jayshree Ratnam and Raman Sukumar—published an article in the Economic and Political Weekly criticising official practices of fire suppression.
Their argument runs as follows. The dry forests of peninsular India gradually became adapted to periodic fires of low intensity after humans colonised the interior of the Deccan. These were set to create optimum conditions for foraging, hunting and grazing. They were usually lighted early in the dry season, before a mass of debris and litter could build up on the forest floor. Colonial officials sought to stamp out the practice, with mixed success—fire suppression became a key tool of forest management, pursued with increased vigour after 1947. Its cumulative result was the gradual decline of grass cover (and certain types of grasses), the proliferation of the invasive weed Lantana camara (introduced from South America) and increased biomass load (or flammable debris) in the shape of dead branches and leaf litter. Over the past century, the basic structure of dry forests has altered irrevocably. This makes it much more likely that fires, whether accidental or deliberate, will spiral out of control, inflicting substantial damage. The only way of preventing them is to go back to managed burning early in the dry season; this would have the added advantage of inhibiting the spread of Lantana.
Insofar as Indian ecologists rarely examine the history of landscapes, the letter marks an exception. It is true that fire suppression was a cornerstone of colonial policy, although administrators eventually came to recognise that fire aided the growth of some timber trees, notably teak and sal. Other parts of the argument remain hazy and undeveloped. The authors do not discuss whether dry forests subjected to careful burning might be more, or less, diverse than those from which fire is excluded. This has never been tested in India. For that, Lantana camara would have to be uprooted first, for it comprises a large proportion of their biomass, magnifying forest fires by an order of magnitude.
It may be, as they contend, that dry forests in South Asia are akin to savannas, but they intergrade with moist deciduous forests over much of the peninsula. It is unlikely that these are fire-adapted in the same way. The letter does not discuss whether moist deciduous forests should be burned—to burn one but not the other would require care and effort. Meanwhile, the hypothesis that low-intensity fires inhibit Lantana camara can only be tried out by clearing it before controlled burning can even be attempted.
It is at this stage that the letter acquires its Alice in Wonderland quality. Its recommendations are sensible: experimental burning, carefully controlled as to time and locale, under the right conditions. What it omits is any consideration of whether the forest department is actually capable of carrying them out. This omission, in turn, embodies a widespread fallacy not confined to ecologists—what might be called the fallacy of institutional omnipotence. It assumes that Indian institutions are capable of executing virtually any policy, even one diametrically opposed to current practice, once its utility is accepted. It also reflects the complexity of the relationship between ecology and state power in India, swinging between active collaboration and concealed, though more lately open, unease.
FROM THE 1970S TO THE 1990S, two generations of conservationists collaborated with the forest department to devise the template for managing protected areas. Project Tiger was the fruit of a complex alliance between bureaucrats like M K Ranjitsinh, forest officers like Kailash Sankhala and well-connected conservationists like “Billy” Arjan Singh. What is called the “fences and fines” approach to wildlife conservation—marking off protected areas, removing people from them and preventing any kind of forest use—was the brainchild of experts within and outside government.
Many of their professional successors support the state’s basic approach to conservation, but disagree on specific questions. The Science of Saving Tigers, a 2011 collection of papers and articles by the wildlife biologist K Ullas Karanth, offers a summary of this viewpoint. For Karanth, protected areas are the alpha and omega of effective conservation: his principal criticisms have to do with policing and scientific expertise, or the lack thereof. To conservationists of this stamp, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 is an open invitation to extend cultivation in forested zones. The effect, Karanth fears, will be to fragment them even further, magnifying human–wildlife conflict. More than ten years on, it is fair to say that these apocalyptic predictions have not borne fruit, but its opponents still view the Forest Rights Act with alarm—hence the legal challenge mounted against it in the Supreme Court.
