THE Western Ghats run along the west coast of peninsular India from Tamil Nadu through Kerala, Karnataka and Goa to Maharashtra. I first witnessed its beauty and richness of biodiversity when I went by bus to Goa from Mumbai where I was attending summer school as a Science Talent Scholar at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay in the early 1970s. Coming from the forests of the Himalaya with oak and rhododendron, deodar and pine, I was fascinated with a different biodiversity of the Western Ghats, even though colonial extraction of timber had left large tracts of the Ghats degraded in the Bombay Presidency.

The next opportunity I had to visit the Western Ghats in Karnataka was in the late 1970s to support the local communities who had started a movement against the Bedthi dam while I was at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. I got to live with a family, had the most sumptuous food, and watched with fascination how PhDs in math, chemistry, physics, including women, worked in their kitchens and spice gardens. I had never accepted the artificial gender hierarchies, hierarchies of work, hierarchies of knowledge. It was a joy to experience such rich biodiversity and cultural richness and wealth created by and sustained in a biodiversity economy through biodiversity of knowledges over thousands of years.

The spice gardens in the Western Ghats have existed for thousands of years, nourished by the heavy rains which pour down through the orographic effects of the mountain system perpendicular to the southwest monsoon.

People have conserved and coexisted with 30% of country’s plants, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals including tigers and elephants. UNESCO has identified the Western Ghats as one of the eight global biodiversity hotspots of the world. Human prosperity was not extracted at the cost of nature, but grew as part of nature’s biodiversity. In the Western Ghats we witness how conservation of biodiversity goes hand in hand with evolving the richest economies of the world which shaped history, drove international trade for millennia, and even led to colonialism.

The spice gardens and the forests were interconnected ecologically and epitemologically. Instead of being in conflict with each other, ecology as the science and knowledge of ‘oikos’, our home and economy as care for our home, are mutually supporting. They created economies of permanence which have lasted thousands of years.

In contrast, the globalization of today is based on limitless growth, limitless greed and a monoculture of the militaristic mind. GMO soya is invading and destroying the Amazon and palm oil is devastating the Indonesian rainforests, driving species and indigenous cultures to extinction, creating dispossession and disease. The colonial monoculture of the mind only sees the commodity that can be extracted. It turns forests into mono-cultures of commercial species like teak for timber and eucalyptus for pulp. They also turned agriculture into monocultures of commodities.

The human-nature symbiosis is expressed at its highest in the spice gardens of the Western Ghats, where forests and farming coexist. Manure and mulch from the forests replenished the fertility of the Areca nut and spice gardens. Each acre of a spice garden was allocated nine acres of Bettaland.¹ And the spice gardens themselves mimicked the forests in their biodiversity, three dimensionality, mutuality and synergy.

 

The spice gardens of the Western Ghats stand as sentinels on how biodiversity cultivates a biodiversity of the mind, and sustains circular biodiversity economies which are economies of permanence. After my Green Revolution study showed how monocultures do not produce more, in fact they destroy more, I started to do research to reflect biodiversity productivity of forests and farms, and changed the metric of one-dimensional ‘yield’ per acre of commodities in commercial forestry and Green Revolution agriculture.

My research over the last five decades has shown that the more biodiversity intensive a system is, the more it produces. It was the spice gardens of the Western Ghats, the Baranaja of the Himalaya, the Navdanya fields, which I first witnessed in the semi-arid Deccan that both inspired and informed me.²

 

Black Pepper is native to the Western Ghats.³‘In Kerala, its land of origin, pepper is still an auspicious offering at Kodungalloor Bhagavathi temple near the ancient seaport of Muziris, and green peppercorns are offered at the shrine of Vavar, Lord Ayyappan’s Muslim friend, at Sabarimala.’⁴ We have grown and used black pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, cardamom for thousands of years for health and culinary purposes. In the 4th century BC, Sushruta refers to our healing plants. Charaka (1st century) and Susruta II (2nd century) referenced spices and herbs for healing purposes.⁵

The biodiversity of the Western Ghats is at the heart of understanding our biodiversity based health systems like Ayurveda and Agroecology. The biodiversity wealth of the Western Ghats helps us understand how India was historically so wealthy, how we were leaders in international trade, and how the spices of the Western Ghats became the reason for colonialism, created poverty in our country, and resulted in the contemporary health and ecological disasters faced by the Western Ghats.

