Predicaments of power and nature in India: An introduction (original) (raw)

Abstract

Political leaders and the media, corporations and popular movements, are all engaged with issues of how to strike a balance with nature more than ever before. Climate change and the loss of biological diversity, the threat of nuclear contamination and the issues of wider ecological security of the underprivileged, are all among the issues that jostle for attention. 1 With recent regime-shifts on the global political arena, commitments that were earlier out of sight are now plausible. However, while time was running short, partisan national interests took centre stage. This was starkly evident in the run up to the Copenhagen United Nations Convention on Climate Change in December 2009. The prospects for a global commitment on how best to reduce greenhouse gases were hard to reach at Copenhagen. This is not the fi rst time in human history that people have foreseen or feared such threats to human life. The aftermath of the Second World War saw public protests that led to early restraints on nuclear tests in the atmosphere and in the ocean. 2 In 1962, the publication of Silent Spring led to a larger awareness of more unseen threats such as the ecological and health impacts of chemical pesticides. 3 A decade later, the nations of the world met at Stockholm, where the book by the economist Barbara Ward and the geneticist, Rene Dubois, set the tone. It was called Only One Earth. Perhaps it is true that in this new century, the scale of the problems, as also the recognition of the need for action, has been without precedent. The predicament was summed up aptly by Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen. In a world where the older industrialised nations are now uneasily sharing space with newly emergent powers. A scholar of the ozone layer, Crutzen placed the issues of its depletion and attempts to reverse that process in a larger perspective. With regard to predicting the future, we are in terra incognita (unknown lands). In a desperate act to fi nd a technical solution to globally rising temperatures, he has calculated an alternative way of cooling the earth through geo-engineering. It would take one to two million tons of sulphate aerosols to be sent up in the

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (65)

