THIS essay aims to bring together things that are usually studied separately – environmental history, political economy and conservation practice. Given constraints of length, the treatment must of necessity be schematic, but I hope to show that a fruitful convergence is possible, a convergence capable of casting fresh light upon contemporary ecological problems including species extinction, habitat loss, and some of the other consequences of that ever growing, ever more ominous shadow the human race casts over the planet as a whole.

Ecologists and conservationists tend, not unnaturally, to focus upon the present and the future. The past is usually demarcated in terms of a specific problem – like the catastrophic impact of organo-chlorine pesticides on raptor populations in Europe and North America, starkly visible by the 1970s, or the consequences of diclofenac use on vulture populations in India (visible by the 1990s).¹ However, as soon as we come to the realm of solutions, it begins to intrude more insistently, if only because, as Gramsci remarked, we interpret the past by the very fact of acting in the present.²

An important question in the Indian context involves projecting the roots of environmental degradation back in time. This is of obvious interest to historians, but I believe that it has implications for conservation practice as well. A small body of work has developed around this problem, beginning with Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil’s formulation that the pre-colonial period was marked, on the whole, by ecological harmony, a balance between resource use and preservation, mediated largely through the caste system.³

This idealized view, conflating different periods and state structures, was sharply challenged by subsequent scholars. There is evidence to show that wild grass for fodder had already become a contested resource in parts of the Deccan by the 18th century, liable to engrossment by powerful military and landowning groups.⁴ Other examples include the steady reduction of the range of the one-horned rhinoceros, found as far west as Gujarat in Harappan times;⁵ and the over-hunting of cheetahs in the Mughal period.⁶ There are doubtless many other instances of landscape modification, range reductions and local extinctions before the advent of colonialism awaiting excavation and exegesis. Meanwhile, a more nuanced view of colonial transformations was subsequently set forth by Mahesh Rangarajan.⁷

 

More recently, Kathleen Morrison has suggested the polar opposite of Gadgil and Guha’s original thesis: in her view, since environmental degradation has occurred throughout the whole sweep of South Asian history, and the very concept of climax vegetation is inherently unsustainable and ahistorical, it makes no sense to regard the colonial period as being exceptional in this regard.⁸ I believe that her specific examples can be critiqued on other grounds: for example, the restricted nature of the evidence used to argue that forests in the Western Ghats show evidence of anthropogenic disturbance from very early on.⁹ Besides, disturbance is a relative term: how would we describe their state now? More importantly, I believe that her argument misreads the nature of ecological change before the advent of colonialism.

 

Although it is true that human beings have modified wild landscapes ever since their appearance upon the evolutionary stage, there remained sharp limits to the kind of change that could be brought about. It is perfectly possible to convert a forest landscape into savannah through cyclical burning (as happened in Australia and East Africa); or manage woodlands so intensively for timber as to make them essentially anthropogenic (as happened in England).¹⁰ Yet, for the most part, what this involved was the replacement of one kind of vegetation, and the faunal assemblages associated with it, by another.

This argument can be extended, albeit to a much smaller extent, to certain types of cultivated landscapes. Pre-modern agriculture in South Asia was carried out at very variable levels of intensity: cultivation could be broken up by wild grasses, canebrakes, shifting riverbeds and seasonal lakes – like the frontier region between Delhi and Lahore described by Jos Gommans.¹¹ These interstitial spaces provided shelter for wild animals and enabled alternate forms of resource use like nomadism. Agriculture incorporated fallows; the frontier of cultivation fluctuated – scrub forest could take over abandoned fields. In other words, the agricultural landscape under certain ecological conditions (that were far from uncommon) constituted a mosaic, one which wild animals like elephants, wolves, lions, deer could pass over in their peregrinations. Deltas were another example, where rivers reconfigured the landscape annually, to which humans had to adapt.¹²

 

The final limiting factor was demography, which has been calculated at 35 human beings to a square kilometre for Mughal India in the mid-17th century¹³ in contrast to 434 today. This staggering contrast can only be comprehended against the background of far-reaching transformations set in train by colonialism. By destroying large swathes of pre-modern industry, it forced more and more people back upon the land – an effect to which grandiose projects of land reclamation (Punjab, southern Tamil Nadu) and the general disarming of rural groups contributed.¹⁴ It inaugurated a process of demographic expansion despite regular setbacks caused by famines (whose effects it exacerbated). It introduced new crops and methods of cultivation (such as tea and coffee). The net result of all these developments was agrarian expansion on a massive scale throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century – probably the biggest single factor contributing to habitat loss.

