THREE boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred in India’s conservation and development landscape. A boundary in space that separates protected wildlife reserves and government owned or private forests from the surrounding areas under other human land uses. A boundary in time that demarcates historical landscape transformation or protection from earlier pristine or later recovery periods. And a boundary in the imagination that cleaves the human as a being separate from nature. Taken together, this calls for new approaches to conservation of biological diversity and spaces for people in conservation.

The Indian experience carries lessons for the wider developed world, especially for countries rich in biological diversity that are undergoing major shifts in demography and economy. Attested by recent scholarship and field research, it suggests a perspective that builds on environmental history and expands the contemporary conservation landscape to encompass the city, the countryside, and the wild.

Environmental histories, especially long perspectives emerging from deep histories of wide landscapes, partly impel this broadening of the conservation landscape.¹ Globally, few would argue that we now live in a period, labelled the Anthropocene, of unprecedented human impact including landscape alteration, global climate change, and species extinction. Still, environmental histories reveal pervasive historical and cultural connections and dynamics of humans and landscapes. If this deep history of ecological and cultural continuity and change is ignored, mainstream conservation efforts – such as setting aside protected reserves or restricting human impacts – risk pursuing misdirected or inadequate conservation goals.

Under the long shadow of history amidst widespread global change, the conservation movement’s quest for the ‘pristine’ or for nature uninfluenced by humans may prove elusive. At the same time, recent ecological field research reveals gradations and nuances of human influence on biological diversity, ranging from the negative and neutral to the positive and resuscitative, from destruction and degradation to recovery and restoration. Approaches that integrate environmental history with contemporary ecology, which reaffirm and reorient the human place in nature, can better guide, revive, and sustain conservation landscapes of the future.

 

The setting aside of natural remnants and reserves as a means of conservation has, of course, a long history in India, emerging bottom-up as traditional and community reserves as well as imposed top-down by ruler or state as more exclusive reserves.² Connected to a rooted conservation ethic, local knowledge of nature and natural resources, and tolerance, communities across India have established, protected, and managed sacred groves, wetland heronries, and village commons such as pastures and bamboo reserves. In contrast, the top-down reservation effected by state fiat or legislation resulted in the creation of reserves such as the hunting preserves of the erstwhile princely states, forest reserves of the colonial British government, and wildlife reserves in independent India. After the enactment of the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, a slew of reserves were established as wildlife sanctuaries, national parks, and tiger reserves, together numbering over 660 in 2015 and occupying just under 5% of the country’s geographical area.

 

Although useful, the bottom-up versus top-down classification is a simplistic portrayal of the diversity of conservation approaches and their social, ecological, and historical contexts. The latter sometimes built upon the former as in the case of Vedanthangal bird sanctuary in South India, or as in the more recent attempts to notify community reserves under the Wildlife Protection Act, and recognize the roles and rights of forest dwellers in forest conservation under the Forest Rights Act of 2006. Still, the setting aside of protected reserves has been a mainstream conservation approach for long.

The creation of wildlife reserves in India has paralleled the setting aside, worldwide, of over 209,000 protected areas that now cover about one-sixth of earth’s terrestrial area and inland water, and 3.4% of the oceans.³ Following the creation of protected areas, the last decades of the 20th century saw debates over the conservation philosophies of preservationism versus sustainable use, recalling similar debates of earlier decades.⁴ The protected areas sometimes became theatres of contest between excluded or dispossessed local communities and state or industrial interests.

While these debates brought the realities, nuances, and complexities of conservation to the forefront and continue to remain relevant, there is now greater recognition that a diverse suite of conservation, governance, and management systems is required rather than a preservation versus use dichotomy. The IUCN spectrum of protected areas ranging from Strict Nature Reserve and Wilderness Area (Category Ia and Ib) to Protected Area with Sustainable Use of Natural Resources (Category VI) is one such articulation. Another is India’s attempt to establish ‘inviolate areas’ free of human influence in national parks and tiger reserves, recognize rights and uses of forest dwellers in reserved forests and wildlife sanctuaries, and create community reserves and joint forest management (JFM) systems.

 

Irrespective of the conservation philosophy, approach, or management system, the creation of protected areas for conservation has left open three broad questions. All three are of great relevance in the current context. First, are protected areas enough? In an increasingly transformed and crowded world, where reserves are few, scattered amidst other land uses, and small (>58% of protected areas are less than 10 square kilometres in area), can conservation goals be achieved by such reserves alone? Should conservation efforts encompass the diversity of species that persist in or use the surrounding landscapes? In other words, should there be greater efforts to expand the penumbra of places for nature conservation?

