Final Ecosystem Book.pdf

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

DHRUBAJYOTI GHOSH

Published by


NIMBY BOOKS NIMBY BOOKS is an initiative by Civil Society magazine and an imprint of Content Services & Publishing Pvt Ltd D- 26 (Basement), South Extension, Part 2, New Delhi - 110049 Text © Dhrubajyoti Ghosh

First published in 2014 by Nimby Books an imprint of Content Services & Publishing Pvt Ltd

Cover design: Dhrubajyoti Ghosh and Amit Roy Layout design: Virender Chauhan Illustrations: Amit Roy Maps: Avijit Ghosh Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Mailing Address D- 26 (Basement), South Extension, Part 2, New Delhi - 110049 Phones: 91(011) 46033825 and 91-9811787772 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.civilsocietyonline.com ISBN: 978-81-906570-4-4 Printed at Samrat Offset This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reveiws) may be made without written permission of the publishers.


To my father: Late Sudhendu Kumar Ghosh To my teacher: Late Prof Richard Meier To my friend: Shri Soumyanath Mallick

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Foreword A clean story Anupam Mishra All cities struggle to dispose of their wastes. The rich cities of the world have over time found technological fixes for processing sewage and reusing it. It has generally come to be believed that distributed solutions work best: deal with sewage where it is generated instead of dumping it in lakes and rivers. But urbanisation is a process. Cities take their time to find their way. The first stage of this growth is often defined by shortcuts. The nearest waterbody will often be the first choice for dumping sewage and little thought is given to sustainability. At first the waterbody seems to work as a sink. Soon the limit is reached and after that point the sewage destroys the life sustained in that waterbody. But there are also cities in the developing world that have found low-cost solutions based on local traditional knowledge. Dhrubajyoti Ghosh has done frontiers work in studying how Kolkata depends on a network of fisheries to cleanse its sewage before it flows into the river Kulti. The fisheries serve as a natural treatment plant. They take waste and transform it into food in the form of fish which Bengalis love. This is a unique arrangement managed brilliantly over a hundred years by fishermen, who, without any formal training, have shown a deep and intuitive understanding of the science of recycling. i

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Ghosh is an engineer by training. He has also worked for the West Bengal government. But despite his background he has been able to appreciate the traditional system at work in the fringes of Kolkata. It is thanks to Ghosh that Kolkata's fisheries have come to be internationally acknowledged as a waste-to-food model and an urban solution. Most importantly, Ghosh has been able to recognise the science in the traditional knowledge of the fishermen. Ghosh's book emphasises that in an age when sustainability is the big challenge for mankind, it is necessary to connect with knowledge systems that don't seem to conform to the precepts of modern science. For urban managers in the developing world this is all the more important because faced with the onrush of urbanisation they need to be innovative and creative in their search for solutions. The fisheries of Kolkata have often come perilously close to being turned into real estate. It would be a huge loss if that were to happen. No sewage treatment facility can ever do what the fisheries do. Ghosh tells their dramatic story and connects it to the bigger debate over the relevance of traditional knowledge in the modern world.

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Preface “That alone is a Science which studies experience.” Swami Ranganathananda in introduction to Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

My journey into the field of ecology began during the midseventies of the last century, when I was a doctoral researcher. I was working as an engineer in the government sector where I served for more than 30 years. My important tasks during this long journey included sanctioning casual leave for the subordinates and, having gained seniority automatically, ritually attending State Plan meetings and such like. The main attraction was the assured salary at the end of the month. In between, I had opportunity to closely observe a number of ecosystems. On rare occasions, I had to draft policy papers on environmental issues, which largely remain unimplemented. Historically, my student life was witness to a period of global turmoil. Students were protesting against the establishment in many places – France, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and in my own country, India. They were trying to make a point. Like many others, this had an impact on my ethical anchor. I wanted to enquire into the complex maze of interrelationships that lay hidden below the erratic expressions of the social. The result of the first few years of this inquiry was my doctoral dissertation in ecology. That was in the late seventies.

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Two common human qualities have never ceased to amaze me throughout my uneventful life: selflessness and hypocrisy. This book is also the result of these two provoking horizons. Being an ordinary government servant, my world of reading remains untidy and patently incomplete. I admit with no hesitation that my attachment with academics has at best been peripheral. The intellectual content of this book will reflect all these limitations. Even so, I thought I should write my experience of assimilating the brilliant subject that Ecology is. It may be as an outsider, but someone honestly delving into the intermingled layers of interrelationships that are clouded, if not overcast, by make-believe stories of ‘achievement’ and ‘sustainability’. I worry that I might have pampered myself much too much, but then a reader has all the freedom to refuse to read.

Dhrubajyoti Ghosh March 2014

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CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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INTRODUCTION Where are we stumbling? To be an ecologist you need not be an ‘ecologist’ The bifurcated domains Ecological thinking: the enlightenment of the ordinary

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CHAPTER 1 Ecosystems and ecology: old theories and new frontiers Going beyond the fences Ecological processes and thereafter: an experiential synthesis Adaptive strategy in ecosystem management Using common-sense in ecosystem management Use of narratives in ecosystem discourses

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CHAPTER 2 On projects in natural resource conservation Ecological assessment: past and present Review of some natural resource management projects Lessons from irrigated ecosystems Exploiting natural resources in the post-colonial Plants, shoots and leaves: mobilising the obscure Fatal exclusions and the disappearing identity

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CHAPTER 3 Improvisation and eligibility in ecosystem management Origin of ecology and ecosystem management Importance of ecological history Ecosystem improvisation: a festival of the invisibles On eligibility, hegemony and cognitive apartheid

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CHAPTER 4 Relating local practices to sustainability Sustained impoverishment and living sustainably Rag-pickers and re-use: the ‘filthy pigs’ of the poorer cities The East Kolkata wetlands and municipal wastewater A silent disconnect and de-suffocating agriculture

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CHAPTER 5 Re-assembling the pedagogy: practice-theory-practice Ecology, ecosystem management and all of us Writing better descriptions: the unmarked triggers Patterns: how things relate Priority: taking public decisions privately Worldview: re-explaining controversy Understanding waste Taking conversations on board On ecological practice and securing an ethical anchor

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POSTSCRIPT

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

About the author More than thirty years ago, it was not usual for a civil engineer in India to get a PhD in the field of ecology. Dhrubajyoti Ghosh did so. Thereafter, in 1990, he was included in the United Nations’ Roll of Honour for conserving a wetland which redefined Kolkata. Ghosh is also one of the earliest to become an Ashoka Fellow as a social entrepreneur. He has been a public servant for more than thirty years, bridging the gap between policy and practice. Ghosh was associated with two of the largest international environmental NGOs at the management level. He is simultaneously a grass roots person and understands success and failure across these spheres. Ghosh writes in a simple and straightforward way about how people manage ecosystems in their daily lives, recognise patterns and learn as they go along. The wealth of their knowledge is difficult to match. In fact in their successes lie the secrets to efficient management of biodiversity. Ecology, after this book is read, will not be the same again for a reader. He will be ready to open up dialogue with himself, with all others who are initiated, and collectively urge for a new pedagogy for the ecologically challenged.

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Introduction

Setting the pace As a subjective tool, particularly in the global South, ecosystem management has a marginal requisition. The planners (largely taken over by the economists), policy writers or those who plant business ideas on natural resources on behalf of international donors, and most blatantly local players, all of them intrinsically ignore ecosystem management as an avoidable idiom to punctuate their negotiations. Ecosystem management thus, has a feeble constituency in the corridors of decision-making. On the other hand, the idea of ecosystem management emphatically exists as a praxis. Forest-dwellers, farmers, forest dependent communities, fishers – all the toilers upon the earth – have been managing their ecosystems in varying degrees. Should this specialised knowledge be termed as ‘ecosystem management’? The author has no firm answer to this question. Formal branches of science, even collectively, cannot answer the ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) problems of ecology. These are the ones related to conservation of biodiversity, damage to agricultural ecosystems or, more recently, climate change. For these problems, ‘the era of management is over’ (Ludwig, 2001). Indeed, as Einstein said, ‘We cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.’ 1



Yet, people have been managing ecosystems using their cognitive ability, carefully honed skills, creativity and innovative instincts. We are trying to know about these knowledge systems. These people are ecosystem managers and administrators in their own way. I have, timidly though, retained the existing term, for not having been able to suggest any better alternative to this. I shall continue to use the term ecosystem management as a rigorous subject, acknowledging its semantic limitations. Ecology and ecosystem management will at least have one more decade of exploratory time to set its theoretical bearings right. Authors like me will come and disappear in this unregulated market of scientism.

Where are we stumbling? We learn when we stumble. That has been happening since antiquity. In the early 1920s, fishermen in the wetlands to the east of Kolkata, India, lost their livelihood as there was no more water coming through the creek connected to the Bay of Bengal (Ghosh and Sen, 1987). Faced with this challenge they began to think. Subsequently, they introduced wastewater flowing out of the metropolitan city into the wetlands and sustained their livelihood, and unknowingly changed the history of the city of Kolkata. Learning, teaching or constructing pedagogy become difficult when these activities have to face opposing worldviews head on. Perhaps that is where we stumble most frequently. For example, ecologists are generally comfortable discussing forest conservation. An established theory of saving the forest biodiversity is the ‘fortress’ approach which was introduced in forest conservation 2


INTRODUCTION

(Siurua, 2006)1. As the name suggests, forests are to become ‘fortresses’ and humans (forest-dwellers and forest-dependent communities), are to stay away. No compromise, said the learned stewards, whereas loggers seemed to enjoy perpetual access for felling, with no permissible limits specified (Simsik, 2002). Researchers in indigenous communities easily know that forestdwellers in many places have age-old practices of replacing one fallen tree with a 100 new saplings. In the course of the last five years, announcements have been made for 24 power plants (including a nuclear power plant2) to be set up in two districts along the south-west coast of the state of Maharashtra, in India, in a narrow width of less than 20km and a Parineeta Dandekar

1. This approach originally found support among US ‘cult of wilderness’ enthusiasts (including conventional large NGOs such as the Sierra Club) and biologists/ ecologists who believe in ‘preserving the remnants of natural spaces outside the purview of the market’ (Martinez-Alier, 2002). 2. This nuclear plant is slated to be the largest in the world. For a better idea, see film Konkanchi Mega Vaat by Kurush Canteenwala, accessible at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg0Owt6HuN8

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Parineeta Dandekar

Sacred groves of Gudaghe Panderi, where power plants are planned to be built.

stretch of about 140km. This is a clear case of confrontation where the growth-centric worldview overruns the ecological worldview. Putting these sorts of mutually opposed happenings – together in a continuum – is another book writing project. But even this small list is indicative enough of the inconsistent base material whereupon the knowledge of ecology and ecosystem management is constructed. We need a robust pedagogy that can withstand the questions and will itself pose problems instead of waiting for them to be raised. The paradigm of ecology and ecosystem management will have to come down from its eminent domain and embrace the vulnerable. It has to become the recipe for the commons so that they can live better. That must be the promise of this historically embedded knowledge. Ecosystem management will have to be a pedagogy of the vulnerable, as much as for the vulnerable. It will 4


INTRODUCTION

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have to tirelessly bring together the components of knowledge, remembering always to overcome the temptation of certainty3 (Maturana and Varela, 1988).

TEMPTATIONS OF CERTAINTY

We are constantly avoiding an elementary question. What will be the impact on our ecosystem earth of the growing population of the relatively poor and exponentially growing consumption of the relatively rich? A reminder: we do not have endlessly stretchable resources in nature. We are trying to avoid the consequence of this profligacy by being silent or positioning ourselves in some feeble hideouts. The colossal, however will invariably collapse. Nature will get rid of this bloated civilisation. We are stumbling. Stumbling for 3. Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela in their book ‘The Tree of Knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding’ point out: 'We tend to live in a world of certainty, of undoubted rock-ribbed perceptions, our conviction proves that things are the way we see them and there is no alternative to what we hold as true'. The permeation of this belief in the field of ecology can become a bane to exploratory thinking.

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INTRODUCTION

sure in managing the ecosystem earth and the component ecosystems, very large in number, where we are residents here or there. Throughout this book, merging theory and practice has remained the primary provocation for most of the enquiries and a reliable tool to understand the knowledge system. About failed practices, it is found that while good practices are important, it is equally crucial to examine the failures. The prevailing intellectual trend is to grab all good practices with gusto and showcase them. This, apparently, is to learn from them and expect replication. It doesn’t happen like that always. India did not see a second Chipko Movement4 inspite of the intense media attention that it received. The basic lesson that was missed by ecologists and citizens alike was that Chipko did not take place primarily out of environmental perspectives. Chipko may have produced a dozen environmental heroes and doctoral theses, but Chipko cannot be taken as the leitmotif of the environmental awareness of the Indian people. May be, lessons from failures deserve more space in ecosystem studies. It will be useful to go back to the perception of Juan Martinez-Alier, ‘the main thrust of this [environmentalism]…is not a sacred reverence for Nature but a material interest in the environment as a source and a requirement for livelihood; not so much a concern for today’s poor species and of future generations of humans as a concern for today’s poor humans. It has not the same ethical (and aesthetic) foundations of the cult of wilderness5. Its ethics derive from a demand for contemporary social justice among humans.’ 4. Emma Mawdsley’s article (‘After Chipko: from environment to region in Uttaranchal’ Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 25, No.4, pp.36-54) discuses this in detail. 5. The cult of wilderness is a term widely used by ecologist and others to refer to the emphasis placed on preservation of the remnants of pristine nature where possible, to preserve its natural balance.