 

One of the most obvious gaps in the historiography of environmental change is the absence of studies straddling the dividing line of independence. If we accept that the colonial period did constitute a watershed (albeit not of the kind of envisaged by Gadgil and Guha), and recognize its essential continuity with developmental processes after 1947, it might be possible to take a more self-critical view of current problems. For only a nuanced understanding of ecological change at different times in the past, under different technological frameworks, can help us to arrive at a fair judgment on the effects of subsistence use upon natural landscapes today.

The argument that human beings have always modified nature does not distinguish between different intensities of resource use by different societies, or help us determine under what circumstances patterns of subsistence use become ecologically unviable. It is theoretically possible for the technology and practices of a small group to remain unchanged and yet become environmentally wasteful (or much more wasteful) thanks to increasing intensity of resource use by adjoining societies. This probably happened in the Western Ghats once tea and coffee were introduced in the 19th century, leaving a shrinking remnant of forests unable to support subsistence use as they had once done. This does not, of course, alter the essential problem or make solutions easier to find, but it does allow us to apportion the blame more equitably.

 

A nuanced understanding of environmental histories might help conservation practice reach out more effectively to poor and marginalized communities. Much like history, political economy remains absent from conservation debates. Most ecologists would doubtless argue that economic and social questions (except under narrow and restricted definitions) fall outside the remit of the discipline. Even if this was once true, the rapidity of climate change should force us to think anew: a thoughtful debate about the ideology of indefinite economic expansion is one to which ecology could contribute much more than it now does. However, in the Indian case at least, I would argue that there are narrower, more immediately relevant questions of political economy that conservationists have ignored so far, and at some cost.

Both are structural in nature, and have to do with systemic flaws in governance. The first is an administrative framework that actively alienates adivasi communities from natural resources and landscapes, and in so doing makes conservation goals much more difficult to achieve. Adivasi or tribal communities are not, of course, the only ones living in or close to forests but they form a significant proportion of this category. In the Northeast, most live in regions governed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution; in peninsular India, the Fifth.

The history of the sixth schedule is contradictory and open to interpretation in different ways. The powers granted under it to autonomous district councils or ADCs are wide ranging in theory – though undercut in practice by the financial control exercised by state governments.¹⁵ From the 1950s, dissatisfaction with Assamese hegemony provoked demands for full statehood in a growing number of councils; the fear of Naga secessionism becoming a template finally forced the central government to act. By the early 1970s, most ADCs had been subsumed into new states and union territories carved out of undivided Assam – Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram. But this merely shifted the problem to a new institutional terrain as political competition coalesced around the electoral framework whereby state governments are formed and power exercised. ADCs remained a secondary arena, almost as subservient financially and politically as before, though the new social composition of power meant that crossing over from one to the other – from a position in the ADC to one in the state government – became easy.

 

The sixth schedule does grant a measure of control over natural resources to ADCs. This is partly an artifact of forest governance – over much of the Northeast the forest department is a much smaller presence than elsewhere. In Arunachal Pradesh, roughly 62 per cent of forests in 1990-91 were under community ownership and designated as unclassified state forests; only 37 per cent were reserve forests, managed by the forest department.16 This gives local communities much greater control over a key resource than would otherwise have been the case. However, other social and economic developments ensure that this stewardship is not necessarily benign. In Meghalaya, forest and mineral royalties provided as much as 40 per cent of the budget of the Khasi Autonomous District Council in the 1990s. Illegal logging on a massive scale was routine and a great deal of forest land has also been destroyed by limestone quarrying and coal mining.¹⁷

 

In Arunachal Pradesh, the state government’s eighth plan outlay (1992-97) budgeted less than Rs 300 crore for conservation and protection, but almost Rs 674 crore for extractive forestry (plantations, logging and the like).¹⁸ More recently, it has signed dozens of MOUs with private corporations for hydroelectric projects, unmindful of their environmental impacts on the fragile ecology of the eastern Himalayas. A recent study from Mizoram shows the very significant impacts on biodiversity of the state government’s drive to discourage traditional jhum or shifting cultivation in favour of oil palm and teak plantations.¹⁹ These governments are composed of members of indigenous groups who have internalized the conventional rhetoric of development to the point where the ecological problem of the Northeast is shifting from the familiar phenomenon of empty forests (denuded of wildlife by over-hunting) to the integrity of the physical landscape itself.