Second, what is the role for rewilding and restoration, especially in areas set aside ostensibly to minimize human impacts? These often active tasks of intensive human intervention may be needed to bring back original ecosystems and complement of species that were lost or altered due to historical exploitation, land use, or degradation. In considering environmental history, how far back in time should one look to determine the original or desired state and benchmark recovery?

Third, can humans live alongside other species, as a part of nature rather than live apart from nature? Will negative interactions between people and wildlife, in combination with reservation of conservation areas, lead to an increasing disconnect between humans and other species? How does one frame and manage interactions between people and wildlife to foster coexistence? Scholarship and field research on these three larger questions contribute to the blurring of the three lines in space, time, and imagination alluded to in the opening of this piece.

 

Conservation research across diverse landscapes in India and elsewhere in the tropics is firmly establishing the need to look beyond the boundaries of protected areas.5 The effectiveness of protected areas to stave off conservation threats has been variable. One study of 93 protected areas across 22 tropical countries showed that protected areas have been reasonably successful in preventing further land clearing, but less effective with threats of hunting, logging, fire, and grazing.⁶ Unprecedented infrastructure expansion, particularly roads, is now a serious concern in many tropical areas, implicated in deforestation outside and to a lesser extent within protected areas and in disruption of animal corridors.

A global survey of 60 tropical protected areas found that around half are continuing to lose biodiversity in a range of taxa from fish and amphibians to primates and carnivores.⁷ Although such nature reserves may help reduce deforestation within their boundaries, the surrounding landscapes may continue to lose forest cover and undergo land use changes, with inimical effects that may penetrate the park and affect their connectivity to other reserves. To be effective, conservation within reserves must also take into account the needs of local communities, poverty and livelihoods, and unsustainable land-uses in the surrounding landscape.⁸

 

As recent works indicate, both species requirements and ecological processes dictate the need to consider wider landscapes. Species such as Asian elephants or migratory birds move over large areas thereby indicating the value of corridors and stopover sites and habitats en route. Ecological processes such as animal migration, flow of nutrients and pollution, large-scale phenomena such as synchronized bamboo flowering, and global changes such as a warming climate may connect even the most remote corner of protected areas with wider landscapes and changes. Many species of conservation interest persist in landscapes outside protected areas, including in areas such as wetlands, pastures, plantations and agroforestry, and cities.⁹

The creation or expansion of infrastructure such as roads, railways, canals, and powerlines within and around conservation areas, brings concerns related to wildlife mortality, habitat fragmentation, weed invasion, and degradation.¹⁰ Emerging fields of study such as countryside biogeography, urban ecology, and road ecology integrate these areas and concerns under a broader conservation umbrella. While highlighting cross-sectoral political and policy linkages, they have also fostered cross-disciplinary links between humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, agriculture, and engineering technology. Besides expanding the conservation horizon from cities to wilderness, what is now evident is that drawing a boundary around an area to focus protection efforts within, by itself, is insufficient to attain conservation goals.

 

Taking the long view of environmental history also challenges some common concepts underlying mainstream conservation approaches.¹¹ This includes the concepts of pristine nature or ‘climax’ vegetation, sharp colonial ecological watersheds, and the narratives of loss set against putative historical baselines.¹² In tropical forests, for instance, archaeological, historical, and other scientific evidence points to a long history of human presence, use, and modification in India as elsewhere.¹³ As Kathleen Morrison underscores through analysis of case studies, the rise and fall of empires such as at Vijayanagar in southern India, has dynamically altered the water bodies, pastures, fields, farms, and forests across large landscapes. Many areas considered pristine today have retained or recovered their biological diversity and characteristics over long periods alongside various forms of human influence.

 

The natural environments of today are therefore better construed in relation to the historical and contextual degree of human impact or influence rather than their complete absence. In Morrison’s words, ‘Like the "fall" and expulsion from the garden in romantic approaches, scientific approaches adopt the view of human-modified natural environments, original states of nature against which cultural action is arrayed. The long human history in South Asia, along with its changing climate, make it clear that there could never have been such a beginning, and that humans cannot be excised from histories of the landscape. Beyond this, many accounts of change, whether of environmental political, or social history, drink from the same metaphorical well, invoking common tropes of loss, degradation, and decay.’¹⁴

A more fluid conception of change and historical influence is applicable not only to contexts such as ecosystems in disequilibrium or affected by long-term climate change, or which are believed to represent trajectories of decline from pristine to degraded. Cyclic systems too may exist, such as in seasonally flooded environments or in shifting (swidden) agricultural landscapes. In parts of northeast India such as Mizoram, shifting agriculture or jhum cultivation creates and maintains a landscape mosaic of fields, fallows, and forests (both regenerating secondary and mature forests), with a significant presence and role of bamboo in regeneration.