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A new epistemology is waiting. A bifurcation point is not far off.

To be an ecologist you need not be an ‘ecologist’ I remember a number of years ago, during one of my trips abroad, as a member of an IUCN team, we were visiting a forest patch in Colombia. We met an elderly couple who were the stewards of that biosphere which they were managing well and knew the ecosystem thoroughly. On being questioned, they smilingly replied that they did not know the terms ‘ecology’ or ‘ecosystem management’ and they thought it is for us who attend meetings and conferences to know the meaning of such alien terms.

Colombia

In the part of the world I have been living for more than six decades, most people, don’t know the meaning of the terms ‘ecology’, ‘ecosystem approach’ or ‘ecosystem management’. The 8


INTRODUCTION

terms have been translated into regional languages, but no one uses them. But well-known historians have recorded outstanding instances of managing forests, water resources, urban space and landscapes. Using contemporary vocabulary, this country has had a number of ‘knowledge hubs’ in ecosystem management since ancient times. The fishing boats along the coast of peninsular India invariably have a headman or a navigator. These navigators can anticipate the movement of fish shoals approaching the boat, sudden changes in climate or assess the amount of risk expected in every voyage that takes place. None of these persons ever had any training in coastal hydrology, meteorology, marine ecology and wave dynamics. None of them know the term or have any learning experience in ‘ecology’. I have no confusion about the need for advanced scientific tools in ecosystem management selected appropriately. I do not believe either that the local people who have outstanding knowledge in ecosystem management, if we call them ‘natural ecologists’, are necessarily averse to the use of or fail to appreciate the benefits of advancement in science. The ‘navigators’ we mentioned earlier have happily described to me the advantages of the signal system that was available to provide direction for the movement of fish shoals. These signals were developed on the basis of continuous analysis of reflectiveness using satellite images. In a separate instance, a university teacher from West Bengal,6 who knew coastal geomorphology as her domain of specialisation, used to frequent the 6. State of India sharing its eastern border with Bangladesh and southern border with the Bay of Bengal, its coastal zone comprising the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta covered with mangrove forests called the Sundarbans.

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innumerable networks of tidal creeks in the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve. These creeks are to be carefully negotiated remembering that the water level recedes twice a day when boats cannot manoeuvre. Interestingly, the teacher found out a convenient method using properly chosen satellite imagery to guide the preferred time and water level of the boat’s movement. The navigator, a complete master of the network of forests and creeks was amazed at the assistance he could get from the map. ‘I do need this kind of technology for my safety on longer voyages’, he said. For most of the world there are ecosystems but no ‘ecosystem managers’ in the formal sense of its meaning. In India for example, except in protected areas, which are under forest authorities, there are no ecosystem managers designated. Ecosystems are nevertheless managed and administered, sometimes adequately, by local people who are engaged in one kind of livelihood or other through which they relate themselves to the ecosystems. This is the dominant pattern of ecosystem management in most parts of countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Thinkers who can rationally connect the task of management with the ecosystem features and participation of the dwellers have been able to construct stable pathways. For example, Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters (1993) outline five principles of effective ecosystem management. These principles are the following:  Human motivation and response should be included as part of

the system to be studied and managed. The shortsightedness and greed of human underlie difficulties in management of 10


INTRODUCTION

resources, although the difficulties may manifest themselves as biological problems of the stock under exploitation.  Action is needed before scientific consensus is achieved.

Additional scientific studies before taking action to curb human activities that cause global warming; ozone depletion, pollution, and depletion of fossil fuels is not required, the scientists said. Calls for additional research may be mere delaying tactics.  Scientists should be relied on to recognise problems, but not to

remedy them. The judgment of scientists is often heavily influenced by their training in their respective disciplines, but the most important issues involving resources and the environment involve interactions whose understanding must involve many disciplines. Scientists and their judgments are subject to political pressure, the ecologists point out.  Claims of sustainability must be distrusted. Since past resource

exploitation has seldom been sustainable, any new plan involving claims of sustainability should be suspected. The work of the Brundtland Commission is an oft-quoted example of continual references to sustainability that is to be achieved in an unspecified way. At one time, some of the world’s leading ecologists have claimed that the key to a sustainable biosphere is research on a long list of standard research topics in ecology. Such a claim that basic research will (in an unspecified way) lead to sustainable use of resources in the face of a growing human population may lead to a false complacency: instead of 11



addressing the problems of population growth and excessive use of resources, we may avoid such difficult issues by spending money on basic ecological research.  Uncertainty must be confronted. The authors point out that

‘Once we free ourselves from the illusion that science or technology (if lavishly funded) can provide a solution to resource or conservation problems, appropriate action becomes possible. Effective policies are possible under conditions of uncertainty, but they must take uncertainty into account. There is a well-developed theory of decision-making under uncertainty. In the present context, theoretical niceties are not required. Most principles of decision-making under uncertainty are simply common sense. A person or a group inclined to draw up plan for an ecosystem on the basis of these five guidelines will have to have sufficient placebased or situated knowledge and familiarity with the ecosystem. The person should be able to recognize pattern, prioritise, distinguish worldviews and additionally should remain alert about the morphological changes that take place within an ecosystem that finally generate waste. The group should be able to study the human motivation and the domain of greed. It will be preferable if the group is exposed to the theory of uncertainty and non-linearity. Most essentially the group will have to have the capability in understanding what is understanding. They have to think globally and act locally. Epistemological vigour is essential in carrying out anything that has been recommended in the five point recipe. But then, it is not conditional that the group will have to be conversant with the works of E. P. Odum, the father of theoretical ecology, or 12


INTRODUCTION

get misguided by reading Paul Ehlrich (Population Bomb, 1978)7. No substantial training in ecology is indeed called for. The new approach to ecology8 is beyond ‘ecology’. It tries to learn from practice, perceives complexity and polarisation, and finally manipulations of politics and business. All this is done to understand the web of life better. The five point guidelines for ecosystem management ignored the importance of enhancing ecosystem resilience or its ability to adapt. Ecosystems are ‘complex adaptive systems’ said Simon A. Levin (Levin, 1998). For him, ‘it is essential to determine the degree to which system features are determined by environmental conditions and the degree to which they are the result of selforganisation’. Self-organisation is important for understanding ecosystem and its management. What, however, Levin and many other ecologists have ignored or did not consider important enough is the role of the mind in ecosystem management9. Adaptive initiative of any life form is a conscious decision and 7. Ecologist and Professor of Population Studies (born in 1932), he is currently at Stanford University. Through his powerful writing, Ehlrich warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. The book has been criticised since its publishing for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions. The Ehlrichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because ‘it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future’. 8. The new ecology refers to a revolution in ecological science brought about in the 1970s by the realisation among ecologists that there is not, in fact, any natural tendency for ecosystems to develop towards a state of maturity (characterised by an increase in either biomass stabilisation, diversification of species, cohesiveness in plant and animal communities, and/or homeostatic regulation), as had long been supposed (Botkin, 1990 in Nadasdy, 2007; Scoones, 1999). This overturned the long-standing assumption that ecological systems are characterised by a single state of stable equilibrium to which ecosystems can return following a disturbance. Instead, ecosystem scientists came to realize that what they had conceived of as “the environment” must be viewed as a set of nested non-linear social-environmental systems of great complexity. The relations between various processes in such systems are so complex that the system’s overall behaviour is unpredictable. As a result, cause and effect are not easily linked. Indeed the notion of “cause” itself becomes highly problematic in complex non-linear systems. All this has profound implications for the practice of environmental management. 9. For a discussion of the role of mind in ecosystem management, refer Chapter 1.

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there inevitably is a role of the mind, which is to exercise reasoned choice to enhance resilience or display adaptability. The interrelationship between mind and nature constitutes one of the foremost questions of ecology as a theory and ecosystem management as a paradigm. This has not been so as yet. Conventional ecology has not seen reason enough in this quest that leads to enlightenment. Millions of ecosystem residents, who learn ecology through their living and selecting and livelihood priorities, have reasonable command in understanding how these unique relationships work. They are conversant with the crossings of intangibles and tangibles. Mainstream ecologists keep away from learning this intrinsic capability of the ecosystem residents in managing their lives, livelihoods and the place to which they identify themselves, the ecologists who are not ‘ecologists’. We need reassembling the pedagogy of ecology and ecosystem management. ‘Nothing has meaning except it be seen in some context…without context, words and actions have no meaning,’ Gregory Bateson, one of the leading thinkers of our time said this in his book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Bateson, 1979).

The bifurcated domains Stories of Mullah Nasruddin first appeared in the 16th century. Even today in many parts of the world, these stories are enjoyed by readers and listeners of all ages. The stories have an immortal appeal for South Asian people and are known for their clean humour, intelligent satire and deep understanding of the mind. In one of the stories, Mullah Nasruddin was busy in his courtyard, 14


INTRODUCTION

suffused in daylight, and seemed to be searching intently for something. ‘What are you searching for?’ asked his wife, who knew her husband profoundly. ‘I have lost my key’ replied a worried Nasruddin. ‘Where do you think you have lost it?’ ‘In the room’. ‘Then why are you not searching for it there?’ ‘I must search where there is sufficient light and not in the darkness of the room’, replied Mullah Nasruddin in his inimitable way.

Mullah Nasruddin

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Mullah Nasruddin cannot carry out his search where facilities are inadequate. He knows where he has lost the key. Mullah’s wife, a normal mind, could easily dismiss the facility fetish and wanted the search to be done where the key was lying. Mullah Nasruddin was determined. No matter what the correct step was, he would only search where the facility is adequate. It is difficult to come out with a clearer indication of the mainstream trend of how to decide where to carry out research. It is not where the solution lies, although eminently understandable, but where there is enough resource available. Exception to this trend is only in such places where there is the evidence of morality and ethics amongst the researchers, the changemakers. This divide explains the bifurcation in the cognitive advances in ecology or ecosystem management. If one has a problem to work unless facilities are adequate, the other relies upon the information that is grounded even if the search is difficult and without the brightness of facilities. Advances in learning and research which are predominantly ‘facility based’ are in the eminent domain. This is where the mainstream ecology has flourished. Learning and research continuously take place very near to the site where the research is a felt need of the victims of disorder, without being or hardly being facilitated. This is the dialectics of history. Therefore, in spite of incomplete knowledge of the diversity of living plants and animals and almost insignificant knowledge of the diversity of microbial world, the focus continues to limit the access of the forest dwellers and forest dependent communities, while the passage remains smooth for the loggers and intelligent scientists engaged in biopiracy10. 10. Nandy, Heerak and Ghosh Dhrubajyoti (2009): ‘How effective is the implementation of India’s Biodiversity Act? – A case study in Darjeeling’, unpublished paper presented in Seminar on ‘Emerging Issues in Biodiversity Management’ held in January 2009, Bharatidasan University, Tamil Nadu, India.