The wealth of spices led historians and traders to refer to the Western Ghats as the Pepper Queen. The history of the world is a history of spices. The spice trade is recorded in antiquity. The Greeks used pepper in the fourth century, and the early Roman Empire was trading in pepper in 30 BCE after the conquest of Egypt. The Romans sent a fleet of around 120 ships on an annual trip to India and back.⁶ Pliny complains in his Natural History how much Roman wealth was being transferred to India. ‘There is no year in which India does not drain the Roman Empire of 50 million sesterces.’⁷

 

The crusades were triggered by the blocking of the spice routes and silk routes by the Turko-Persian Seljuk Empire c. 1090. After the crusades, trade patterns changed. European traders started to take over. Black pepper started to play an important role in the European economy. At one point in the 1300s, when tariffs were at their highest, a pound of nutmeg in Europe cost seven fattened oxen. Pepper was more than its weight in gold.⁸ Pepper was ‘black gold’, and the Europeans wanted to control it. Spices were the main driver for colonization.

The first to set sail to India with a letter patent was Christopher Columbus. He was seeking a quicker route to India, and ‘discovered’ America on the way. He called the indigenous people he found in the turtle island ‘Indians’ and the red chillies became pepper. Four years later Vasco da Gama came to India via the Cape. In 1600, the Dutch and the British created their East India Company to control the trade in spices.

And having conquered India through the Battle of Plassey, the British started to drain India of its wealth. Instead of paying for pepper in gold and silver as Europeans had to do before colonialism, the British started to extract taxes (lagaan) from the peasants of India, bought pepper with this blood money, pushed 60 million Indians to starvation, and according to economist Utsa Patnaik, transferred $ 45 trillion to England.⁹

 

The British did not merely take control over the spice trade, they also enclosed the forests. By the beginning of 1800, Bombay was fast becoming the centre of British commercial activity. The colonial power wanted to exploit the natural wealth of the Western Ghats to build ships for the British Navy. However, the community ownership of natural resources proved a hurdle. Hence in 1830, the British decided to assume ownership of forest in Uttara Kannada, then North Canara.

In 1867, forest laws were passed for the reservation of forest tracts – the commercialization of forest use had begun. The centuries-old sustained self-reliant economy came under threat. Forests were viewed as a source of raw material to provide timber to centres like Bombay and London.

Reserved forest extended right upto the doorstep in many settlements; the forest department jealously guarded its rights in these forests and from 1902 to 1904 the local people were prohibited from even collecting dry leaves for manure from these forests. The supply of green manure and fodder became scarce for agriculture due to restrictions on free access to forests.

By 1910, the British started to control 90% of the forests. All this led to a decline in agriculture, as stated in the representations made by the local agriculturists associations to the government. A sense of alienation and grievance was seen among all sections of the local population since 1800; the forest issue rallied a majority of the people on a sustained and organized basis. Their efforts to reclaim the forest commons led to passive resistance popularly known as ‘Raita Koota’ (farmers or peasants meet), which continued from 1831 to 1837. Eventually this opposition was crushed with the help of the army.

Among the earliest organized expressions of grievance about forest administration was the convening of the Kanada Vanadukha Nivarini Sabha (Kanara Conference on Forest Grievances) in 1884 and 1887 in Sirsi. In 1885 the farmers of Sirsi and Yellapur taluks appealed to the Governor, Bombay Presidency, emphasizing the justification for the ancient rights of the people to collect forest produce like fuel, fodder and dry leaves for agricultural activities.

 

There is a record of such conferences on forest grievances being held again in 1916 and 1917 at Bilgi in Uttara Kannada. A letter from Commissioner of the Southern Division to the Collector of Karwar, dated 7 January 1922 states: ‘If civil disobedience is started anywhere in the Southern Division, it will be in Kanara… a probable form of it would be the incitement of lower castes to break the forest laws.’

The conflict finally led to a revolt people. A ‘jungle satyagraha’ was launched on 4 August 1930 in a broad section of villages in Sirsi, Siddapur and Yellapur taluks. The demand of the people was ‘forestry in support of agriculture.’ This movement gained momentum and ultimately merged with the broader struggled for independence.

In 1930, while Gandhi was undertaking the Salt Satyagraha against the British salt laws, in the Himalaya and in Western Ghats people started ‘forest satyagrahas’ against the enclosures of the forest, which had traditionally been managed as village commons. Contrary to Garett Hardins essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, the community managed forests were rich.¹⁰

 

Colonial conflicts over forest resources, whether in the Western Ghats or in the Himalayas were primarily conflicts between the sustenance economy associated with local management of forest resource for need, and the market economy associated with non local management by the British government based on extraction of timber and profits.