Earlier research had suggested that if bamboo forests regenerating after jhum were protected for periods spanning decades, mature tropical evergreen forests are likely to recover after the periodic mass flowering and death of bamboos. Recent research suggests that after bamboo flowering, bamboo recovers and persists in the same sites, acting as a pervasive ecological and cultural marker of human influence in the landscape.¹⁵

 

These ideas are relevant in the context of the increased interest globally in ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems and rewilding areas with species and ecological functions.¹⁶ Rewilding and restoration involve a bringing back of species to sites for which historical information on ecological conditions, species composition, and human influences play a major part. Knowledge of how ecosystems functioned prior to loss, and reference sites that have seen different histories and intensity of impact, can help determine and track trajectories of planned recovery. Still, such restoration remains difficult given the ongoing pace and extent of change, difficulties in determining how far back in history one would look to determine the original conditions, and the possibility that under present conditions the trajectory of recovery may depart significantly from the past. Historical knowledge and continuous monitoring may then serve more as guides rather than templates for restoration.¹⁷

 

Rewilding and restoration affirm a significant positive role for human influence in designing and tracking recovery towards more desirable ecological and cultural outcomes, even where target original conditions are not precisely determinable. Restoration goals therefore need to integrate both cultural and ecological continuity in the landscape. Sharp boundaries in time may need to make way for a more fluid conception of history and informed charting of progress into the future.

Species persistence outside protected areas, and restoration and rewilding efforts, may enhance interactions among people and wildlife in the landscape. Animal species often persist outside protected areas in habitat remnants and areas under more intensive human land use or production, as shown by recent studies of species such as elephants, leopards, and a spectrum of other wildlife.¹⁸ The interactions between humans and wildlife may range from positive (e.g., aesthetic appreciation, economic returns through use or tourism), through neutral (no noticeable human-wildlife impact) to negative (e.g., causing losses to property or livestock, human injuries and deaths).

 

To conserve other species that share landscapes with people requires pro-active efforts to avoid or minimize negative interactions such as wildlife damage to crops and property, livestock depredation, and injury or loss of human life in (frequently accidental) encounters. This can enable human-wildlife coexistence involving many species, including carnivores such as lions, bears, cougars, and coyotes that live in or are expanding their ranges into human-use areas in many parts of the world. Well known in North America and Europe, such phenomena also apply to parts of South Asia for some large wildlife species.¹⁹

The presence of wildlife alongside people is often construed as a problem or as leading to human-wildlife conflicts. Although the term ‘conflict’ has been widely used in the literature, this has been criticized in a recent assessment.²⁰ The use of ‘conflict’ can be misleading as it conflates and confuses direct impacts of wildlife on humans with the often more frequent human-human conflicts such as between conservationists and developers who pursue alternate visions for the same area.

 

The focus on conservation within the bounds of nature reserves has also led to the idea that wildlife involved in negative interactions with people in the surrounding landscape are ‘problem animals’ that are ‘straying’ out from the domain of nature into the domain of the human. As a result of this perception, reactive measures that seek to continually separate animals from people through barriers, capture and removal into captivity, or translocation into protected areas, are implemented. Such measures have been shown to fail to address the cause of the negative interaction (which, in reality, may be a problem related to location, or to human welfare and occupational safety, rather than the animal itself), or to prevent recurrence, or actually transfer or worsen the problem (e.g., leopards²¹). Community involvement and pro-active measures that address human needs such as safety and sanitation, insurance and early warning systems, and better livestock corrals and herding practices, offer better alternatives for coexistence.

The idea of coexistence of humans with other species finds space in contemporary policy as in the case of Asian elephants.²² In 2012, the Karnataka Elephant Task Force demarcated three ‘elephant management zones’ for the state: elephant conservation zone, elephant-human coexistence zone, and elephant removal zone.²³ The three-way classification parallels the notion of ‘sustainable landscapes’,²⁴ construed as landscapes which have protected areas set aside for species conservation, use areas meant for sustainable natural resource extraction, and more intensive land use areas with agriculture and urbanization.

Although this three-way zonation refines the inadequate within/outside protected area classification, it is afflicted with the same problem of artificial boundaries that restrict neither humans nor animals. Given pervasive human presence and historical impact even inside parks and sanctuaries and the widespread occurrence of wildlife and biological diversity even in intensively used areas such as cities, this classification may be questioned. In reality, the entire spectrum from industrial and urbanized areas to countryside and wilderness can justifiably be viewed as a single wide landscape of coexistence.