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INTRODUCTION

My practical introduction to the features of the eminent domain was chance directed. It was around the closing years of the last century when I was present to listen to a campaign to mitigate climate change. The venue was the conference hall of WWF (India) at Lodi Road, New Delhi. Experts from the UK were explaining climate change. I was a member of the Board of Trustees of WWF (India) at that time. After the well-crafted presentation I raised a simple question that occurred to me spontaneously. Why were the speakers silent about the necessity of changing the consumption pattern of the people in the West? Why not cap the energy consumption per person at 1990 levels? These two steps together would have had substantial impact on the rate of temperature rise. ‘Our countrymen do not like discussing controls on consumption,’ came the unhesitating reply. I do not know how correct he was but I applaud the speaker for his courage and intrinsic ability to ignore the ordinary. The speaker knew where the key was lying, but wanted to search for it in the courtyard with enough sunshine. Since then I started learning more and more about the eminent domain in ecology and ecosystem management, its strengths, weakness and possibilities, positive and negative. It is time that all of us understand our compulsions better. We will have to work within the framework of consumerism, globalisation, liberalisation and all dominant designs of financial capital, no matter what view one might have on them. In the course of the past four decades, tireless efforts have been made to preserve the interests of capitalism. Some of the best minds have been at work. Capital 17



holds them captive almost effortlessly. This collective thinking and continuous effort has provided enormous strength to the system where they belong. In fact the pattern of maintaining control has changed. The system of preserving capital at the expense of every other framework has become much more precise and mathematical, low in risk, increasingly lethal, incisive and robust. It can anticipate threats and has the ability to overcome them. In addition, the guardians of capital come up with new designs to form capital like hedge funds and the use of derivatives. Runaway consumerism, therefore, is here to stay. New generation ecology has this challenge in the forefront because consumerism can only decline with the decline of current civilization. Pious hopes of ending consumerism are unlikely to translate into reality. An end to consumerism is a utopian idea that will share museum space with other such ideas like a ‘classless society’ or ‘perfect competition’. This world will continue to remain carefully divided, tersely competitive and increasingly hierarchical. There will be diminishing camaraderie and expanding military might. Babies will continue to die of malnutrition. Concern for the ecological well-being of the world must above all be practical in accepting certain realities. Naïveté cannot be a strength in any ecological interpretation. And for new generation ecology, nature has no balance and, therefore, managing a biosphere is much more complicated than was ever imagined (Kaufmann, 1993, Kricher, 2012). As academic and ecologist, Daniel Botkin, has said: ‘We can no longer rely on the 19th century models for the analysis of the 21st century problems’. For example, ecology and ecologists (specially with roots in biology 18


INTRODUCTION

rather than anthropology), often lack the theoretical clarity to understand the significance of the study of local language, belief and symbols adequately. We shall move on to discuss one well-known example. In 1993 IUCN described the state of the environment in Laos and unambiguously stated that no conservation practices existed (IUCN was a part of a World Bank-led consortium that was funding Nam Theun 2, a dam to be built in Laos). A report of the organisation said that the word ‘conservation’ does not even exist in the Lao language. Anthropologist Michael Goldman (2001) who researched the above context mentions, ‘If, in fact, there were (or are) no conservation practices in the country, how is it that the Lao forests are flush with more than a dozen ‘globally threatened species’ such as rare tigers, elephants, muntjacs, barking deer, gibbons, langurs and warty pigs, and its rivers filled with otters, white winged ducks and diverse fish species, including the Asian cyprinid, which is known for its remarkable ability to pluck monkeys of the river banks? Foreign funders want to train Lao professionals in English, send them off to research centers in to teach them how to identify Mekong species, and then return them to the country to run new environmental institutes, state agencies and conservation projects. There is a huge gap between epistemologies of nature-and-society of transnational experts and those of local peoples. It seems that what is missing for the World Bank and its partners when they gaze at Laos is a reflection of themselves.’ This is an incredible lack of ability to understand the local language, culture and ethics. The knowledge of ecology and ecosystem management continued to accrue and get embedded amongst the ecosystem residents since the beginning of living. This has been discussed in this book. All this 19



happened in the faceless domain mostly independently in various parts of the world. We have also discussed outstanding studies in ecosystem management by the farmers, fishers, forest dwellers and forest dependent communities. This knowledge survives and evolves through generations of continuous practice. There are instances of gradual decay, the way the knowledge of traditional agriculture is lost amongst the farmers who have adopted modern chemical agriculture. There are also cases of sudden collapse like what we saw recently in Himalayas (Uttarakhand) or the experience of the islands of Marichjhapi or Jambudwip (both in West Bengal) that we have discussed later. It is equally true that there are examples of good practices in ecosystem management flourishing today in the faceless domain and discussing one well-known example may be helpful. Let us move to know about an exemplary initiative in Himalayan India. This is about the efforts of Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM)11 of Gopeshwar in Chamoli district situated in the mountainous range. All these areas became almost tree-free zone after the construction of an extensive network of border roads (Gadgil, 2001). As the valleys lost the trees, landslides followed. Devastating ones took away settlements where they were situated. The disaster was major. DGSM took up the challenge of restoration. This was mostly done by carefully planting local trees and caring for them till they were grown up. Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal planted trees in the catchment areas of three tributaries of the river Alakananda. Caring is a complex and sensitive task that needs understanding the management of soil and water of the place 11. The motivators of the much discussed Chipko Movement (Mawdsley, 1998, op cit)

20


INTRODUCTION

along with the climate pattern and sunshine that is incident. These local trees included fruit bearing as well as fodder yielding trees. What was the result of this painstaking work? DGSM wanted to know this from Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad, the foremost institution for satellite imagery in India. In parts of Alakananda Valley: ‘the green front is advancing, with the tree cover restored. The land is no longer sliding down at the rates it was apt to a decade ago. Most importantly, the flush is back in the cheeks of the hard-working women of many many villages’. The entire initiative of the DGSM comes from the local villagers – especially the women who suffer the most to sustain their living. They also allow select outsiders to participate in their plantation camps usually eight to ten days long. DGSM has expanded to caring the village societies as well. They now have enough patronage of the locals. This is an ideal tutorial for ecosystem management work carried out in the faceless domain. A good idea will be to attempt bringing these two domains closer and re-express the subject of ecology and ecosystem management. The research initiates an endeavour towards this and essentially tries to share the findings with a hope to provoke many others as well as to get challenged for whatever has been said. This book begins with discussions on conventional understanding of ecology, ecosystems, ecosystem approach and ecosystem management. In this part the most exciting enquiry will be into the state of transition or flux that is looming larger and larger in the knowing of ecology as an intellectual discipline. It will necessarily demand a series of vertical as well as horizontal sets of enquiries into epistemological spaces. This demand is rightful and unavoidable if 21



we try to understand ecosystem management as a task in modifying the use of natural resources and ecosystem functions to ensure continuous and mindful knowing of living experience. Although different fundamentally, the two domains are not water tight but do not usually meet. However, the interconnecting pathway is one way. Ecologists from eminent domain can have interface with the faceless domain or in rare cases belong to the faceless domain, but even the vanguards of the faceless domain cannot generally have a novisa-required entry into the eminent domain. Exceptions, however have started appearing in the horizon. One example for instance will be the trend set in history when Maori researchers started to develop their own methodologies and research programmes and are sitting parallely in the citadels of the eminent domain. Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a leading light in this intellectual project that combines theory and practice and is set up on research priorities decided by the indigenous people themselves on the basis of their own understanding (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Questions may be raised about their assessments, but whatever they are doing, they are doing differently. They are working at the interface of the bifurcated domains.

Ecological thinking: the enlightenment of the ordinary Enlightenment of the ordinary is about the ecosystem residents attaining maturity in ecological knowledge and ecological thinking together. Enlightenment is about getting matured, Kant said (Hayward, 1995). If a group of people can anticipate a tsunami, run up to the top of the hill away from the coast and save their lives, one can agree that they are ecologically mature. 22


INTRODUCTION

This was about the Jarawas of Andaman islands. The Tsunami swept the shores of the Andamans on 26th of December, 2004. Jarawas are known as Negrito tribes and might be one of the earliest humans to come out of Africa, according to some scientists. They have been residing in the islands for as long as 60,000 years12. For all these years Jarawas accumulated their knowledge about nature in the form of ocean, forest and movement of the living. All 300 of them utilised their ancestral knowledge to run deeper into the forest and survive the tsunami. A relic of a seventeen thousand years-old needle made of animal bone was found by archaeologists13. The design of a needle has not changed much since then. Primitive residents were thoughtful, innovative and familiar with the components of the ecosystem in necessary details. All of these are signs of maturity in ecological thought read in context. Hayward (1995) deals extensively with the seemingly unending debate on ecological thought and European concept of Enlightenment14 in his book Ecological Thought. In contrast, the present author has worked with the simple dictionary meaning of enlightenment which in many parts of the book has unmistakably been evidenced by the work of the ordinary in their ecological thought and conservation paradigms, their ecstasy and flourish. Traditional use of water as a resource has been described by many observers. Essentially they are of at least two categories. Those who 12. http://news.nationalgeographic.co.in/news/2005/01/0125 050125 tsunamiisland.html 13. Refer Andrew Marr’s informative ‘History of the World’, commissioned by the BBC, available in DVD format, accessed May 2013. 14. European Enlightenment was influenced by thoughts of man’s domination over nature.

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have an instituted timeframe to include as many practices as possible, come up with a catalogue kind of smart production. The second group of observers have a lot of time to see, feel, go deeper and deeper into the interplay of minds of those who thought, who created and recreated. They are the ones who can also visualise, in fact get intermingled with the agony and ecstasy of the masses. This is to me the enlightenment of the ordinary. One such rare person who has introduced us with the enlightenment of the ordinary, the ecological thinking of the masses is literatteur Anupam Mishra, who is with the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi. His literary style itself is the words of enlightenment, intimately close even to the whispers of the common people about whose creativity, ingenuity and ecological thought Anupamji writes. India is a vast country and Anupam Mishra has been visiting one community after other, digging the past, in consummate skill he writes their stories, the stories of enlightenment of the ordinary. Rajasthan is one state in India known for acute water scarcity. A large part of it is desert. The people of Rajasthan evolved a set of customs or ethics (they call it riti) linked to their pattern of labour in relation to water conservation. The customs they developed were the outcome of partnership between nature, human action and religious belief. Interested readers can refer to the English translation of the original Hindi Rajasthan ki Rajat Boondein (The Radiant Raindrops of Rajasthan, Mishra 2001). There cannot be any theory without practice and there cannot be any practice without theory. Jarawas, Santhals, village people 24


INTRODUCTION

setting examples of ongoing ecosystem management – all of them have their theory which we have not been able to decipher much. We have not been able to sufficiently acquaint ourselves with their cognitive processes. Inability to see this point has led to compulsive failures of the top-down projects in development programmes in general and ecosystem management interventions in particular. A better appreciation of and grasp in the theory of knowledge marked above would have saved surfeits of precious funds misused in so called development goals in the lands of the disadvantaged. More importantly, this glaring inability to respect the ‘outsiders’ (farmers, fishers, forest dwellers, for example) even to locate any benchmark of ideas in the high and mighty platforms of licensed knowledge exposes a striking ego of the educated gentry nested safely in the orbitals around the centre of power. Enlightenment is also about flourish. From a different perspective, ‘sustainable development’ can be seen to advocate miserly survival but not the mindful flourish of living experience that should be a natural entitlement of everyone on this Earth. Fundamental to enlightenment of the ordinary which evolves around their ecological thoughts is setting up of intrinsic relation between nature and human beings. Commendable studies have been carried out all over the world and similarity in the findings is also striking. The guiding light was to live creatively with nature and not irreversibly damage it or exhaust its resources (Gadgil and Berkes, 1991; Gadgil, Berkes and Folke 1993; Berkes et al, 1998). Societies which failed to adhere to this maxim did not sustain.

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CHAPTER 1

Ecosystems and ecology: old theories and new frontiers Going beyond the fences1 In the late 60s of the last century Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (1969) edited a volume of essays with the title Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man. Ecology, Shepard2 said, ‘deals with organisms in an environment and with the processes that link organism and place. But ecology as such cannot be studied, only organisms, earth, air, and sea can be studied. It is not a discipline: there is no body of thought and technique which frames an ecology of man. It must be therefore a scope or a way of seeing. Such a perspective on the human situation is very old and has been part of philosophy and art for thousands of years. It badly needs attention and revival.’ The ideological status of ecology, the author added, ‘is that of a resistance movement’. Shepard had visualised beyond the conventional boundaries of the discipline of his time, the time when we were getting to know about ecological damages, loss of biodiversity, wetland destruction and such others. In addition to these, there are questions which are rarely asked. A review of 50 years of the publishing of Rachel 1. This sub-heading may bring to mind the two-volume resource book 'Beyond Fences' published by IUCN in 1997, which dealt with social sustainability in conservation. However, this book's gamut is entirely different. It seeks to provoke to look beyond the usual practice of focusing on forest ecosystems to understand the management challenges confronting them. 2. Shepard was influenced by the idea of Paul Sears from a paper titled: ‘Ecology: A Subversive Subject’ (Sears, 1964).

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ECOSYSTEMS AND ECOLOGY – OLD THEORIES AND NEW FRONTIERS

Carson’s Silent Spring in the 31st May, 2012 issue of Nature3 disclosed that the agrochemical industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the book’s message regarding the mega lethality of pesticides. We have a few simple questions. Question One: Have those institutions fluent in using dollars to silence a voice of dissent taken leave from the floor of the earth, have the throttling machines been deactivated? Question Two: Do we consider the attempt to strangle to death the voice of science related to ecosystem destruction to be a stray incident unmindfully aimed at Rachel Carson? Or this is how things happen and will continue to happen unless the sun sets in the east? Question Three: It has been more than forty years since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring began to influence policy thinking to set things in a better stead in the matters of ecology and ecosystem management. Incisive scientific studies exposing the destructive impact on agricultural ecosystems have been published since then4. Other than NGO responses - some of them being determined and well meaning - today, very little is found reflected in the global or country level environmental policy or regulation in a manner it happened after Rachel Carson’s expose. Do we read this as a shift in balance in favour of superprofit? 3. The book concerns the perils of excessive use of pesticides at a time when pesticides were widely believed to be part of the progress of civilisation. ‘The agrochemical industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the book’s message. There was, after all, much for the industry to justify.’ [Dunn, Rob (31 May, 2012): ‘In Retrospect – Silent Spring’: Nature, Vol. 485, No. 7400, pp.578-579]. 4. F. William Engdahl (2007): Seeds of Destruction and John Wargo (1996) Our Children’s Toxic Legacy: How Science and Law Fail to Protect us from Pesticides show how scientists have been sidelined or persecuted relentlessly for upholding their findings in contentious areas.