This assumption runs counter to the whole history of regulation in India. Take labour laws, which began to be formulated in the 1940s. From the very beginning they were packed with loopholes, in the form of exemptions, ambiguous definitions, discretionary powers, and so on. This laid them open to judicial challenge, and judges usually found in favour of employers. In the end, only a tiny minority of workers obtained legal protection; the vast majority were left to fend for themselves in the informal sector, where no rules applied. If history is any guide, the FRA will be used as an instrument of politics, to grant or withhold concessions on grounds of expediency, not justice. This is already happening in project approvals—its provisions were cited to disallow bauxite mining in Niyamgiri, but flouted to approve the Polavaram dam in Andhra Pradesh.
It is true that the FRA’s basic assumption—the supposed compatibility of forest livelihoods with conservation—is erroneous. They are opposed in many, if not most, cases, if only because wider ecosystems in which local practices are embedded have been wrecked by the consumer society to which “we,” and not their practitioners, belong. However, Karanth’s counterproposal—of moving large numbers of people out of forests—rests on equally shaky foundations. To suggest that their discontent can be alleviated by providing them with jobs and funds currently being dissipated in a haze of corruption merely restates the problem. It is far from clear how a state incapable of providing education, basic services and jobs in the name of welfare will be able to do so in the name of conservation. Essentially, Karanth is asking his readers to believe in the power of virtuous intentions, but this procedure is not very different from that espoused by the FRA.
There is little evidence to show that the punitive laws underpinning Indian conservation work in any but a purely negative sense. The only defence their supporters can offer is that things would be even worse without them. Therefore, some ecologists advocate a model of land management that reaches beyond protected areas, incorporating diverse methods of conservation and popular participation wherever possible. Ghazala Shahabuddin’s excellent survey Conservation at the Crossroads, first published in 2010, sits firmly within this tradition. It begins with the problems of the statist model, using the local extinction of tigers in Sariska National Park as a case study. The last tiger disappeared from Sariska in 2005, sparking an outcry in the press, and, somewhat later, a reintroduction programme. In response, the forest department promptly threw the blame on villagers living in the park as a convenient method of diverting attention from its own failings.
Shahabuddin—currently affiliated as a scientist with the Centre for Ecology, Development and Research in Dehradun—shows that these villagers were far from being the only offenders. The growing volume of tourist traffic to temples inside Sariska is completely unregulated; mining around the periphery affects its water sources; people from distant settlements cut timber and poach animals. Some villages were moved out between 1975 and 1977, an experience marked with so many problems that it left an abiding legacy of distrust. Yet, conservationists who criticised the forest department for poor policing paid virtually no attention to this long history of mismanagement.
Another chapter lays out the state’s failings with respect to science. The procedure for granting research permits is inane, opaque and complicated, designed to deter rather than encourage. The forest department actively discourages overseas scholars—during the 1970s, Kailash Sankhala, the first director of Project Tiger, rejected the Smithsonian’s proposal to set up field stations in India, at a time when indigenous ecological expertise was notable by its absence. Obstructive laws compound the difficulty—the Biological Diversity Act of 2002 makes the process of sending plant specimens outside the country for study and comparison much more difficult. The state favours research projects with “visible and immediate implications for the management of protected areas,” but ignores the recommendations of independent scientists. It discriminates in favour of state-sponsored research, even though the capacity of state institutions has been systematically eroded. Forest officers are not trained in the natural sciences, leave alone techniques of research. Research positions in protected areas lie unfilled for lack of qualified personnel.
Shahabuddin goes on to discuss alternative models of conservation. Joint forest management commenced in the 1990s with the aim of protecting degraded forests in partnership with local communities. Thirty years on, the goal of popular participation still remains a mirage. The department’s refusal to relinquish operational control, its insistence on micromanaging every aspect of JFM, rapidly emptied it of any real content. Shahabuddin uncovers its ecological failures in southwestern Bengal, where the partial regeneration of sal woodlands had no discernible effect on wildlife or biodiversity.
She also examines experiments in community management, where villagers undertake to protect forest patches while making use of them. These patches exhibit more biodiversity than unprotected ones (which are more heavily used), but do poorly in comparison to well protected forests, where fewer people are able to go. Despite this somewhat discouraging history, Shahabuddin remains optimistic that a way forward can be found. In her view, “it is only by placing community-based conservation on an equal footing with strict protection paradigms—while recognising the weaknesses of both—that one can hope to strengthen nature conservation in India.” What remains absent from her otherwise persuasive analysis is any consideration of the structural factors inhibiting reform.