 

Accommodating deep history and wide landscape perspectives into conservation also requires integrating ecological research with environmental history. While environmental historians are right to critique the quest for ‘pristine’ nature as flawed given the historical evidence,²⁵ they fall short in recognizing other ecological concerns. As field research across a cross-section of habitats in the landscape indicates, pervasive human influence does not imply that human influence is always benign or unavoidable. Studies show that various anthropogenic factors such as type of land use, extent of forest cover or fragmentation, degree or intensity of habitat alteration, and human population density can influence the diversity and abundance of species in the landscape. Species of greater significance for conservation, including those that are rare, have more restricted ranges, or have specialized habitat requirements, are known to occur more frequently in less intensively used or altered habitats such as old-growth or mature tropical forests.²⁶ For conservation to be effective across wide areas, it is often vital that such mature or less-impacted habitats are retained as part of the landscape mix.

 

Deep history also holds profound implications for restoration and rewilding. Ecosystems can rebound when freed of past human impacts, such as following land abandonment, human migrations, or even due to armed conflicts and wars, as evidenced in parts of Europe and the Americas. In other places, careful reintroduction of species, control or removal of invasive alien species, and various forms of habitat manipulation may be required for rewilding landscapes and waterscapes. Such active efforts, crucially involving human intervention and participation, may be required to return or recover species of conservation significance, ecological functions such as watershed values, besides aesthetic and other use values.²⁷ Evidence from environmental history, in this context, represents not merely a negation of the pristine, but serves as a guide to enhance ecological and cultural potential of a landscape with positive roles for humans in conservation.

 

In conclusion, stretching the conservation landscape to encompass much larger areas than the 5% of land area in India’s wildlife protected areas represents both a great challenge and an opportunity. As scientists, practitioners, and communities continue to extend conservation beyond the boundaries of nature reserves into countryside and urban landscapes, more examples, approaches, and models of human-wildlife coexistence are being brought to the fore. Restoration and rewilding are also gaining ground as complementary conservation strategies. While a quest for a single or particular historical baseline or boundary may remain elusive, it is evident that various elements or habitats in the landscape differ in their potential to support conservation of nature and biological diversity. These elements of the landscape, which also differ in the intensity and history of habitat alteration or human influence, deserve to be included in the penumbra of places for conservation and restoration.

Attention to long-term environmental history, indicating diverse, shifting, and dynamic landscapes under human influence, can illuminate and guide such conservation and restoration efforts. Such a broadening of the ambit of conservation can potentially increase the spaces and constituencies for conservation through wider engagement of communities and the larger civil society, besides political and corporate entities.²⁸ At a fundamental level, this also requires recognizing humans as part of nature, enmeshed in its ecology, with agency and capacity to positively influence the future conservation landscape.

 

Footnotes:

1. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Shifting Ground: People, Animals and Mobility in India’s Environmental History. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2014.

2. V. Saberwal, M. Rangarajan and A. Kothari, People, Parks and Wildlife: Towards Coexistence. Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2001.

3. See http://www.protectedplanet.net and http://www.mpatlas.org/

4. D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.

5. M. Rangarajan, M.D. Madhusudan and G. Shahabuddin (eds.), Nature Without Borders. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2014.

6. A.G. Bruner, R.E. Gullison, R. E. Rice and G. A.B. da Fonseca, ‘Effectiveness of Parks in Protecting Tropical Biodiversity’, Science 291, 2001, pp. 125-128.

7. W.F. Laurance, D.C. Useche, J. Rendeiro, M. Kalka, C.A. Bradshaw et al., ‘Averting Biodiversity Collapse in Tropical Forest Protected Areas’, Nature 489, 2012, pp. 290-294.

8. See: R. DeFries, A. Hansen, A. C. Newton and M. C. Hansen, ‘Increasing Isolation of Protected Areas in Tropical Forests Over the Past Twenty Years’, Ecological Applications 15, 2005, pp. 19-26; L. Naughton-Treves, M. B. Holland and K. Brandon, ‘The Role of Protected Areas in Conserving Biodiversity and Sustaining Local Livelihoods’, Annual Review of Environmental Resources 30, 2005, pp. 219-252; and Laurance et al. 2012, op. cit.