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Question Four: In case such abusive spending is still there to throttle the voice of sustainable living and environmental conservation, should the learning, research and scholarships in ecology and ecosystem management remain restricted within the confines of safe and designated grooves? We read Nature meticulously5 along with other leading journals of unquestionable reliability. We could nowhere locate the decay or disappearance of consortium engaging themselves to douse Rachel Carson-like flames. Till date we have not traced even any surrender or setback on the part of the ambassadors of unhindered greed. We, therefore, assume they are there and the discipline of ecology will have to understand and anticipate their presence. In that case ecology, heralded as the ‘philosophy of the future generations’ (Capra, 1996), will have to go beyond the prevailing limits of inquest. Similar questions are also being asked in other places. This is why, the call to open up wider discussion has been gaining strength from conservation NGOs such as the IUCN. The need at the start of the twenty first century, commented W. M. Adams6 (in IUCN Renowned Thinkers meeting held on 29-31 January, 2006), ‘is clearly for systemic change. The experience of the last 30 years shows that this cannot be brought about using metaphors, slogans and ideas that are currently available.’ 5. Our reading of Nature showed that if anything, the say of business in research in the sub-disciplines of science has only intensified over the years. 6. IUCN convened this meeting to discuss the issue of sustainability in the 21st century. The meeting considered the progress made towards global sustainability, the opportunities and constraints facing the world and the World Conservation Union in attempting to meet the challenge of sustainability. The idea of sustainability, as opposed to sustainable development, dates back to more than 30 years, to the 'new' mandate adopted by IUCN in 1969. It spoke of 'the perpetuation and enhancement of the living world - man's natural environment - and the natural resources on which all living things depend', which referred to management of air, water, soils, minerals and living species including man, so as to achieve the highest sustainable quality of life.'

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In 2004, Hillary Masundire in his preface to an IUCN pamphlet on ecosystem approach (Shepherd, 2004) highlighted the relevance of ecosystem approach for professionals and practitioners active in farming, forestry, fisheries, protected areas, urban planning and many other fields. This has been a forward looking statement demanding a level of expediency that has not been reached in the mainstream capabilities in ecology and ecosystem management. Two questions come up: (1) Where else should we look beyond? (2) How better is it to understand understanding? Throughout the remainder of this book these two questions, sometimes independently, sometimes jointly, have kept agitating the mind of the present author. The product has been set in a kind of organisation that binds the chapters loosely. In fact sub-sections are free to float and be coupled in a separate chapter, if the reader so desires. The content will remain unconditionally open to revision, modification, retrospection and complete refutation, if that is better. But ecology and ecosystem management is set to move towards maturity, come out of the confines of one dimensional thinking.

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Ecological processes and thereafter – An experiential synthesis The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. Gregory Bateson

Gopal, a village boy of about ten years, regularly goes to the field where his father is engaged in farming, carrying a box in which his mother has carefully packed a filling lunch for his father. Always barefoot, the boy enjoys his travel, sometimes walking, sometimes running, sometimes standing still to stare and trying to understand the numerous patterns, interplays and connections between the diverse range of plants and animals and human action. No matter that he is not going to school, he is learning every moment, and learning with happiness. Gopal is a curious observer. One day, Gopal saw a snake approaching a stationary but living frog. Strangely, the frog did not make any attempt to escape and the snake very easily gobbled up its prey. On his way back, Gopal found the snake lying dead. After his father’s return that evening, Gopal narrated his experience and asked his father why the snake died. The farmer explained that the frog must have consumed something which had pesticides in it but the amount may not have been lethal enough to kill him. However, the snake could not tolerate the pesticide amount after consuming the frog for having a digestive system weaker than the frog so far as the specific poison is concerned and therefore died. After hearing this explanation, the boy remarked that the pesticides must have affected the frog as well, as it could not 30



stay away to save itself from being eaten up because it had lost its ability to respond to such stimuli, which is a natural instinct of animals. The boy was learning to connect loose ends, an important step in ecosystem management. This is how for a few thousand years, our farmers, fishermen, forest dwellers and such others have been learning ecosystem management slowly but comprehensively – a knowledge that has been handed down through generations. This simple village story opens up a horizon for discussing and describing the major elements of ecology and ecosystem management along with the emerging sciences of mind (cognitive science) and lived human experience. Even for a lay reader the circularity between the science of mind and human experience is closely visible. In the formal classrooms of ecosystem management, students learn about nutrient cycling but here a small boy and his father were discussing ‘pollutant cycling’ as part of their living experience. Formal learning in ecosystem management is not likely to include pollutant cycling, particularly when the pollutant is a pesticide. This blockade set up on natural flow of knowledge is a very interesting area of our experience and will be discussed subsequently. What happens if we observe more intensely the story of Gopal or his father or the fact that a snake dies after eating a dumb frog, for the purpose of trying to understand the method of learning of the locals. Similar epistemological positions were explained by Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in their book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. ‘Our bodies’, they said ‘we see both as a physical structure and lived experiential structure – in short, as both outer and inner, biological 31



and phenomenological. These two sides of embodiment are obviously not opposed, instead, we continuously circulate back and forth between them’. Learning ecosystem management will be incomplete without understanding this circularity between science of mind and lived experience of the humans. Lived experience includes flow of time. ‘Time and reality are closely related. For humans, reality is embedded in the flow of time.’ (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Gopal’s is just one story out of hundreds and thousands of such events happening upon the earth, continuously. In all these events science and humanities converge and the very genesis of living not only becomes different but is intellectually separated from the way we know things. We have a two-fold challenge – to conceive the matters of learning of those largely excluded underprivileged millions who live closer to nature and constantly and directly interact with water, soil and animal kingdom as an integral part, to work out their uncertain livelihood. In the first place we have to unlearn our ideas whereas we have to relearn how mind and nature intertwine themselves. India along with a few other countries has started digital recording of traditional/ indigenous/ local knowledge. As of August 2013, total 150 books on traditional medicine formulation have been transcribed7. All these records attempt to capture what ‘they’ or ‘the locals’ do. Knowledge in ecosystem management begins by asking why they do it like that. Throughout its length, this book has 7. Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is a collaborative project between Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India and Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. Since inception in 2001, the library has been created on the codified traditional knowledge of the Indian Systems of Medicine. So far, 150 texts and 2,89,362 formulations have been transcribed, totaling 34 million pages.

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attempted to invoke the question of why they do and what they do. That is why we are trying to understand how the boy was understanding, how the boy was knowing, that is, his epistemology of knowing things. Ours is an epistemology of epistemology or a meta-epistemology. Learning ecology or ecosystem management will be a cognitive route to knowing, or ‘understanding understanding’ (Geertz, 1983). Why was the boy surprised? Because the boy had a pattern in his mind and the events that took place did not fit into that pattern and he learnt a new pattern through fusion. There can be more complex scenarios. I had a chance encounter with an exemplary display of knowledge in ecosystem management. Such examples abound where people constantly interact with nature and its infinite and diverse attributes. Few of these attributes are helpful, few others are dangerous, but all of them establish relationships with each other – whether living or non-living – where matter and energy is constantly flowing through the system. I was walking along an embankment in one of the largest islands of the Sundarbans (West Bengal part). Just by chance I found a loop made of strong nylon chord lying on the paved walkway. Inquisitive, I tried to lift it, but failed completely. A local resident who had been observing me all this while smilingly informed me that the loop was planted well below the ground and tied firmly with a block of stones. I was curious and nowhere near understanding what the loop is useful for. The resident took pity at my ignorance and explained the matter in detail. The loop was used to connect a tie8 again firmly 8. A tie is a nylon rope joining the headload and the loop.

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enough, which goes over the thatched roof of the small hut of which the narrator was the resident. The other end is tied with a dead weight. In the event of strong winds capable of lifting and blowing away the temporary roof of the hut, this arrangement saves the situation. This has worked well and without fail for more than ten years, he said. Did any stranger like me ever want to know this from you? No, he said. This simple system of averting and in the process managing a disaster has not been used anywhere else (other than of course by a few creative people of this locality). This is an example of what we will call ‘living creatively with nature’. It has a structure, a pattern and a process in which the structure and the pattern are embedded. The two weight blocks, one underground and one in the courtyard, the loop, the tie and the house itself which is being protected against the possible storm

How does the loop work? (Source: Ghosh, 2005)

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arising from the side of the coast, are the structural ensemble which have been patterned uniquely with remarkable ingenuity. I am familiar with the wastewater ecosystem to the east of Kolkata, India for more than three decades (See chapter 4 of this book). It took me many years of unlearning of my linear and curricular lessons to understand or get closer to the key to their way of living. They have been growing fish in wastewater. I found them improvising whenever they needed it. Sometimes they failed. Improvisation did not work. They modified the practice again. They were not chased by pollution regulations to manage wastewater quality of the fish ponds properly. Fishes, particularly the sensitive varieties grown there, die if the quality of water where they grow is not good enough. For the fishermen, negotiating these bends in the wastewater ponds has always been difficult. Their study of nature, to the extent they were to encounter, was next to thorough. They found how plants, animals, the soil underneath, the sunshine from above work out opportunities for them. And they were able to recognise such interplays, the connectedness and perhaps the beauty as well. The farmers could indeed posit themselves as ecosystem managers both in theory and practice. Finally, the invention of the process is the master stroke of the designer of this disaster management contraption. What is the process in which the structure and the pattern are embedded? It involves a reasonable knowledge of wind speed in space and time (in which place and for which part of the year the contraption is designed), strength of the weight blocks, the strength of the tie and the loop. The empirical knowledge, nothing of which exists in any written form, has 35



been sufficient to protect the roof of the hut from being blown away by fierce storms. Furthermore, there is an unbelievable command over the material and behavioural components of ecosystem management, which will teach us about pattern, structure and process, most importantly the synthesis of all these three. With these elementary lessons in ecosystem management, we have just been touching the surface of an epistemology. Bonafide learners are sure to make deep inroads and ecosystem management will then reach a state of subjective maturity that the contemporary society is desperately in need of. We will have more and more of ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) problems and ecosystem approach stands a reasonable chance to come up with good answers. Why they do what they do is the core enquiry to be carried out whenever a learner in ecosystem management encounters arrangements of ‘living creatively with nature’ set up by those who need to know much too little about the mainstream knowledge in ecology. Such people just do it. They know how to synthesise pattern, structure and process. We have to know how they do it. That is the epistemological challenge emerging. Of course, there are ecologists who have been trying to know how to know from human skills and abilities. According to Meffe et al (2010): ‘An adaptive person recognizes when a change is coming, diagnoses the meaning of the change, makes a plan and puts the plan in action. Adaptive people keep their “antennae up”, watching whether or not the new plan is working. By adapting, they are able to prosper in their new situation, while their non-adaptive counterparts fall further and further behind’. In other words, 36



adaptive persons learn. This learning led to construct a new thesis. Ecologists introduced this tool as adaptive management. We shall discuss this in the next section.