THE EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE OF global warming should encourage us to revisit the complex relationship between humankind and nature. There is a strong temptation to view this in binary terms, encouraged by an influential strand in ecological thought that sees Homo sapiens as a disrupter of ecosystems evolving independently of it. This viewpoint is being challenged, but historical thinking, with or without the spur of climate change, remains all but absent from Indian ecology. At Nature’s Edge, edited by two distinguished environmental historians, forms part of a continuing effort to bring the two closer together.
In their introduction, Mahesh Rangarajan and Gunnel Cederlöf discuss the dangers of taking the Anthropocene too literally. This is held to mark a new geological epoch, when we began changing the earth’s equilibrium in fundamental ways. The original suggestions ranged from the late eighteenth century (the commencement of the Industrial Revolution) to 1945 (the first nuclear explosions). In 2016, the Working Group on the Anthropocene presented a formal recommendation to the International Geological Congress for a new epoch beginning 1950, when radioactive elements from nuclear testing become visible for the first time in the geological record.
The Anthropocene lumps us together as a species, but not all societies are equally responsible for global warming. Besides, humans have been reshaping nature ever since their arrival upon the evolutionary stage—our ancestors extinguished a range of animals and plants at different times and places, ranging from the last glacial epoch to a few centuries ago. Even if the physical changes and extinctions of the Anthropocene remain qualitatively different, the problem of plotting them against a shifting background remains.
In her stimulating contribution to this volume, the anthropologist Kathleen Morrison argues for treating human activity as an integral part of nature—its ecological effects go back to the Neolithic Revolution, when agriculture began reshaping landscapes on a planetary scale. This long-term history is obscured by computer models of vegetation change based on the European experience, where farming came late—six thousand years ago—and altered land cover to a smaller degree. In other parts of the world, agriculture, and the methane emissions generated by it, date to the early Holocene. Viewed from this standpoint, the Anthropocene is much less novel than it appears.
What Morrison’s argument elides is the critical question of variability. Prehistoric humans may have succeeded in converting some forests into grasslands, but this involved no more than the replacement of one interlocking suite of plants and animals with another. The effects of hunting and foraging are density-dependent—small groups do little damage, relatively speaking; large ones do more. Premodern farming techniques reconfigured ecosystems by subtracting many species, but adding others. Industrial farming removes most of them. Which brings us back to the contention of the editors: any balance sheet of losses and gains must be historical, site-specific and socially differentiated.
The challenge is to combine history with ecology in a concrete and fruitful way. This difficulty is exacerbated by a marked tendency to view history in terms of events rather than processes. An example comes from this volume, when the marine biologist Rohan Arthur treats two distinct developments as identical examples of historical contingency. The first occurred in the Lakshadweep archipelago, where reef fishing was the usual practice until the 1970s. At this point the fisheries department began teaching local fishermen techniques of harvesting tuna in the open ocean. These proved so profitable that reef fishing declined significantly. This is the principal reason why Lakshadweep’s reefs are in better health and show greater resilience to coral bleaching than many other places.
The second example comes from the east coast of India, where trawling was introduced in the 1960s, with international aid, to increase fisheries production. Its original target was shrimp. Trawl nets are superbly efficient from an economic point of view by reason of their incredible wastefulness. They dredge up virtually everything from the sea floor in addition to what is being sought—this bycatch is thrown away. Once shrimp stocks were depleted, trawlers began pulling up fish, wiping out each commercial species in turn. Now they catch inedible fish—species that, twenty years ago, would be dumped overboard—to sell to poultry farmers for use as feed.
Yet nothing in this sequence is contingent, in the sense of being accidental. Trawling would have reached India with or without Norwegian aid—the only accident about it is its timing. This is because it meshed seamlessly with the inherent logic of India’s developmental policies (and regulatory failures), as did all the cascading events that followed. Bolting on history to ecology in this superficial way is not very rewarding. Arthur muses about the unlikely possibility of conceiving “a set of environmental, geographical, cultural, and ecological parameters that together predispose ecosystems to certain historical processes,” but this proposal, utopian or not, represents a misunderstanding of the way history works.