9. See Introduction and Chapters by K.S.G. Sundar, ‘Sarus Cranes, Cultivators and Conservation’; H. Nagendra, R. Sivaraman and S. Subramanya, ‘Citizen Action and Lake Restoration in Bengaluru’; N.S. Ghotge and S.R. Ramdas, ‘Black Sheep and Grey Wolves: Pastoralism in the Deccan’; and D. Mudappa, M. A. Kumar and T.R.S. Raman, ‘Restoring Nature: Wildlife Conservation in Landscapes Fragmented by Plantation Crops in India’, in Rangarajan et al., Nature Without Borders, op. cit., 2014.

10. T.R.S. Raman, ‘Framing Ecologically Sound Policy on Linear Intrusions Affecting Wildlife Habitats.’ Background paper for the National Board for Wildlife, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, 2011.

11. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Shifting Ground, op. cit., 2014.

12. K.D. Morrison, Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation’, in M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ibid., 2014, 39-64.

13. C.C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Second edition. Knopf, 2006.

14. Op. cit., fn. 12.

15. See: T.R.S. Raman, G.S. Rawat, and A.J.T. Johnsingh, ‘Recovery of Tropical Rainforest Avifauna in Relation to Vegetation Succession Following Shifting Cultivation in Mizoram, North-East India’, Journal of Applied Ecology 35, 1998, pp. 217-231; B. Ingle and T.R.S. Raman, unpublished data, 2015.

16. G. Monbiot, Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Allen Lane, London, 2013.

17. K. Suding, E. Higgs, M. Palmer, J.B. Callicott et al., ‘Committing to Ecological Restoration’, Science 348, 2015, pp. 638-640.

18. See: V.R. Goswami, S. Sridhara, K. Medhi, A.C. Williams et al, ‘Community-Managed Forests and Wildlife-Friendly Agriculture Play a Subsidiary but not Substitutive Role to Protected Areas for the Endangered Asian Elephant’, Biological Conservation 177, 2014, pp. 74-81; M.D. Madhusudan, N. Sharma, R. Raghunath, N. Baskaran et al., ‘Distribution, Relative Abundance, and Conservation Status of Asian Elephants in Karnataka, Southern India’, Biological Conservation 187, 2015, pp. 34-40; V. Athreya, M. Odden, J.D.C. Linnell, J. Krishnaswamy and K. U. Karanth, ‘Big Cats in our Backyards: Persistence of Large Carnivores in a Human Dominated Landscape in India’, PLoS ONE 8(3), 2013, e57872; D. Mudappa, M.A. Kumar and T.R.S. Raman, op. cit., 2014.

19. G. Chapron et al., ‘Recovery of Large Carnivores in Europe’s Modern Human-Dominated Landscapes’, Science 346, 2014, pp. 1517-1519; V. Morrell, ‘Predators in the ‘Hood’, Science, 341, 2013, pp. 1332-1335; and T.R.S. Raman, ‘Leopard Landscapes: Coexisting With Carnivores in Countryside and City’, Economic and Political Weekly, Web Exclusives, 3 January 2015, http://www. epw.in/reports-states/leopard-landscapes. html

20. S.M. Redpath, S. Bhatia and J. Young, ‘Tilting at Wildlife: Reconsidering Human-Wildlife Conflict’, Oryx 49, 2015, pp. 222-225.

21. V. Athreya, M. Odden, J.D.C. Linnell and K.U. Karanth, ‘Translocation as a Tool for Mitigating Conflict With Leopards in Human-Dominated Landscapes of India’, Conservation Biology 25, 2011, pp. 131-141; M. Odden, V. Athreya, S. Rattan and J.D.C. Linnell, ‘Adaptable Neighbours: Movement Patterns of GPS-Collared Leopards in Human Dominated Landscapes in India’, PLoS ONE 9(11), 2014, e112044.

22. M. Rangarajan, A. Desai, R. Sukumar, P.S. Easa et al., Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India. Report of the Elephant Task Force, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, New Delhi, 2010.

23. Report of the Karnataka Elephant Task Force, submitted to Honourable High Court of Karnataka, September 2012.

24. J.G. Robinson, ‘Limits to Caring: Sustainable Living and the Loss of Biodiversity’, Conservation Biology 7, 1993, pp. 20-28.

25. K. Morrison, in M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, Shifting Ground, op. cit., 2014.

26. T. Newbold, L.N. Hudson, H.R.P. Phillips et al., ‘A Global Model of the Response of Tropical and Sub-Tropical Forest Biodiversity to Anthropogenic Pressures’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, 2014, 20141371.

27. G. Monbiot, Feral, op. cit., 2013.

28. M. Rangarajan, M.D. Madhusudan and G. Shahabuddin, Nature Without Borders, op. cit., 2014.