  1. On climate change see Lovelock 2006, and the even more dire Lovelock 2009. On species extinctions, Terborgh 1999.
  2. The role of science in the campaign for information on nuclear tests is told in Commoner 1971, revised second edition 1972.
  3. Paul Crutzen. 2009. Keynote speech at the First World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen. 4 August 2009.
  4. For a provocative view of Asia's rise see the Singapore diplomat and scholar, Mahbubani 2007. The best overview of India since 1947 is Guha 2007a.
  5. One way to track these views and debates is via the wirings of the deeply infl uential environmentalist the late, Anil Agarwal; see CSE 2007.
  6. For other critical discussions, see Sen 2006. For instances of recent informed public interventions, see also Kashwan 2007; Wani 2009; and Dharmadhikari 2009.
  7. For recent literature on human-nature relations and environmental politics, see Elvin 2006; and Shapiro 2001.
  8. On biology and conservation, see Gadgil 2001, and the recently published collection mainly on energy and technology, Ravi Rajan 2009. On animal conservation, see Divyabhanusinh 2008. On urban planning see Guha 2007b (http://www.thehindu.com/mag/2007/01/21/ stories/2007012100100300.htm), and on ideas of tribals and modernity see Guha 2001.
  9. For studies of manifestation of nation and nationalism in nature, see Cederlöf & Sivaramakrishnan 2005. For an anthology with a different perspective see Prasad 2008.
  10. Fresh insights are provided by the oral fi eld work of Annu Jalais in the Sunderbans, India, in Jalais 2009.
  11. Upcoming studies provide a critical view of a synoptic understanding of scientifi c forestry. Hölzl forthcoming 2010. Ravi Rajan 2006. Richard Hölzl's work can be usefully read against the study by Ravi Rajan. See also Singh 1998; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Vasan 2006. For a synthesis across continents see McNeill et al. In press.
  12. Guha and Gadgil 2001. For a recent reappraisal especially for the inter connections of social fabric, agrarian change and forest cover, see Chaudhuri 2008; Linkenbach 2007; Dangwal 2009.
  13. For a regional comparison, see Forsyth and Walker 2008; Goodall et al. 2007; Nuttall 1998.
  14. Nag (2008) is probably the fi rst full length work to place dearth related to natural cycles (the fl owering of bamboo) at the centre of a century long social history of a region.
  15. Studies bringing in legal aspects of environmental and natural resource confl icts have begun to appear also in other fi elds, in addition to the well researched forest tracts. See, for example, Subramanian 2009; Hoeppe 2007; Baviskar 2007. See also Cederlöf 2008; Guha 1989, Revised edition with fresh introduction 2009; Rangarajan 1996; Saikia 2005.
  16. Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (http://www.bom.gov. au/climate/ahead/ENSO-summary.shtml), and United States Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http:// www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090709\_elnino.html).
  17. The remaking of global ecology via empire is discussed by Beinart and Hughes 2007; Grove 1996; Williams 2003. REFERENCES
  18. Baviskar, A. (ed.). 2007. Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
  19. Beinart, W. and L. Hughes. 2007. Environment and empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  20. Cederlöf, G. 2008. Landscapes and the law: Environmental Politics, Regional Predicaments of power and nature in India / 225
  21. Downloaded free from http://www.conservationandsociety.org on Thursday, August 05, 2010, IP: 71.111.187.206] Histories, and Contests over Nature. Permanent Black.
  22. Cederlöf, G. and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.). 2005. Ecological nationalisms: Nature, livelihoods, and identities in South Asia. New Delhi: Permanent Black; Seattle: University of Washington Press (2006).
  23. Chaudhuri, B.B. 2008. The history of science and civilisation in India, Volume 8, Part 2. Peasant history of late pre-colonial and colonial India. Delhi: Pearson Longman.
  24. Commoner, B. 1971. The closing circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. Revised second edition, 1972. New York: Random House.
  25. CSE. 2007. The Anil Agarwal Reader. Volumes 1 to 3. Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.
  26. Dangwal, D.D. 2009. Himalayan degradation: Colonial Forestry and Environmental Change in India. New Delhi: Foundation Books/ Cambridge University Press.
  27. Dharmadhikari, S. 2009. Mountains of concrete: Dam Building in the Himalayas. Delhi: SANDRP.
  28. Divyabhanusinh (ed.). 2008. The lions of India. Ranikhet: Black Kite.
  29. Elvin, M. 2006. The retreat of elephants: An environmental history of China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  30. Forsyth, T. and A. Walker. 2008. Forest guardians, forest destroyers: The politics of environmental knowledge in Northern Thailand. Seattle: Washington University Press.
  31. Gadgil, M. 2001. Ecological journeys: The science and politics of conservation in India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
  32. Goodall, H., P. Rosier and S. Washington (eds.). 2007. Echoes from the poisoned well: Global memories of environmental injustice. Lanham: Lexington Books.
  33. Grove, R. 1996. Green imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  34. Guha, R. 1989. The unquiet woods: Ecological change and peasant resistance in the Himalaya. Revised edition with fresh introduction 2009. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  35. Guha, R. 2001. Savaging the civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  36. Guha, R. 2007a. India after Gandhi: The history of the world's largest democracy. Delhi: Picador.
  37. Guha, R. 2007b. Scottish internationalist. The Sunday Hindu 21 January 2007. http://www.thehindu.com/mag/2007/01/21/stories/2007012100100300.
  38. htm Guha, R. and M. Gadgil. 2001. The use and abuse of nature: Omnibus of this fi ssured land and ecology and equity. Oxford University Press.
  39. Hoeppe, G. 2007. Conversations on the beach: Fishermen's knowledge, metaphor and environmental change in south India. New York: Berghahn Books.
  40. Hölzl, R. Forthcoming 2010. Forest crimes and the advent of scientifi c forestry in preindustrial Germany. In: Common ground, converging gazes: Integrating the social and environmental in history (eds. Massard- Guilbaud, G. and S. Mosley). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.
  41. Jalais, A. 2009. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. Delhi: Routledge.
  42. Kashwan, R. (ed.). 2007. The caterpillar and the mahua fl ower: Tremors in India's mining fi elds. Mumbai: Jaico.
  43. Lear, L. 1997. Rachel Carson: Witness for nature. New York: Henry Holt.
  44. Linkenbach, A. 2007. Forest futures: Global representations and ground realities in the Himalayas. Permanent Black.
  45. Lovelock, J. 2006. The revenge of Gaia: Earth's climate crisis and the fate of humanity. London: Basic Books.
  46. Lovelock, J. 2009. The vanishing face of Gaia: A fi nal warning. London: Allen Lane.
  47. Mahbubani, K. 2007. The new Asian hemisphere: The irresistible shift of power to the East. New York: Public Affairs.
  48. McNeill, J. 2000. Something new under the sun: An environmental history of the twentieth-century world. London: Penguin Allen Lane.
  49. McNeill, J., J.A. Padua and M. Rangarajan (eds.). In press. Environmental history: As if nature existed. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  50. Nag, S. 2008. Pied pipers in north-east India: Bamboo-fl owers, rat-famine and the politics of philanthropy (1881-2007). Delhi: Manohar.
  51. Nuttall, M. 1998. Protecting the Artic: Indigenous peoples and cultural survival: studies in environmental anthropology. Volume 3. New York: Hardwood Academic Publishers.
  52. Prasad, A. (ed.). 2008. Environment, development and society in contemporary India: An introduction. Delhi: Macmillan.
  53. Rangarajan, M. 1996. Fencing the forest: Conservation and ecological change in India's Central Provinces, 1860-1914. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  54. Ravi Rajan, S. (ed.). 2009. Amulya Reddy: Citizen scientist. Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan.
  55. Ravi Rajan, S. 2006. Modernizing nature: Forestry and imperial eco- development 1800-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  56. Saikia, A. 2005. Jungles, reserves, wildlife: A history of forests in Assam. Guwahati: Wildlife Areas Development and Welfare Trust Assam.
  57. Sen, A. 2006. The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, culture and identity. Delhi: Penguin.
  58. Shapiro, J. 2001. Mao's war against nature: Politics and the environment in revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  59. Singh, C. 1998. Natural premises: Ecology and peasant life in the western Himalaya, 1800-1950. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  60. Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern forests: Statemaking and environmental change in colonial eastern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  61. Subramanian, A. 2009. Shorelines: Space and rights in south India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  62. Terborgh, J. 1999. Requiem for nature. Washington, DC: Island Press.
  63. Vasan, S. 2006. Living with diversity: Forestry institutions in the western Himalaya. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
  64. Wani, M. 2009. Nought without cause. Pune: Global Forest Coalition.
  65. Williams, M. 2003. Deforesting the earth: From prehistory to global crisis. Chicago: Chicago University Press.