Its actual uses are more modest and, in my view, much more helpful. They are embodied in historical ecology—the biotic history of landscapes in terms of ecological responses to land-use. Unfortunately, it remains all but absent in India, where the work of scholars like Oliver Rackham and Colin R Tubbs finds little purchase. No institution seems interested in fostering the specialised skills it requires. At a simpler level, a historical approach is capable of yielding new insights into ecological problems—but for that the problem and its treatment must be carefully thought out.
DURING THE 1970S AND 1980S, Indian conservationists ignored questions of political economy and turned away from research to build islands of protection. This is being rectified, albeit slowly and haltingly. A debate about people and nature is opening up. Attempts to understand how diverse ecosystems actually work are being made. However, ecological research and conservation discourse remain largely decoupled from climate change.
In general terms, temperate ecosystems are much better studied than tropical ones, if only because they lie in the world’s richest regions, with the largest investments in research. We know more about some tropical ecosystems than others: the Amazon basin has been studied for decades by institutions in Brazil, the United States and Western Europe. Their projects have pushed forward our understanding of forest ecology in general. There is not a single ecosystem in India of which something similar could be said. Our knowledge is growing slowly, but remains strikingly uneven. There has been more research on montane landscapes than peninsular forests; the study of grasslands, coasts and rivers is even less developed.
From the very beginning, the Indian state starved the natural sciences of resources and funds—Nehruvian patriotism preferred to sacrifice knowledge to any abrogation of the state’s ability to set the boundaries of ecological discourse. Knowledge extends and complicates these boundaries; ignorance restricts them. This was also true of the field of history, where tight control over archaeological excavations—dominated by an under-equipped and underfunded government agency—crippled research into prehistory and early history, preparing the ground for the fantasies of the Hindu Right.
It is worth remembering that the official policy of discouraging Western ecologists had influential supporters, including M Krishnan—not just a nature writer and naturalist, but an important voice in conservation. Systematic ecological research in India commences only from the 1980s, with the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun (set up in 1982; granted autonomy in 1986), the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (1983) and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore (1991).
This late start was exacerbated by lack of funding. The state puts more money into ecological research today than it used to, but this is only a tiny fraction of what is required. Independent institutions remain dependent upon corporate donations and overseas funding (tightly controlled by the state); research permits are doled out grudgingly and reluctantly. Ecological patterns known elsewhere are still being explored in the Indian context.
All plant and animal species flourish within a defined temperature band—their survival is affected if the peak goes too high or the trough falls too low. This leaves three possible responses to rising temperatures: adaptation, migration or extinction. Many species are capable of moving to their accustomed temperature gradient. On a planetary scale, it becomes colder from the equator to the poles, and from sea level to mountain top. Finding a suitable gradient involves moving north in the northern hemisphere—the southern hemisphere has a much greater proportion of water to land, complicating terrestrial migrations—or upwards in montane landscapes. Plants move too, by the simple expedient of seed dispersal. As temperatures rise, seeds falling to the north of a plant’s tolerance band will germinate while those falling to the south (where it is getting too hot) will fail. Over several generations, the geographical band in which a tree is found will shift northwards.
There are many species whose numbers are too small to migrate successfully. Others are too specialised, being dependent on other conditions besides temperature. Those on islands and mountain tops have nowhere to go to. These migrations and extinctions have already commenced, yet we know virtually nothing of them in the Indian context. We are trying to build a scaffolding of basic ecological knowledge on a house whose very foundations are shifting.
It is true that ecology as a discipline has grown steadily, albeit from a very small base. Research programmes remain strikingly lopsided—fauna receives far more attention than flora, and in fauna, large mammals. There is little support for long-term projects. Some state institutions, including the Botanical Survey of India and its counterpart, the Zoological Survey, are showing signs of revival. Others, like the Forest Research Institute, remain moribund. But the significance of the forest department does not depend merely upon its (in)capacity to do research, for it is the managing agency for virtually all our terrestrial ecosystems.