In the post-colonial period, with the collapse of foreign rule, these conflicts were expected to be more effectively resolved. However, state planned industrialization created more intensive and extensive demand for raw materials for forest based industry. These demands posed a new threat to the survival of local village communities through ecological destabilization. A new level of conflict thus arose between the demands of nature’s economy as the basis of the survival economy and the demand for raw materials for the commercial/industrial economy.

As the manipulation of forest ecosystems intensified to suit the needs of forest based industry, the ecological impact of forest exploitation on the lives of people increased. The post-colonial period has thus been associated with a new kind of forest struggle based on the ecological imperative of conservation of biodiversity to provide needs for food, fodder, fertilizer and fuel and prevent pandemics, floods and ecological disasters.

The Mysore Paper Mills were set up in Bhadravati in 1939 and the West Coast Paper Mills at Dandeli in 1955. Harihar Poly Fibres was set up in 1972. At the time of their establishment, these industries entered into an agreement with the forest department for the supply of raw material for periods ranging from five to thirty year. Thus bamboo, which had been declared a weed in the early colonial period when teak was the most favoured species, became an important raw material for the pulp and paper industry.

 

It was believed that bamboo was available in unlimited supply and was offered practically free of cost at low rate like Re 1.00 per tone to the industry. However, the project yields never materialized. Thus the West Coast Paper Mills in Karnataka was expected to harvest 150.000 tones a year from its concessional area in North Karnataka. However, the realized harvest has averaged only 40.000 per annum from this area, and the mill has had to obtain its raw material requirement from places as distant as Arunachal Pradesh.

As natural forest resource dwindled, large tracts of natural forests were clear-felled to plant eucalyptus monocultures to feed the plup and paper industry. The spread of eucalyptus plantations in the sixties was linked with the destruction of conventional raw material like bamboo stocks. The pulpwood famine led to the need for a quick growing pulpwood species. To bridge this gap, rich tropical forest of the Western Ghat were clear-felled to plant eucalyptus. The destruction of highly productive natural forests was justified on the ground of ‘improving the productivity’ of the site, a blindness that I identified as a ‘monoculture of the mind’, which destroyed biological and ecological productivity for pseudo productivity of extractivism and commerce.

The conversion of the shrinking natural forests to pulp-wood plantations led to further erosion of biomass needed for fuel, fodder, fertilizer, etc. Monoculture plantations of species like eucalyptus and pine also severely undermined the essential ecological processes in mountain catchments like the Himalayas and the West Ghats, destabilizing the hydrological balance of streams and rivers. The ecological impact of deforestation and the conversion of natural forests to industrial plantations generated a new level of conflict between the industrial and commercial economy, and nature’s economy of ecological processes.

The forest cover in Uttara Kannada decreased from 81% in 1952 to 20%in 1982-83, with large tracts lost to dams and mines. Western Ghats, considered one of the global biodiversity hotspots, has lost forest cover to the tune of 33,579 square km, or 35.3% of the total forest over the last nine decades, indicating that it represents a vulnerable ecosystem, reveals the latest findings by the Indian Space Research Organization. Fifty per cent of the forest loss is for commercial plantations.¹¹

 

In the 1970s the movements to protect native forests and community rights re-emerged as Chipko in the Himalaya, a movement I was privileged to be part of as a volunteer. In the 1980s, inspired by Chipko, Pandurang Hegde started Appiko in the Western Ghats.¹²

The women-led Chipko movement started after the 1972 Alaknanda disaster caused by logging in the Alaknanda valley. Women connected the deforestation to landslides and flooding. As they pointed out, the primary products of the forest were not timber and revenue, but soil and water. Forests left standing to protect the fragile Himalayan slopes provide more to the economy than when they are extracted as dead timber.

It took the 1978 Uttarkashi disaster for the government to recognize that the women were right when it had to spend much more on flood relief than the revenues received through timber extraction. In 1981, in response to the Chipko movement, logging was banned above 1000 km in the Garhwal Himalaya.

 

With climate change, extreme events will only increase, floods will increase as will draughts. Protecting the forests and biodiversity of the Western Ghats is not just necessary to protect the Ghats. It is also necessary to prevent draught in draught prone peninsular India.¹³ Forests and biodiversity are the protectors from floods in the mountain regions of the Himalaya and Western Ghats. The Western Ghats receive heavy monsoon rain that sustains the rich biodiversity. And biodiversity sustains and protects life.