The experience of the fifth schedule points to a very different lesson – the danger of depriving local communities of every vestige of control over natural resources. Essentially it grants the governor of each state vague and theoretically unlimited authority to protect the interests of inhabitants of schedule five regions (an authority never exercised). In every other respect they are subject to the authority of state legislatures, central laws, and the forest department. Unlike the sixth schedule, these regions possess no separate apparatus of governance. However, the day to day lives of their inhabitants are also influenced by the forest department, in whose jurisdiction most communities happen to fall: in that case all other laws and institutions become secondary.

 

The problems are familiar, beginning, in many cases, with the lack of formal title to land. In addition, every aspect of forest use – grazing, firewood collection, foraging – is technically forbidden. Meanwhile the state strip-mines the resources communities are prevented from using. The practice of auctioning bits of reserve forests for wood and charcoal (coupe cutting) continued until the 1980s. Concessions were, and are, freely granted to industry – it took a Supreme Court judgment to halt logging in the Northeast. Huge swathes of forest continue to be destroyed by dams, mining and infrastructure projects, quite apart from illegal felling by the so-called timber mafia with the active connivance of forest staff.

All this has the inevitable consequence of spurring popular hostility to conservation, which tends to be regarded as an instrument of exclusion on other grounds. This feeling is exacerbated by forcible displacement from protected areas (or the denial of rudimentary services with the aim of forcing communities out). These are familiar tropes that require little discussion. What is more interesting is that every attempt at reform has run up against familiar obstacles. Joint forest management embodied the first recognition of the problem in early ’90s. Its chequered history and ultimate failure demonstrate the forest department’s obdurate refusal to surrender any authority over its domain.

 

More recently, the Forest Rights Act of 2006 was hailed as a potentially transformative law. However, its utility in obtaining land titles is limited since relatively few individuals can muster the necessary proof. Its most radical provision – community forest rights or CFRs that enable local communities (in theory at least) to manage forests with the agreement of the department – has either been ignored or subverted. The Panchayati Raj Extension to Scheduled Areas Act of 1996 is even less effective, for the gram sabha (to which extensive powers are devolved on paper) must rely upon the existing machinery of state to carry out its decisions. This effectively leaves local representatives of the executive branch free to ignore it. As far as its negative powers – such as withholding assent to land acquisition – are concerned, the state either refuses to accept their exercise or whittles them away by providing for exceptions.

It is striking that every attempt to reform forest governance by legislation, leaving institutions and institutional processes untouched, has failed. Which brings me to my most crucial point – it is the institutional structure of the forest department that alienates communities and renders conservation goals very difficult to achieve. This has two aspects. The first is a very long colonial and post-colonial history of preserving forests in order to exploit them commercially, embodied in extensive forestry operations to change their floristic composition by planting commercially valuable species. Tellingly, very little research has been done on the subject and even now it is impossible to determine whether these operations have ceased completely. It is only in the 1980s that this orientation haltingly begins to change – but the structure of the forest department remains unchanged, and it is this structure that fosters both ineptitude and authoritarianism.

 

The problems begin with a recruitment process that is rife with corruption at lower levels and marked by lack of accountability and specialized knowledge higher up. Conditions of work and housing for field staff remain abysmally poor, and a great deal of arbitrary corruption is condoned, if not actively encouraged. Budgets are geared towards spending money so as to allow skim-offs (such as in construction contracts): long-term planning and scientific expertise (whether independent or in-house) are conspicuous by their absence. There is no mechanism to impart effective training to the forest guard or ranger, and no system to hold him accountable for abuses of power.

These fault lines – lack of ecological knowledge and lack of accountability – run all the way to the top, for the department is organized as a closed caste of bureaucrats (rather than experts in conservation, ecology, anthropology etc.), answerable only to their superiors. The result is an authoritarian administrative machine designed to process money in order to (ineffectively) preserve a handful of species, and extend what is nebulously called tree cover.

The concept of participatory conservation represents a salutary corrective to earlier paradigms based on exclusion and punishment (what has been described as the fences and fines approach).²⁰ It seems eminently sensible to suggest that we should look beyond protected areas, if for no other reason than that many species consistently overflow their boundaries. Tigers, leopards, elephants and wolves move across cultivated landscapes; in riverine and marine environments, the very notion of a physical boundary becomes absurd. If conservation is to move beyond a few flagship species, human use must be reconciled and reoriented towards conservation goals to a greater or smaller extent.

 

However, I do not believe that it is, by itself, enough. The aim of this essay is to argue for a politically sharpened view of conservation, one that takes structural problems of governance into account. Without tackling institutional processes and discussing institutional reform, I do not believe that participatory conservation can be scaled up or be successful in more than a few isolated cases. The problem of conceptualizing more democratic and equitable arrangements that give local communities a voice in resource management (with adequate safeguards), and of reforming the structure of the forest department to make it more accountable and less opaque (to communities and scientific expertise) should be regarded as integral to the success of conservation outcomes.