Adaptive Strategy in Ecosystem Management Adaptive management is a thoughtful choice. To adapt is a faculty of mind, a constructed decision of any living form. It is a continuous process of organised alertness. Certainly there is a matter of learning that is linked to it, involved in it. It cannot ‘conveniently be separated into functions like research and ongoing regulatory activities, and probably never converges to a state of blissful equilibrium involving full knowledge and optimum productivity’ (Walters, 1986). Meffe et al (2010) mention three forms of learning for adaptive management. These are 

Learn through tradition (progressive steps of the vanguards)



Learn through trial and error



Learn through scientific experiments

The authors have marked learning through tradition as the most basic way which includes ‘the transfer of knowledge through myths, lessons of elders, parental guidance, taboos, formal ceremonies, apprenticeships and class room education. Tradition simplifies learning generally to emphasize important lessons.’ This generationally flowing knowledge lies embedded among traditional people, also known as local people, indigenous people, tribal people or aboriginals. This knowledge has at best been partially described 37



and uncovered. In most cases the knowledge gets disfigured, sometimes purposefully distorted, in translation. Traditional knowledge is invariably contextual, situated within respective linguistic fields. In fact, ‘Being heard (and even understood) is not enough. Without necessary links to state power, these alternative forms of talking/knowing cannot form the basis of legitimate action,’ (Nadasdy, 2003). There has to be a continuous reminder. Even if any traditional knowledge system is properly recorded in mainstream versions of safekeeping, the life of the people to whom the knowledge belongs may remain uncared and unsung. The concept of ‘adaptive management was developed combining the advantages of trial and error and scientific learning.’ C.S. Holling and Carl Walters have been credited with this commendable visualisation of how ecosystems work – ‘a new approach to learning that enables us to be adaptive while we work,’ which is also called ‘learning by doing (Walters and Holling, 1990). However, it is unbeknown why learning through tradition was not considered in constructing the pedagogy. Given the state of intellectual preparedness of mainstream ecologists, it has not perhaps been possible to take the methods of learning through tradition on board. There is another question lying hidden, what actually we intend to learn? To adapt is a quality seen ubiquitously in nature. Every living organism adapts to the surroundings it encounters. How do we human beings do it? There is a so called ‘free will’ that makes the choice. What happens in case of human brain is however interesting and has lately been discovered by V.S. Ramachandran, one of the foremost neuro-scientist of our times. He says ‘your left inferior 38



parietal lobe conjures up vivid images of multiple options for action that are available in any given context, and your frontal cortex suppresses all but one of them.’ (Ramachandran, 2011). Again, that the ‘frontal cortex suppresses all but one’ is not by chance. Frontal cortex is guided by impressions drawn from the museum of mind which has a collection of impressions from as far back as one’s memory allows. Can we therefore move towards meaningful learning sans the study of relations between mind and nature? This is where the subsequent studies in adaptive management will have to move into. In this scheme of things hitherto excluded traditional practices will get included as a rational priority. Simon A. Levin, mentioned earlier, one of the more influential ecologists of our time defines ecosystems and biospheres as ‘complex adaptive systems’. He has included non-linearity and also qualitative shifts in system dynamics (Levin 1998) similar to the idea of bifurcation points introduced by Ilya Prigogene (1984). He has a set of six questions which according to Levin is the ‘fundamental challenge for ecologists in identifying what the properties of their objects of study are, and what connections exist between the ecological and evolutionary levels9. Explicitly or implicitly, they are likely to define a research agenda for the indefinite future.’ Levin in his writings is disturbed to find ‘heavily managed system, such as an agriculture or forestry’ and they are ‘not purely adaptive system’. Levin is helpless in front of heavily managed systems such as agriculture and forestry. Most 9. The questions that Levin asks are: (a) What patterns exist in the distribution and organization of biodiversity? (b) Are these patterns uniquely determined by local conditions or are they historically and spatially contingent? (c) How do ecosystems become assembled over ecological time? (d) How does evolution shape ecosystem properties? (e) What are the relationships between ecosystem structure and functioning? (f) Does evolution increase resiliency or lead to criticality? Does it lead to the edge of chaos?

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of this book deals with so called ‘heavily managed system’ and will not be able to draw much from directions of research set by Simon Levin for ‘indefinite future’. At an elementary level more important will be to understand the role of mind in managing ecosystems. We are discussing mind and nature as dialectic because of unending spirality between them. Examples abound in the ecosystems where humans live or depend upon nature. A group of people develop a relationship with a place and thereafter an identity of their own. If we are thinking about the vulnerable communities, they only have place-based skills for their livelihood, the whole identity, the last vestige of dignity as a social being, is inseparably linked with the specific location where they grow up, belong, understand and perhaps worship. When development projects, large dams, power plants, industrial agglomerates displace them and force upon them a piece of land in exchange of their original habitation, hardly matching the earlier size and rarely with ecosystem that they knew earlier, what kind of adaptive ecosystem management we will be in a position to recommend them for their new place, unknown identity? In India alone we have more than fifty million project oustees from large dam projects only and much more in the waiting. The concept of adaptive management meets a challenge here. Where do we have such institutes of learning where these refugees of growth will get guidance to adapt to their new place, new identity that is being forced upon them? New institutes are coming up unfailingly and taxpayers are paying taxes nevertheless for such explosions. A discipline of knowledge can only be said to have matured whence it can respond to the sharpest questions of its time. A number of 40



ecologists are trying hard to rise to the challenge. Till then the discipline will continue to have a feeble, even in some cases, fading constituency. Indeed, ecosystem management has to go beyond metaphors. Along with the idea of adaptive management, co-operative management or co-management grew up about the same time, although independently. A trend is visible to merge these two rationales of thought and examine the merger. Anthropologistecologist Paul Nadasdy has focused on this merger or integration in great detail. This integrated route is known as adaptive comanagement, (Nadasdy, 2007). Not many ecologists of modern times have taken role of politics and political decisions within the fold of ecosystem management so comprehensively, and Nadasdy’s descriptions should have provoking effect upon present day thinkers and practitioners in ecology and ecosystem management. At the same time, Nadasdy has fallen short of examining the impact of rent-corruption-capital amalgam that dictates the final versions of global financial politics. No one, none of us, no component of any ecosystem falls outside its purview. But then, we do not have this answer even from the leading thinkers on earth today. They are also trying to solve the riddle, the travel of industrial capital to finance capital (Hudson, 2012). Adaptive management and also adaptive co-management fall into the category of integrative style of enquiry encouraged by ‘increasing recognition of the need to go beyond the restrictive nature-culture divide (which) pushes us to challenge other unhelpful dichotomisation’, (Scoones, 1999). Around the 1970s ecologists began 41



to realise that there is not, in fact any tendency for ecosystems to develop towards a state of maturity (characterised by an increase in either bio-mass stabilisation, diversification of species, cohesiveness in plant animal communities and/or homeostatic regulation), as has had long been supposed’ (Botkin, 1990 in Nadasdy, 2007). New ecologists were the earliest to doubt the equilibrium theory monolith. This was the time when ecologists began to view environment as a ‘set of nested non-linear social-environmental systems of great complexity’. Ecosystem approach or ecosystem management has remained in a state of wonder if not bewilderment for those who have come out of the confines of reductionist science. Infallible convictions like nonlinearity, unpredictability and irreversibility has set up permanent camp in the venerable enclosure of these knowledge seekers. Ecologists are searching for answers, experimenting with new assumptions. Adaptive co-management proponents have been more meticulous in understanding the complexities of modern times and yet failing to come up with workable direction. However, mainstream experts who have spoken about adaptive management (not the New Ecologists) have come up with simple guidelines which give a platform for beginners and learners. One good example will be the IUCN pamphlet written by Gill Shepherd (2004). She comes up with five simple steps and provides understandable explanations for all of them and also relates the steps with principles of ecosystem management10. 10. These steps are: Step A: Determining the stakeholders and defining the ecosystem area Step B: Ecosystem structure, function and management Step C: Economic Issues Step D: Adaptive management over space Step E: Adaptive management over time

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The strength of this book lies in the reference it has made to the case studies to explain the steps. All these case studies bring up the experiences mostly from excluded communities including indigenous people from various parts of the world like Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and Panama. These steps remain ineffective when compulsions and experiment meet complex socio-political arrogance. This is because of failing to take into account the broader economic context within which environmental management actually takes place and renders a thorough analysis of socio-ecological system impossible (Nadasdy, 2007). For small systems and at the times of disaster, ‘command and control’ can sometimes be an effective approach to ecosystem management. However, command and control ‘results in unforeseen consequences for both neutral ecosystem and human welfare in the form of collapsing resource, social and economic strife, and losses of biological diversity’ (Holling and Meffe, 1995). Enter adaptive management, concepts of sustainability and resilience, without necessarily breaking away from the equilibrium, steady state or homeostatic paradigms. Ecologists were examining each of these terms carefully and critically. Nadasdy (2007) critiqued the idea of resilience because ‘it fails to help us address a crucial political issue, that is, who gets to decide what the ‘desired’ social ecological configuration is’. Sustainability has been a convenient shapeless metaphor that has never been either here or there. Adaptive co-management has left 43



behind the entire baggage of equilibrium conditions, earth-in-abalance, linearity and predictability. Moreover, it is also true that not all ecologists have rejected Cartesian science. In fact even quite a few physicists work within the fold of the linearity paradigm. Change of view will take a longer time because scientists do not have any stake in the theoretical construct they choose. They will have to publish papers and such publications will continue for many years even if the science is reductionist. For conventional thinkers, the new approach to ecology, is seen as ‘a grave threat to the environment movement precisely because it undermines the movement’s ethical formation. Without the notion of ecosystem management to guide us, there is no longer any foundation for an ecological ethic upon which to base political / environmental action’ (Worster, 1993 in Nadasdy, 2007). The discipline of ecology and ecosystem management will emerge from within this battle of conventionalists and critical ecologists.

On common sense in ecosystem management ‘Most principles of decision making under uncertainty are simply common sense’. This prolific statement was made by Donald Ludwig, Ray Hilborn and Carl Walters in their article ‘Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation and Conservation: Lessons from History’ published in Science, April 2, 1993. Esteemed researchers and scholars in ecosystem management have seldom included ‘common sense’ as any category of knowledge, not many research projects on common sense could be located. Common sense has been defined in multiple ways. Common sense 44



is sound practical judgement, that is, independent of specialised knowledge, normal native intelligence and attention to the obvious. Common-sense isn’t a one-stop destination; it’s a way of thinking that needs constant nourishment and application. It is also defined as plain ordinary good judgement, sound practical sense or good sense of the air around. For ecologists, the definition or concept that will be most useful comes from Clifford Geertz. He suggests that common sense ‘is a cultural system and there is an ingenerate order to it capable of being empirically uncovered and conceptually formulated, one cannot do so by cataloguing its content, which is wildly heterogeneous, not only across societies but within them – ant-heap wisdom’ (Geertz, 1983). Clifford Geertz has quoted Evans-Pritchard, who writes ‘From generation to generation’, the ‘Azande regulate their economic activities according to a transmitted body of knowledge, in their building and crafts no less than their agricultural and hunting pursuits. They have a sound working knowledge of nature in so far as it concerns their welfare..... It is true that their knowledge is empirical and incomplete and that it is not transmitted by any systematic teaching but is handed over from one generation to another slowly and casually during childhood and early manhood. Yet it suffices for their everyday tasks and seasonal pursuits’. Since around the end of the last century, I visited villages in West Bengal to evaluate the work of environmental projects carried out by non-governmental organisations in the state. In one of such villages I found a good number of children, enquiringly standing in scattered groups, most of them without much to cover their bodies, 45



and a few looking at me, blankly. I asked an elderly villager why their children looked generally run down and had pot bellies and rickety limbs. ‘Why will not they be’, pat came the reply, with some amount of anger or wonder or both at my ignorance. ‘In the past’, the explanation continued, ‘all the paddy fields you can see, provided a comfortable stock of small fishes which was a good source of nutrition for our children in all the villages around and this was free. With the introduction of agro-chemicals, and no knowledge or limit as to how much a farmer is desperately pouring, the population of the small fish is lost. Thus a vital ecosystem service that was coming from the paddy field, stopped. The children, thereafter, are all carrying the burden of our greed’ he summarised. This is scenario one. In 1992, in another village, nestled in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina (Chiras, 2010), the farmers suspected that the local water-supply was receiving a large residue load from the chemicals that were being used to control pests and weeds. They also suspected that the same cause was responsible for the higher rate of childhood leukemia in the region. Health officials however could not ascertain the linkage between higher rate of child leukemia and pesticide application. A large number of farmers, entirely of their own accord decided to take positive action. They reduced the amount of pesticide application in a big way and introduced natural biological pest-control methods. The result of such an action gave them back their flourishing wildlife and improved the quality of groundwater. In five years, they got back what they had lost in the past many years. This is scenario two.

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Let us get back to the scenario one. For an ecologist, the elderly villagers’ direct involvement in production is the source of all his knowledge. Participating directly in production empowers him with the most comprehensive knowledge about the world in which he lives and continuously interacts. In a gradual manner, like most others in his village, the man understands how the ecosystem, of which he is a resident, works. He also understands how others are related to the actions of production. He can understand why the dealer is interested to allow him a deferred payment for the fertiliser or pesticides he buys from the dealer and also why must he agree to sell his crop at a cheaper rate to the same dealer to repay his loan. The elderly villager knows why contract farmers who bid for a land to carry out agricultural practices for a short period of one or two years, desperately impregnate the soil with chemical fertilisers, pesticides and hybrid seeds, sometimes genetically modified as well, to maximise the production, destroying the life of the soil like ‘an expert bandit’ (Howard, 1940). None of the ecosystem knowledge could have been acquired by the villager without participating directly in the process of production. He was using his common sense and prudence involuntarily. The villager was also learning a very important lesson in ecosystem management, a lesson about his adversaries. The better the knowledge he develops about his adversaries, the more equipped he is to sustain himself in the first place and only later can he think in terms of flourish and happiness. Learning about adversaries is knowledge at multiple levels. It can be at individual level, at family level, at neighbourhood level, at village level and it can expand its scope still further. In a hierarchical society like ours, no thinking is 47



complete without its context that includes the knowledge of adversaries and how to win over them. The fishes did not disappear from the paddy fields suddenly. They disappeared gradually, pesticides applied in the paddy fields with gradually increasing doses did not kill all the fishes at one time. Fishes also were of various types with unequal resistance to a specific pesticide reaching their metabolic system in varying concentrations. The disappearance of fish is a complex system that science cannot predict. Science is correct about the generics but often clueless with the specifics. Everyone of us knows that a chain is as strong as its weakest link but howsoever uniformly the links are made, ‘it is impossible to predict which will be the first link to yield. Learning through the villager’s eyes is therefore – step by step. It includes the knowing of the context, the history and very much of the science that is partially able to explain some of the interactions. Knowing ecology becomes a circulation between human experience and science of mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1992). This epistemological journey is discussed in more details in the fourth chapter. How could the villager living under deprivation and denudation make a statement with such clarity? Any one or a group of the country’s foremost research institutions working together on a high budget multi-disciplinary project might have taken three years to conclude tentatively with a suggestion for further research so as to carefully avoid the responsibility of making such a conclusive statement. It is the participation in a social practice with a scientific prudence for a necessary and sufficient length of time that gives the 48