However, as deforestation destroys natures protection, floods are becoming an annual nightmare in many parts of southern and western India in regions in the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala which were not considered flood prone. During floods and landslides in August 2019, two villages were completely destroyed killing several people, while a year earlier Kerala saw its worst floods in a century.¹⁴

In 2018, floods killed 483 people in Kerala, causing damages of Rs 40,000 crore. In 2019,Kerala floods killed 212 people, impacted two lakh. A total of 61 people were killed and seven lakh displaced due to the 2019floods in Karnataka.¹⁵

 

As deforestation for a greed based model of development has increased, new pandemics have spread and ecological destruction has increased, threatening life. New diseases like Corona, Sars, Mers, Ebola are being created because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient food and agriculture model is invading the ecological habitat of other species and manipulating animals and plants with no respect for their integrity and health. The illusion of the earth and her beings as raw material to be exploited for profits is creating one world connected through disease.

In the Western Ghats the Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) is a highly pathogenic virus that spread from monkeys to humans through virus infected ticks as deforestation shrunk the forest habitat of monkeys. ‘The KFD virus is a pathogen that has long existed as part of an established ecosystem in South Kanara. Human modification of that ecosystem through deforestation caused the epidemic occurrence of the disease.’¹⁶ The incidence has increased annually over the last two decades and has expanded rapidly beyond its original foci of the Kyasanur Forest area of Karnataka state in recent years.¹⁷ The destruction of forests is an invitation to new pandemics. It is also a recipe for floods.

In 1982, the Ministry of Environment invited us to do a study on the impact of ecological impact of limestone mining in the Doon Valley. On the basis of our study, in 1983, the Supreme Court stopped limestone mining in Doon Valley, recognizing that the limestone left in the mountains to conserve water in its aquifers contributed more to the economy than the limestone extracted through mining on the basis of the ecological impact study done by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology for the Ministry of Environment.

The Supreme Court ruled that Article 21 of the Constitution which states, ‘Protection of life and personal liberty – No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty’, requires that when commerce destroys ecosystems and ecological processes on which life depends, commerce must stop, because the continuity of life through protection of the vital processes of nature is a constitutional obligation.

 

This ruling based on Article 21 of our Constitution needs to now be applied to the ecological functions of the rich biodiversity of the Western Ghats. It is also an ethical and civilizational obligation. We talk of being members of Vasudhaiva Kutumkam, One Earth Family, with diverse species and cultures.

The cultures of the Western Ghats have lived as an Earth Family over centuries, protected the biodiversity wealth and also making India the richest country pre colonialism because of the spice trade based on the rich biodiversity.

The foyer of the Central Ministry of Environment declares Prakriti Rakshati Rakshita (Nature Protects when Protected). It is time to transform this decoration into policy, and protect our biodiversity and ecological civilization.

 

Footnotes:

1.https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/84ae/aa41414eee5cb08d4ffce689d1080e27e802.pdf

2. Vandana Shiva, Monoculture of the Mind. Natraj, Dehra Dun, 1993;Vandana Shiva et al, Biodiversity Based Productivity. Navdanya, Delhi, 2006

3. Colleen Taylor Sen, Food Culture in India: Food Culture around the world. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, 2004, p. 58. Nancy J. Hajeski, National Geographic Complete Guide to Herbs and Spices: Remedies, Seasonings, and Ingredients to Improve Your Health and Enhance Your Life. National Geographic Books, 2016, p. 236.

4. https://heritage-india.com/black-pepper-flavour-centuries/

5. https://www.mccormickscienceinstitute.com/resources/history-of-spices

6. Gary K. Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade. Routledge, New York, 2001, p. 25.

7. The Natural History of Pliny: Pliny the Elder. Translated by John Bostock and H.T. Riley. Taylor and Francis, London, 1855.

8. Peter Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession. John Wiley & Sons, NJ, 2004.

9. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/agrarian-and-other-histories/9789382381952 https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html

10. Vandana Shiva et. al., Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts Over Natural Resources in India. UNU and Sage, New Delhi, 1991.

11. https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/news/state/western-ghats-lost-35-of-forest-in-90-years/articleshow/51030220.cms

12. Vandana Shiva et al, 1991, op. cit. fn. 10.

13. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007% 2F978-981-13-0280-0

14. https://qz.com/india/1708552/destruction-of-indias-western-ghats-causing-devastating-floods/

15. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/senseless-alterations-to-western-ghats-behind-floods-landslips-says-iiscs-tv-ramachandra/article29090535.ece

16. https://www.deccanherald.com/state/ deforestation-behind-kfd-713955.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513490/

17.https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927939v1.full