Doing so would not automatically lead to sustainable use – as the experience of the sixth schedule shows. But it might alter the current incentive to use resources to depletion on the assumption that somebody else is bound to do so. Besides, it seems paradoxical to prevent communities from using resources – or, in the case of fisheries, actively encourage large-scale (industrial) over small-scale (artisanal) extraction – while providing no incentive at all for conserving them.

 

This is not to argue against protected areas (within which any resource use would have to be more vigilantly supervised in any case). It is merely to suggest that questions of governance and institutional reform need to be added to conservation discourse as a key area of discussion and concern. This would also involve moving beyond the traditional reluctance to address questions of economic policy even when their ecological relevance is obvious: the very questionable utility of big dams or industrial trawling, for example. Ecological critiques of both have been made, but they tend to remain narrowly conceived, avoiding any wider conclusion.²¹ A process of sustained dialogue with other interest groups, such as adivasi movements, would be useful too, in order to convince them that subsistence use does not become environmentally benign simply because it is based upon traditional knowledge: there are wider social and economic forces at work too.

Funding and time impose obvious constraints, as does the necessity of concentrating upon urgent short-term problems – the imminent loss of this species or that habitat. Yet, in the long-term, a wider focus, the contours of which I’ve tried to delineate here, might conceivably help conservation science and conservation practice deal more effectively with their myriad challenges.

 

Footnotes:

1. An anti-inflammatory drug widely used to treat livestock (and humans). Vultures eating cattle carcasses rapidly acquire toxic levels, leading to renal failure and death.

2. Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1995, p. 383.

3. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1992.

4. Sumit Guha, ‘Claims on the Commons: Political Power and Natural Resources in Precolonial India’, in Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), India’s Environmental History, Vol. 1: From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2011.

5. Shibani Bose, ‘From Eminence to Near Extinction: The Journey of the Great One-Horned Rhino’, in Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2014, pp. 65-87.

6. Divyabhanusinh, ‘Lions, Cheetahs, and Others in the Mughal Landscape’, in Shifting Ground, pp. 88-108.

7. Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860-1914. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1996.

8. Kathleen D. Morrison, ‘Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation’, Shifting Ground, pp. 39-64.

9. Kathleen D. Morrison, ‘Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State in South India’, in M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), IEH, Vol. 1, pp. 296-326.

10. For a classic statement of the latter, see Oliver Rackham, Woodlands. Collins, London, 2006.

11. Jos Gommans, ‘The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. 1100-1800 CE’, IEH, Vol. 1, pp. 217-244.

12. See Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2006, for a reconstruction of the traditional system of flood plain agriculture in the delta of the Mahanadi.

13. See the introduction to IEH, Vol. 2: Colonialism, Modernity and the Nation. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2013, p. 7.

14. Some of the relevant evidence is marshalled in Shashank Kela, A Rogue and Peasant Slave: Adivasi Resistance 1800-2000. Navayana, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 41-45, 255-265.

15. See David Stuligross, ‘Autonomous Councils in Northeast India: Theory and Practice’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 24(4), Oct-Dec 1999, pp. 504-5, for a useful summary.

16. Amitava Mitra, ‘Environment and Sustainable Development in the Hilly Regions of North-East India: A Study in Arunachal Pradesh’, International Journal of Social Economics 25(2/3/4), 1998, p. 198.

17. David Stuligross, pp. 513, 509-10, op. cit., fn. 15.

18. Amitava Mitra, p. 201, op. cit, fn. 16.

19. Jaydev Mandal and T.R. Shankar Raman, ‘Shifting Agriculture Supports More Tropical Forest Birds than Oil Palm or Teak Plantations in Mizoram, Northeast India’, The Condor 118, 2016, pp. 345-359.

20. The editors’ introduction to Mahesh Rangarajan, M. D. Madhusudan and Ghazala Shahabuddin (eds.), Nature Without Borders, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2014, contains the best paradigmatic description of the concept.

21. See Nachiket Kelkar and Jagdish Krishnaswamy, ‘Restoring the Ganga for its Fauna and Fisheries’, in NWB, pp. 58-80, and Aaron Savio Lobo and Rohan Arthur, ‘Trawling the Shorelines: Fished Out and Squandered’, also in NWB, pp. 41-57: the latter is exceptionally clear sighted on the effects of industrial fishing on the marine environment, yet refrains from any regulatory conclusion (apart from expanding Marine Protected Areas).