villager the opportunity to verify his statement. This is simple for the villager, an ecologist for whom learning ecology is his way of life, and difficult for scientist-ecologists, who any way, are outsiders with very little time to spare and hardly need to take responsibility for their tentative statements. Here two epistemologies contrast. A villager definitely makes mistakes. But in the course of experiences gathered as he moves through life, he tries to learn from his mistakes and improves his understanding of the ecosystems. His is a life-long project. If we try to trace back what he did, the villager did not arrive at this firm statement about the health of the children overnight. A stepwise review reveals that at the beginning they may have tried to collect information. ‘Information consists of differences that make a difference’ (Bateson, 1979). This state of cognitive initiative can be termed as ‘familiarisation’. Familiarisation includes taking note of ecosystem components, external relations between them, major events and so on. This process definitely includes lots of conversation with the local people, conversations initiated among themselves. The next step the villagers took, and any project in understanding ecosystem will have to take up, is the task of ‘rationalisation’. Rationalisation is not the aggregate of whatever information has been collected during familiarisation. Repeated and intense association with the information collected during the stage of familiarisation brings out the hidden pattern. This is a task in integration and is a qualitative change that takes place in the work of mind, in the process of cognition and completely superior level of answers start arriving. Independently any amount of information collected during 49



familiarisation in individual parts, could not be aggregated to reach a level of understanding wherefrom a pattern could be seen. No findings regarding malnutrition among children and adding chemicals in paddy fields indicate an association of cause and effect by logical extrapolation. This in fact brings out the limits of Cartesian thinking and simultaneously marks the beginning of systems approach to thinking in ecology. We have two independent scenarios wherefrom we will take lessons in the use of common sense in ecosystem management. In scenario one, we find the villagers have been able to point towards the cause of their children’s ill-health and malnutrition. They did this remarkably well but did not sit together to reverse or restore the situation. In scenario two , the villagers did not only point out the cause of childhood leukaemia, but had a restoration plan in their mind, which they patiently implemented, finally emerging successful in getting back much of the original ecosystem endowments. They have scored full marks both as planners as well as implementers of an immediate and urgent ecosystem restoration challenge. They sharpened their common sense to meet their uncertainties. Two scenarios were different to a mindful observer. Scenario one was about irreversibility of a damage and the villager did not seek for a collective action, wearing an expression of anguish instead. Scenario two, on the other hand, was about ecosystem restoration and improvisation and the villagers were happy. An ecologist begins to interpret these differences and proceeds to learn further.

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Use of narratives in ecosystem discourses Human life and its relationship with nature is submerged in an unending source of ‘narratives’. ‘Narratives’ generally take the form of stories of daily life including outstanding moments which can come up with unexpected, sometimes explosive revelations. Narratives can be powerful enough to bring hidden connectivity and relationship to the fore and like hermeneutics, can expound how ecosystems work, negotiate bends, surrender to human assaults or respond to creative manipulations. The actors can be human or any other member of animal kingdom like a bacterium or a beaver. Historically, ecology as a subject and ecosystem management as its trail blazer, are moving through a process of continuous change in perception regarding this branch of knowledge. This change is essentially epistemological. It is indeed opening up for ‘understanding understanding’ (Geertz, 1983). At this point of time ‘narratives’ are potential constructs as a research tool in the course of merging theory and practice and much more so for bringing closer the not so intimate sub-clans of ‘scientist ecologists’ and ‘experiential ecologists’. Its prospects as a reliable tool are yet to gain the confidence of scientist ecologists, while experiential ecologists include narratives effortlessly ingrained in style, in their methods of imparting knowledge. Narratives have been one of the most ubiquitous form of exemplars in religious scriptures all over the world as throughout history. In Advaita Vedanta most difficult explanations of the metaphysical relations between matter and mind, the outstanding role of pattern, balance and energy flows are all easily explained by using narratives. 51



Indeed Upanishads and Vedanta – for example Brihadaranyaka Upanishad – are a classical anthology of narratives and open up an excellent area of research in exploring the stability and robustness of narratives as convenient intellectual tools that can be used in understanding and explaining ecology and ecosystem management. Narratives can be of multiple forms. Often, they can be written stories, can be in the form of folk songs along with folk art, and can be sculptures and cartoons as well. Folk songs again have multiple forms and are essentially popular in rural areas. Chhau, a mask dance whose massages range from tales of yore to contemporary issues, is a widely popular form of narrative, performed in India and many parts of South East Asia. In course of about a few decades a form of folk art known as patachitra11 which started in West Bengal, an eastern state in India, reached far- flung areas across many countries. This exemplifies the popularity of narrative in this particular art form. In ecology and ecosystem management, narratives can therefore, be useful for: 1. Understanding / explaining the partnership, commonality, collaboration and interrelation among various elements of ecosystems. 11. Pata chitras are hand-scrolls that were used by itinerant painter-minstrels or patuas who narrated stories along with the illustrative scrolls, which depicted various tales of yore, including those from Hindu mythology, especially the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Pata chitra as a form of art originated in Bengal more than 2000 years ago and have been confined to rural patronage for a very long time. In the 1970s, several social organisations based in Bengal began to pay all kinds of ‘folk artists’ to convey their messages through traditional media and so this form of performing art (where painting and music flourished side by side through a single performer) went through a transformation. Pata chitra now takes up contemporary issues on which to narrate stories, even send social messages which may range from the importance of family planning to literacy campaign, dowry problem or even environmental issues such as planting of trees.

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2. Understanding/explaining the place-based history of ecology and ecosystem management. 3. Understanding /explaining the impact of nature/ social disaster (like hurricane Katrina in the US, arsenic contamination in Ganga-Brahmaputra basin or overuse of pesticides or explosion of antibiotic resistant strain) on ecology and ecosystem management. Narratives provoke thinking. Pictures and designs used to explain or elaborate the story of the writer or the event specific to a place have sometimes been found to be particulary enriching. Even one single design brings out an entire episode of a social action. A good example of this is found in the meaningful rectangular design of ‘Sita Bawri’ (Mishra, 1993) used in the cover page of one of the most information-packed books on water conservation by Anupam Mishra. The author has nicely explained the meaning of this

Credit – Dilip Chinchalkar in Mishra (1993)

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designer narrative and helps the reader to understand a meaningful social action on water conservation. At the centre of the design there is a tiny circle, almost a point which represents life. There are wave-like formations around the sides of the rectangle and also staircase on four sides for safely reaching the pond water from the embankments. Flowers are also seen in four corners giving the feeling of aroma of life. In a few simple strokes this narrative design upholds a philosophy of life. Throughout the sub-continent such powerful narratives in the form of simple designs are preciously stored in the cognition of the ordinary people in the context of their regional ecology and their own languages. Narratives in local and regional languages are very powerful indeed. A large number of exciting narratives remain outside the scope of researchers who do not have any command on local language. Understanding ecosystem without proficiency in local language will be difficult if not impossible no matter how erudite the ecosystem researcher is. We started this chapter with a narrative that spun around a small village boy, the kind that makes the idea of understanding ecology and ecosystem management understandable. How do we ask questions to understand an ecosystem? It has been a crisis of perception, Capra said in his remarkable book, The Web of Life. Narratives are mostly place-based and so also is ecosystem management. Narratives have ability to dig out in a simple and comprehensive manner the most complex interrelationships linking communities or communities and nature. Narratives are 54



reasonably useful in anticipating change. It has not as yet been a chapter in the classical text book, but its use among experiential ecologists is far too commonplace.

I remember a story told by my young friend, a Block Development Officer in West Bengal, creative and hardworking who was curious to know how he could be sure that a villager is getting the benefit of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), introduced by the Government of India. He was chatting with an elderly villager in a kiosk typical to most states in India. The villager said that if the BDO found that the tyre of the cycle of the villager was new, he could be sure that the worker has received money from NREGS. This is a wonderful example of narrative where telling communicates knowing. 55



Although mentioned in a different context, Fritjof Capra in his homage to Gregory Bateson12 brought out the beauty of properly told stories when he commented that ‘Bateson’s style of presentation was an essential and intrinsic part of his teaching. His central message was that relationships are the essence of the living world, and that we need a language of relationships to understand and describe it. One of the best ways to do so, in his view, is by telling stories. “Stories are the royal road to the study of relationships,” he would say. What is important in a story, what is true in it, is not the plot, the things, or the people in a story, but the relationships between them.’

12. Nora Bateson’s film on her father titled ‘An Ecology of the Mind’ on his film of the same name, in its website http://www.anecologyofmind.com/bateson/ offers a wealth of material on Bateson’s mode of thinking

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CHAPTER 2

On projects in natural resource conservation

‘The agriculturist is the servant of the plant.’ Gabrielle Howard

Ecological Assessment Ecological assessments have been carried out since the beginning of life on earth. Without ecological assessment no life could continue living or evolve. For example, beavers were constantly carrying out ecological assessment for constructing their dams (Outwater, 1997). Nature has infinite examples, evidence and description of ecological assessment being carried out by every single life form for its sustainability and flourish. In this book we shall restrict ourselves to human living system during the recent past, not going back more than four thousand years of agriculture in the Far East. To assess the work of managing an ecosystem, one has to know the way it is conceived used, cared and improvised. Ecological assessment is a holistic paradigm. It should be understood as altogether a different expertise from predicting the impact of any conceived project on an ecosystem. Today’s connotation of assessment is very different compared with the pre-project era, since assessment today is tied to time-bound smart development projects in a variety of ecosystems, rural or urban. 57



Agricultural ecosystems are outstanding tutorials of ecology and ecosystem management – largely unvisited storehouse of knowledge where the human race can find the key for living creatively with nature. Ecological assessment is among the earliest lessons for the initiated1. Three examples have been discussed here – two classic texts and one modern assessment. The modern assessment has taken a longer view and uses agricultural ecosystem as an exemplar, focusing mainly on India and the Far East. ‘In allowing science to be used to wring the last ounce from the soil by the new varieties of crops, cheaper and more stimulating manures, deeper and more thorough cultivating machine, hens which lay themselves to death,…something more than a want of judgement on the part of the organisation is involved,’ says Sir Albert Howard in his classic An Agricultural Testament. Agricultural research, he continues, ‘has been misused to make the farmer, not a better producer of food, but a more expert bandit. He has been taught how to profiteer at the expense of posterity – how to transfer capital in the shape of soil fertility and the reserves of his livestock to his profit and loss account. In business such practices end in bankruptcy; in agricultural research they lead to temporary success. All goes well as long as the soil can be made to yield a crop. But soil fertility does not last forever; eventually the land is worn out, real farming dies.’

1. Agricultural environments, in particular, have emerged as the most important focus of the new conservation debate. Batary et al (2011), for example, draw attention to the fact that “more than half of the earth’s surface is molded by agriculture, so the contribution of agriculture is critical for successful long-term conservation'. For a more elaborate discussion, see Mfune, 2012.