THIS BRINGS US TO THE SECOND FAILURE of ecology in India: its faith in the potential efficiency of the state, nourished by its reliance upon state power to notify and protect, codify and regulate. Many ecologists would admit that these functions have never been performed properly. A franker debate about the reasons is opening up, yet prescriptions for reform remain strikingly modest.
In the absence of a reliable corpus of ecological knowledge to support their arguments, the first generation of conservationists approached the state in their personal capacity, using personal connections. This magnified the preexisting contempt for science in official circles and encouraged conservationists to rely on these connections to influence state policy. The need for science could not be ignored for long, but it was held hostage to considerations of expediency and nationalism. In the end, as we have seen, the study of ecology took root outside the forest department. Even after this, the relationship between its practitioners and policymakers remained arbitrary and personalised.
The state has no obligation, and little incentive, to draw upon ecological research. Experts are recruited to serve on committees, but the acceptance of their recommendations depends upon expediency alone. Conservation biologists work with individual officers to improve management practices, but the inherent instability of this relationship is laid bare in a recent account. In 1996, Raghu Chundawat set up a pioneering study of tigers in Panna National Park with the encouragement of its field director. Five years later, the director was transferred. His replacement decided to promote tourism by using the project—which was tracking tigers fitted with radio collars—to locate them for viewing. When the researchers objected, their permissions were curtailed or revoked and their movements restricted. Poachers fanned out as soon as research monitoring ceased. When Chundawat went over the director’s head to warn of falling tiger numbers, the forest department closed ranks. The project was stopped and its members evicted from the park. Over the next four years, Chundawat’s career was all but destroyed. His account of these events, in The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers, is valuable chiefly for its candour—its appraisal of the agency responsible for such startling inefficiency, bad faith and vindictiveness can scarcely be described as incisive.
The most vocal critics of this system are those with no academic axe to grind. The naturalist Pradip Krishen, author of two pioneering field guides on Indian trees, is succinct: India remains “a scientific backwater when it comes to ecological issues. Much of our plant life … has been mapped and documented but very little of its ecology, the relationship between living things and their surroundings. Our forest departments are prime offenders because, far from learning about or teaching us about how things ‘work’ in our forests and wilderness areas, [they] have been notoriously inimical to independent scientific research.”
Ecologists who support the state’s approach are notably milder. For Ullas Karanth, the problem of relocation can be solved by the mediation of conservation organisations and ecological expertise supplied by independent scientists. But this is a fallacy. Problems of management can scarcely be solved by experts alone, in the absence of qualified staff. Conservation organisations cannot substitute for the state—even if this was possible—by privatisating its functions. They can only supplement it in isolated and restricted instances. The attempt to divorce coercion from other tasks is even more mistaken, for effective policing rests upon the ability to defuse conflict. It involves building bridges with local communities, not just punishing them. For this reason alone, it can hardly be separated from efficiency in general.
Advocates of participatory conservation offer a more searching critique: unfortunately, their actual proposals barely scratch the surface of the problem. Ghazala Shahabuddin suggests better training of officers, greater openness and more investments in research to overcome institutional hostility to science. But training is integrally linked to recruitment; it involves selecting people with a solid grounding in the relevant disciplines. Environmental agencies in most developed—and some developing—countries are staffed and managed by specialists. Rachael Carson wrote Silent Spring as a marine biologist in the employ of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The ecologist Frans Vera, whose work inspired rewilding experiments in Knepp (England) and Oostvaardersplassen (the Netherlands), worked in different departments of the Dutch government, including the Staatsbosbeheer, the state agency for nature management and forestry.
An institution becomes transparent—or opaque—by virtue of the structures in which its employees are embedded, the way they are stacked and arranged, the nature of relations between layers. In this respect, field staff are every bit as important as managers. The endemic failures of the forest department have their roots in history. Its institutional structures were originally created for timber extraction and policing. They have remained substantially unchanged for over a century even though its remit has changed beyond recognition. It is underfunded and undermanned—there are not enough field staff, they are not trained at all, working conditions are abysmal. Scientific expertise of any kind is conspicuous by its absence.