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ON PROJECTS IN NATURAL RESOURCE CONSERVATION

Sir Albert, Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India carried out this ecological assessment, and many more during the time he was in India. Sir Albert enriched the quality of scholarship in agricultural research consciously and laid the ground rules of ecological assessment. Entire life of Sir Albert in India is of immense pedagogic significance for ecologists and ecosystem managers and will be a good project in ecological research to derive the protocol in ecological assessment thereof2. About thirty years before Sir Albert, Professor Francis Hiram King wrote about his review of agricultural practices in China, Korea and Japan in his ageless assessment Farmers of Forty Centuries published in 1911. He wrote about a land mass which maintained nearly 500 million people ‘chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than improved farmlands of the United States ….. from which five times our present population is fed.’ Compared to the rural United States in 1900, where 61 people live and were fed out of one square mile (with 30 animals in addition), in China this figure was 1783 (611 animals) and in Japan 1922 (125 animals). The systems of agriculture they have evolved ‘are to us remarkable and indicate a grasp of essentials and principles which may well cause western nations to pause and reflect.’ As an example, King points out that the selection of quick maturing drought resisting millets3, universal planting, ‘adopting 2. For a discussion on the impact of Sir Albert's thinking on Indian agriculture, see Jackson (2005). Also, for a more elaborate background about his experiments and their potential benefits in India, see Louise Howard's 'Sir Albert Howard in India.' 3. I learnt the same lesson about the use of millets as a part of local wisdom prevalent in Chhotanagpur plateau in India

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centuries ago the utilisation of earth mulches in conserving soil moisture, has enabled these people to secure maximum returns in seasons of drought and where the rainfall is small’. The millets thrive in hot summer climates, they survive when the available soil moisture is reduced to a low limit and grow vigourously when the heavy rains come. Thus we find ‘in the Far East... that these people have with rare wisdom combined both irrigation and dry farming methods to an extent and with an intensity far beyond anything our people have ever dreamed, in order that they might maintain their dense populations’. The interchange of ideas on agriculture between the East and the West that may benefit both, distinguishes this ecological assessment. It unknowingly shows the contrast between various forms of existing practices and agricultural models that were imposed in a large part of South Asia through the Green Revolution and beyond, which ran contrary to their practice for centuries. An earlier history of similar assaults is recorded in indigo cultivation in India and opium cultivation in China. For a contemporary picture of this same region, the best example of a global scale ecological assessment is the huge work completed by 400 scientists from 110 countries at the behest of UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, World Bank, WHO and Global Environment Facility. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) is a historic document considering its size, participation4 and patronage. We shall, for the purpose of the present book, focus on East and South Asia and the 4. Of course, there were views that the participation could have been widened to include more grassroots organisation from the South. For an analysis, see Scoones (2009), ‘The politics of global assessments: the case of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) in Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol 36, No. 3, pp. 547-571

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Pacific (ESAP) report to introduce the readers the quality of assessment and subsequent suggestions included in this work. The report has made no secret of the fact that ‘sixty percent’ of ecosystems in ESAP is degraded and accounts for the largest numbers of environmentally castaway people of the world, a consequence of natural hazards as well as some planned production enhancing investments, including dams and plantations. The countries of the ESAP region today, also were the key site of green revolution. These are characterised by high levels of rural poverty, hunger and malnutrition, gender inequality and social exclusion, environmental degradation and growing rural-urban divide. All these continue to mar agricultural development processes and outcomes in these countries. Despite dramatic increases in food production, developing countries in ESAP still account for a majority of the world’s poor and the highest proportion of the undernourished. The report, therefore suggested that to meet the goal of environmental sustainability without compromising the social objectives of poverty alleviation and food security, ESAP countries need to change the content and the practices of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology (AKST). Commenting on the degradation of ecosystems it is predicted that by the 2020 nitrogen pollution from food production (fertiliser use and domestic animal waste) and consumption systems will increase by 1.3-1.6 times in East Asian countries from 2002 levels. ESAP 61



continues to invest in production enhancing technologies that degrade natural resources despite the availability of resource conserving technologies, practices and institutions. We made ourselves accustomed with ecological assessment of agricultural ecosystems, two of them from the past and one from the present. We chose agricultural ecosystems because that is the canonical one for humankind to survive upon earth. All of them are linked to agricultural practices as a whole. If we break them down and reach closer to say one individual strand of rice plant or to an earthworm who always works painstakingly in the aid of soil making, we will have an exciting world before us to learn ecology and ecosystem management. We will learn in greater details how we choose indicators of assessment and how we look at the functioning of these indicators. We do not have our remit to enter into this Wonderland of Alice but we can at least get to know that there are many such wonderlands which we might have sought to be ardent learners if the pedagogy in ecology and ecosystem management reconfigures its basics. Let us discuss the case of pests infesting an agricultural field. What is the farmer expected to do? Go to a dealer, tell him about the pests. To him the dealer is the only available doctor who gives him the ‘most reliable (!)’ pesticide and always suggest the dose. The farmer is worried, uses three or four times the suggested dose and applies in his field for a quick result. At least for that season the specific pest may not invade. But a small number will somehow survive. Insects are extremely robust, can rapidly mutate and come back with complete immunity to the pesticide brand used in the previous 62



season. The farmer buys a new brand, costlier no doubt, and enters into long drawn battle with posterity. The dealer is the winner and through the agency of the dealer the manufacturer records explosive profits. Ecological descriptions of this malaise are yet insufficient. Does the story end here? In fact, it did not at all start like that for Sir Albert who described peasants and pests as his professors (Howard, 1940). He found ‘the attack of insects and fungi on all crops, whose root systems are suitable to the local soil conditions became negligible’ at the end of five years (starting 1905) of experimental agriculture in the Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa. ‘In order to give my crops every chance of being attacked by parasites nothing was done by way of prevention; no insecticides and fungicides were used; no diseased material was ever destroyed’, Sir Albert wrote. That was 1910, by which time he had learnt how to grow healthy crops, practically free from disease. For a specific ecosystem, ecological assessment distinguishes the difference between the level of care bestowed and improvisations to be undertaken. This assessment helps prioritising as well as determining the task of environmental conservation. It is a veteran subject only that not many of the learned persons like Sir Albert or Professor King came up with the phenomenal ability in establishing the significance of the discipline of ecological assessment. Research in ecological assessment remains largely uncharted as yet. Sir Albert and Professor King got no felicitation from the agri-business lobby, if not counteracted. But there is always an undercurrent of thirst for the rightful knowledge even during the worst of times. Ecological assessment as a subjective tool 63



will assume its rightful place in history within a foreseeable future. We continue this chapter enquiring various natural resource conservation and ecosystem management practices, irrigated ecosystem for example, using ecological thinking to construct understanding.

Review of some Natural Resource Management Projects Ecosystem management is the essence of natural resource management and the two are inseparable. It will not be possible to write the history of evolution of these two subjects separately because they were not performed separately. Those who performed these tasks never knew what we call ecology or what is natural resource conservation for that matter. They understand the task together in their own way and there still are many examples of such tasks being performed as a body corporate and as a substantial part of their routine life and livelihood practices. Learning was through observation, practice, memorisation, instinct along with their respect for nature that came to them spontaneously. For us this is a little known pedagogy although eminently impressive in constructing epidemiology. We can get more focused. What is the domain of interest for an ecologist inso-far as conservation of natural resources is concerned? Forest is a natural resource. Ecologists, deep, shallow and new - all of them will raise their hand in affirmation. So also are the forest dependent communities like plants and animals but not so easily 64



their bonafide resident, the forest dwellers. They are bad. And those who have attributed badness to them are ‘good’. But beyond forests where are the ecologists found confidently treading as their domain of interest, if not specialisation? This is an uncomfortable question and we will come to that later in the section. How could the mainstream knowledge of the North break loose with their task within their coveted boundary - the forests? Natural resource conservation, in terms of both theory and practice was known to African and eastern civilisations (including India, China and Japan) since ages. But that is not the kind of knowledge system we are introduced by the post-Stockholm fashion of discourses in natural resources conservation. A phenomenal amount of aid began to flow from Northern funding institutions to developing countries. We know these names of the northern funding institutions more than we know the names of our neighbours. One of the leading groups that influenced the post-Stockholm fashion of conservation agenda was the ecologists. These conservation biologists, belonging to the ‘cult of wilderness’ - to borrow from Juan Martinez Alier - looked upon farmers and forest dwellers as an indelible obstacle preventing the conservation of nonhuman life and an impediment to scientific research (see also Guha 1997, Simsik 2002, Martinez Alier 2002). They strongly lent their voices to preservation of wilderness and wildlife in the tropical countries. In the bid to protect non-human species from human onslaught, donor funding liberally came in for conservation of wilderness and wildlife and biodiversity, protected areas and parks, and Northern NGOs began to occupy prominent spaces in 65



conservation initiatives of a ‘fortress’ nature5, in these countries (for further discussions of this approach, see below). In India, for example, such funding came in for the Project Tiger and the pugmarks led to questionable outcomes (for critical reviews, see Tiger Task Force report to the government 2005, Kabra 2009). Sometimes, American environmentalism when it comes to caring for the forests, puts even a genocidal psyche to shame. Such was Holmes Rolston’s enthusiasm and anxiousness in preserving wilderness in the South that he was sure that ‘we’ North Americans and others wanting to alleviate the problems of developing countries (denoted by the term ‘South’), are ethically justified in prioritising the protection of natural values over human needs in some situations, even when this involves allowing people to starve rather than sacrificing ‘wild’ nature to feed them. As Siurua (2006) points out, in calling for sealing off of ‘wild nature’ from ‘destructive human populations’, Rolston is endorsing a particular model of conservation with a long and controversial history in the South. Rolston, however, has tenaciously held on to his worldview and reiterated it despite criticisms (Attfield, 1998 and Brennan, 1998, rejoinder by Rolston 2001). Rolston’s call for fortress conservation, to force forest dwellers and forest dependent communities to suffer is against the consensus 5. The paradigm which had dominated conservation policy in the South was the establishment of national parks and other formally protected areas from which human settlement was ousted and most consumptive uses strictly prohibited - a strategy pioneered in the United States for the preservation of scenic "wilderness" areas and has been exported to Asia and Africa by European colonizers and, later, by conservation "experts". This approach, often termed "fortress," "fences and fines," or "coercive" conservation (Adams and Hulme 2001, in Siurua 2006), was based on the North American ideal of nature as wilderness where, in the words of the US Wilderness Act of 1964, "man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Accordingly, conservation policies in the South both before and after independence were largely geared towards creating and maintaining landscapes devoid of humans in order to safeguard perceived wilderness areas against the threat posed by "encroaching" local populations (Siurua, 2006).

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reached in the Convention on Biological Diversity which was widely endorsed in 1992 at the Earth summit at Rio (and evidence contrary to its efficacy). As discussed in the introduction, lessons from failures are important for learning ecology and ecosystem management. Lessons from ‘fortress’ conservation, therefore, is a good project for an ecologist and those who intend to understand ecosystem management. One of the most recent studies undertaken by William Lawrence, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Australia, and his team found that around half of the resources of the 60 major protected areas in the world’s tropical region of Africa, America and Asia, are experiencing severe loss of biodiversity (Nature, Vol – 487, No. 7408, pp 405-406, September 2012). After decades of initiatives on protected area conservation, these findings are a telling comment on the success of the protected area models. As more and more initiatives of the protected area framework failed, the past two decades have seen the emergence of the communitybased ‘counter narrative’ which has come to replace the fortress approach in professional conservation discourse, where local people are looked upon as centrally important for the success of conservation initiatives. However, these initiatives have also failed often, as critical literature shows. A detailed and authentic set of reviews in Environmental Conservation under the themed issue on Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM)6 deserves a closer 6. The word community has been problematic while being used by scholars (see, Agrawal and Gibson 1999, Mfune 2012), who have pointed out the changing and at time amorphous understanding of the concept. Yet, as experience shows, we have to have a practical working understanding of the word in order to facilitate livelihood projects.

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look (Environmental Conservation, Vol 37, No. 1, 2010). As the editors point out, though CBNRM has been a pervasive paradigm for forest area projects for more than three decades, yet ‘it has been extensively critiqued from both ecological and sociological perspectives with respect to theory and practice’.7 Furthermore, ‘the vast majority of CBNRM case studies report on programmes that are conceived and designed by agencies external to the local people residing in the target area. Typically these are the planning officers in conservation agencies, development planners or external funders and consultants’. Expectedly, ‘there appears to be insufficient monitoring and longitudinal analysis to verify much of its claims’ and ‘there is very little research, into situations where communities are the management agencies’8. The editorial makes concluding comments that ‘CBNRM is a dynamic process, and so the nature of benefits, outcomes, participation and power relations change through time and place. Nonetheless, key axes within such a typology would need to relate to: 1. who has the power, who is driving the process; 2. who ‘owns’ the resources and has broadly recognised discretion to use them, and how they are used or disposed, what the rights of the different actors are and how these rights are negotiated; 3. who receives the benefit streams from the resources, how equitably they are distributed; 7. Editorial, Environmental Conservation, Vol-37, Pg-1, 2010 8. Environmental Conservation, Vol-37, Pg-3, 2010

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4. what the nature of the management is, whether it is fences and fines with some compensatory outreach, or maintains the status quo, whether it is active, if adaptive, whether it incorporates local knowledge, and 5. who implements and monitors the agreed management strategies and practices. The above points represent a prudent merger of theory and practice in forest management and its use as a renewable resource, and constitute good base material for learners and researchers. Dressler et al (2010), while presenting a critical history of the global CBNRM narrative said ‘CBNRM sought to return the steward of biodiversity and natural resources to local communities through participation, empowerment and de-centralisation. Today, however, scholars and practitioners suggest that CBNRM is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose, with even the most positive examples experiencing only fleeting success due to major deficiencies.’ For all the scholasticism inherent in CBNRM, it is never actually ideal in practice. On the contrary ‘CBNRM’s near universality may lead to its demise’. What has been remarkable of this research is the openness in drawing subjective conclusions and a genuine attempt to diagnose the defaults in community-based management. Can such an initiative stimulate a renewed emphasis in integrating social justice with conservation, the authors asked? Their summary of observations says: 69



‘CBNRM has recently done less to support indigenous rights to land and biodiversity than it has to facilitate interventions which offer livelihood designs that align with the free-market principles. The process of adding new schemes to improve local conditions opens the floodgates to donor-driven ideals and incentives for livelihood change and economic opportunities rooted in neo-liberal capitalist production. CBNRM has thus become partly re-constituted in terms of market-based solutions, adding layers of governance that simply complicate being poor….We make this bold assertion because it is only by explicitly restoring these core values of social equity and justice that CBNRM can hope to resist the debilitating forces of bureaucratic intervention, donor-driven ideologies and economic logics that have become so disruptive in case studies around the world’.