This implies that any lasting reform can only be achieved by overhauling these structures. There are many possible solutions: it might, for instance, usefully be broken up into separate wings for policing, forestry, research, and park management. Distinct recruitment practices and administrative structures would have to be devised for each; research projects require specialised training and collegial reporting. Some system of committees would be needed to coordinate these tasks.
The recruitment of field staff is plagued with corruption, yet operational efficiency depends upon hiring capable operatives and treating them with respect. Policing must be accompanied by reliable mechanisms of oversight—statutory boards comprising social scientists, forest officials and citizen representatives to adjudicate complaints would be a welcome start. The Forest Research Institute could be hived off as an independent agency, to be headed and staffed by specialists. Protected areas should be thrown open to academic researchers without exception; treating ecological research as a matter of state security is the surest way of crippling our ability to cope with climate change.
If this sounds utopian, it should be remembered that the recruitment procedures and operational structures of India’s economic agencies (the Reserve Bank of India, the Planning Commission)—not to mention bodies like the Defense Research and Development Organisation and the Indian Space Research Organisation—were professionalised from the very beginning. The stasis of the forest department merely reflects the low value ascribed to its tasks. If we believe that ecological security is a compelling goal, there is no reason why its agencies should not be treated with comparable respect. Institutional reform alone will not solve all the problems of management, land rights or conservation—nothing can—but without it, the state cannot even begin to act on them.
Up until now, the spheres of policy and law have garnered all our attention, yet the actual results of reform remain modest. The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 failed to prevent the steady haemorrhaging of forest land; JFM never came close to fulfilling its objectives; the FRA achieved relatively little, and this little is exposed to legal challenge and new obstacles. The contempt for science remains unaffected—fresh barriers to research were put in place during the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance. Now the Modi government has seized upon climate change to unveil a new forest policy built around the indefinite extension of plantations at the cost of natural ecosystems. Its language, with its stress on social forestry and the needs of industry, is reminiscent of the 1970s. Once again, complex questions of ecology are being reduced to the simple formula of tree planting for industrial foodstock, this time under the pretext of saving the environment.
Perhaps it is time to take a different tack, by abandoning the chronic neglect of structure for policy. There is more than enough evidence to show that reform is ineffectual without institutional structures capable of translating it into practice—without remaking state agencies that manage forests, fisheries and agriculture from the ground up, on very different principles. Admittedly, the chances of this are bleak, under the Modi government or any other, but without facing the problem, little progress seems possible.
DH Lawrence was, among other things, a superb poet of nature. One of the poems in his collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers describes an unexpected encounter while living in Sicily: going to fill his pitcher at the water trough one afternoon, he saw a snake drinking from it.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The rest of the poem reproduces the oscillation of his thoughts as he watches the snake (“Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?/Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?/ Was it humility, to feel so honoured?/I felt so honoured.”). But, in the end, a feeling of horror comes over him and he flings a piece of wood at the snake. Immediately, he regrets his action (“I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!/I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human/education.”), and the poem crests like a wave to its coda:
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.
The poem distills our visceral responses—fear, pleasure, awe—to those aspects of nature that seem most alien to us while celebrating their validity: a snake, no less than us, is “one of the lords of life.” To Lawrence, the all consuming mania for profit was life’s antithesis, though he could scarcely have foretold the havoc it would wreak in the end.
Roughly one hundred years on, the need for expiation has never been greater or more difficult. It can only be achieved by confronting a radically unsettling set of fears, born of our freedom to alter the conditions for life on a living planet in accordance with our notions of right and convenience. To deal with them will not be easy, for this involves much more than listening to science. It demands a fundamental reassessment of our relationship with the natural world, our view of human goals, social well-being, the state and its functions, and many more things besides. This will not happen easily—without the experience of mass suffering on a scale akin to war, it is unlikely to happen at all. But to restrict our attention only to what seems practicable is a certain recipe for failure in the long run.