Finally, the authors have concluded, that the prospect of local people sustaining CBNRM for social justice, livelihood security and conservation needs ‘is centred’ on how well programmes are embedded in socio-cultural relations, politics, resource needs uses and landscape changes. Ribot et al (2010) examined the question of democratic decentralisation in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to forest management, livelihoods and enfranchisements. Although this study has been carried out for sub-Saharan Africa but it holds equally good for countries like India Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal. In current forestry discourses, they said ‘almost everything is called decentralisation….The confusion adds to an 70



institutional amalgam an analytic nightmare in which no policy value or project labelled decentralised can be taken at face value.’ The authors have further indicated that ‘studies must identify what should be conserved or transformed to optimise the ecology for local and higher-scale values, respectively.’ This again is a thesis against universality. After all most burdens of conservation are borne at the local level, while benefits are reaped at different vertical strata. In fact CBNRM has not been any exception in its tendency to universalise. The very basis of ‘development’ doctrine is built upon this bedevilling thrust of universalisation. This tendency has further been aggravated in the post-liberalisation regime where we are allowed a single size to suit us all. As ecologist we know that what is true for one village that may not be true for the adjacent village. If one tubewell has arsenic in the water it pumps up a tubewell not far away may not have arsenic at all (Chemical and Engineering News, 2013). This is an unalterable rule in ecology. Can we ask water to flow upwards or an ice-block to submerge in water, ‘unless it is compelled by an external force to do so’? At the end of the global review of CBNRM process we are stumbling at the elementary question: where is the community involvement in actual management of natural resources either in or around the protected area. But there is no sluggishness in fund flow. Donors are not looking back and allow themselves a pause when they know that things are not working to the design. When both the protected area approach and the community-based 71



approach have returned regular and cognisable instances of failure, why is there such a steady flow of funds into executing more and more projects? Ecologists need to pay close attention to such failures, since approaches they thought unquestionable have not ensured their confidence. Let us take two tutorial examples, the Indian forestry sector, where there is community involvement in forest protection through the process of Joint Forest Management (JFM)9 and the practice of watershed management spread over a number of states. In JFM, it has been pointed out that in the Indian forestry context, devolution has often served merely to reduce costs and responsibilities for the state, while extending the reach of administration and donors to new areas. In the process, communities are moulded to reflect state, donor and market idiosyncrasies more closely, while they lose their existing social bonds and understanding (Sundar, 2001). Decentralising governance of natural resources has merely allowed the dumping of large sums of donor funds on to state governments, for which the returns are regular (Lele, 2004). One random look at the debt service obligation of India shows that projections of total charges along with interest payments stand at $101022.89 to be paid by 15 August 2013, while the amount is about double at $220126.59 by 15 March 202310. World Bank data show a steady flow of 9. Joint Forest Management is a process where the forest dependent community and the state government cooperate to manage degraded forest lands, enabled by a June 1, 1990 Government of India circular legally binding on all states. In some states, good forest lands may also come under the ambit of JFM. While a cooperative approach characterised the initial attempt that began at Arabari in the state of West Bengal, JFM reviews about India have often shown contrary results, where villagers doing the hard job of protecting the forests are never given any financial powers or administrative participation in the drawing up of micro plans according to village needs. 10. For details, please see http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/ PROJECTS/0,,menuPK:64820018~pagePK:64399677~piPK:64399786~subTitle:Debt% 20Management~theSitePK:40941~CURRENTPAGE:1~PAGESIZE:100~countrycode:IN~TOTALRECORDS:7 12,00.html

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projections, and India has seen consistent world Bank funding for forest and watershed management programmes. A fund flow on a regular basis, from debt serviced is an attractive incentive to continue funding despite dissatisfactory results and not asking what happened to the recipients (for a discussion on results of watershed management programmes, see Lele et al, 2009, Kumar, 2007). Beyond the conventional confines of NRM, ecologists are generally not sure, which of the natural resources, are of importance to them. If they are sure about forests they are not so sure about minerals. So conserving coal, uranium, bauxite and the longer list of minor minerals are not the compulsory area of focus for mainstream ecologists. It is time to rethink the extent of wholesomeness of ecologists are prepared to allot when they are thinking about natural resources conservation. Such resources, quite a few of them in particular, cannot remain on the periphery only to find a few of them raising the voice of nature conservation when the ecosystems are relentlessly threatened. We are coming across a recent discourse in natural resources extraction and that is ‘sand’. Although soil is somewhat important to ecologists because of soil microbes, sand has remained an outsider in the scope of learning and research in ecology and ecosystem management. 2013 will be important to the ecologists if a collective effort towards initiating research in sand can be sparked. We have not done justice to this natural resource for not initiating any conservation programme for sand. Sand conservation project is one that involves most citizens in this part of the world.

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What is happening to sand? Earth scientists have been studying this changing pattern of indiscriminate extraction of sand from the river beds and identified this as a disastrous activity which threatens the very existence of river ecosystems (Padmalal et al, 2009). Although ‘more focussed researches leading to restoration of river environments are progressing in many developed countries, much attention has not been made in the rest of the world.’ The authors have studied the small rivers in Kerala, in the South-west coast of India, where ‘the situation is alarming’ they said. Their work was done on Vembanad Lake, whose catchments are drained by seven rivers whose length varies between 78 and 244 km and catchment area between 847 and 5,398 km2. On an average, 11.73 million tonnes per year of sand and gravel are being extracted from the active channels and 0.414 million tonnes per year of sand from the river floodplains. The quantity of instream mining is about 40 times the higher than the sand input estimated in the gauging stations. As a result of indiscriminate sand mining, the riverbed in the storage zone is getting lowered at a rate of 7–15 cm per year over the past two decades. This, in turn, imposes severe damages to the physical and biological environments of these river systems. The picture all over India is much graver than this, what with the explosive boom in the real estate interests. Before any earth scientist or any ecologist raised their voice aloud against this plunder that could shake the powers that be a remarkable story of a woman, wife of a teacher in a madrasa (Muslim theological institution), a mother of three children, one of them being a toddler, wrote an enlightened chapter in the history 74



of environmental activism by way of her single-handed protest of against sand-mining – a fight against a strong coalition of sandminers and their usual retinue. She knew at least this that she had law of the land on her side. She believed sea-coast cannot be anybody’s private property. More than anything else Jazeera’s mind was unable to cope with the fear that distance of the sea from her house, where she grew up, is rapidly shrinking due to fatal extent of sand mining from the coast and she was unable to accept the loss of her outreach to an open sea that she was used to since birth. This is a feeling that is difficult to appreciate by those who have never been used to it. Her village was in Puthiyangudi, a sea-shore village of Kannur district in Kerala, India, where sand was mined. In fact sand mined almost all throughout the 500 km coast of Kerala. She tried to impress upon the local administration to start with. She failed. She tried to stop the movement of the sand loaded trucks by lying down in front of them. She was beaten up, her daughter was assaulted. She thereafter, on July 10, 2013, started her sit-in-agitation demanding the collector11 to talk to her. Finally, the state Chief Minister met her and gave verbal assurance for taking necessary actions against sand mining on the coast, whatever that means. Jazeera had strange institutions to counter with, including an institution that alleged that she was failing to take care of her children, whom she kept close to her. But the positive thing to come was the support of a noted ecologist, S Faizi, Chairman of Convention on Bio Diversity Alliance (a global network of civil 11. Administrative head of the district

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society). Faizi in his letter12 to the Chief Minister of Kerala has registered his uncompromising protest against the unruly behaviour of the police administration. He gave a clarion call to all ecologists, environmentalists and any one who thinks sand is not for grabbing. But as the case in sand, there is at times a very big lag in realising the damage done due to patently unsustainable use of natural resources. A pertinent example in many parts of the world is in the form of irrigated ecosystems. That is our next section.

Lessons from irrigated ecosystems Irrigated ecosystems are vast areas of knowledge-experience duality. It is one place where practice and theory continuously interact. Irrigated ecosystems can sometimes be more important as a tutorial for learning ecosystem management than forests. But 50 years ago, we could not be surprised that ecological thinking was not included in irrigation engineering13. However, the matter of concern which deserves 12. Faizi wrote: ‘Jazeera was forced to undertake this mission, along with her three children, when all the statutory bodies entrusted with the responsibility of protecting the sea coast have miserably failed in their duty, indeed they have betrayed their mission, particularly the Coastal Zone Management Authority. The irreversible destruction of our coast, caused by multiple forces including the hotel industry, is result of a deep malaise afflicting our officialdom. Jazeera's mission is already drawing public attention into the issue in an unprecedented manner. While she ought to be treated as a public heroine, she is being intimidated by the police... This police behaviour is an affront to the Constitutional principles, and a public shame. I register my protest against the unruly behaviour of the police and affirm that the environmental community stands firmly behind Jazeera who is discharging her fundamental duty as a citizen as required by Article 51A.g of the Constitution.’ 13. Sengupta (1985) has suggested the historical roots of this thinking. In the South, under the ryotwari settlement, the responsibility for commonly owned properties like eries vested with the government and therefore, the maintenance responsibilities devolved on the revenue officials. From this the first practical lesson about irrigation management was obtained by the Europeans. The orientation of the revenue officials ,was of no help to the maintenance works and the revenue spent under this head was wasted. Therefore, expertise was sought in this area. The civil engineers of the army were the only ones who could have been called experts in this area... . Circumstances thus made irrigation science a subject of civil engineering from which state it has not been able to recuperate properly even to this date. The exaggerated emphasis on civil engineering at the cost of environmental balance, efficient crop practice and local management, as found in modern irrigation development programmes, thus, arises from a historical coincidence.

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attention is that this disconnect continues even today14. The confluence of these two streams of knowledge deserves attention as it serves a two-fold advantage: a. irrigation management will come closer to the actual needs of sustainable agriculture and not agribusiness b. ecosystem management will enrich its inner contents. A lot more of learning is envisaged from irrigated ecosystems This disconnect between mainstream ecosystem management and experiences in irrigated ecosystem is spread almost all around the world. Research has explored how the local people situated in place and time (water residing people included), responded to the requirement of water in innumerable variations when it was scarce, when it was sufficient or when it came in a flood. We are getting to know how people set up relationships amongst themselves, with the innumerable artefacts they used to attempt to balance availability and demand, how creative they were in optimising the natural resource conditions or instances where they failed (Mosse 1997, 1999, 2003, Wade 1987, Agnihotri 1996, Mishra 1993, Sengupta 1985). In fact the extensive task that reassembles the units of water, society and nature opens up an unending vista in ecosystem studies. Much has been written on institutional arrangements, collective action, pre-colonial irrigation systems, colonial hydrology and the 14. As Bandyopadhyay (2006) points out, in the existing approach guided by reductionist perspective of traditional engineering, water has been viewed as a stock of resource, to be withdrawn and utilised as desired. This perception could be modified if we learnt more from our past. But if one takes a look at the contemporary syllabi of the Indian Institutes of Technology or the leading engineering colleges in India, local knowledge and traditional irrigation practice finds almost no place there.

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governance of water15. The focus here is to explicitly uphold existing systems of local people’s ability to self organise16 for their agriculture and explore the implications of this for changing our approach to current irrigation management. For our purpose, we focus on West Bengal. Self-organising system The author was visiting medium irrigation schemes in Puruliya district, West Bengal, as part of an ecological assessment work entrusted by the Department of Irrigation, Government of West Bengal.17 One of those candidate schemes, the Khairabera irrigation scheme, led to one of our richest experiences. The Khairabera irrigation scheme was more than 30 years old, and still incomplete. Farmers around the area did not know much about it. We were enjoying a cup of tea at a roadside kiosk and talking to local people to enrich ourselves with their experience. ‘You have to visit our irrigation project that is there since the time of my grandfather,’ told an elderly village physician, ‘and that is just a few kilometres from here’. He was guiding us to visit Burda irrigation system. Though we set about the task half-heartedly we eventually did reach the place and started preliminary probes. Day one was clueless. As usual we wanted to know about the project head, perhaps the secretary or the president as is the case for most of the rural initiatives. 15. The most prolific writing on the various aspects of irrigation, pre-modern and modern, have generated much literature on ecological history, on the commons and their management, as well as on governance of water. They are too vast to be recounted here, but just for a sample of ecological history see Ludden (1979), Wade (1987), Klingensmith (2007), Mosse (2003), Gilmartin (2003), D’Souza (2006), Baviskar (2007). For scholarship on commons, see Ostrom (1990), Knox and Meinzen-Dick (2001). For writings on governance, see Vaidyanathan (2002), Menon et al (2005), Ballabh (2008). 16. The term self-organisation originated in a 1962 article by mathematician William Ross Ashby (reprinted in 2004) titled ‘Principles of the Self Organising System’. However, social scientists have loosely used this term in the sense of its literal meaning. 17. The project was on ecological assessment of performance of small and medium dams in Puruliya District. There are 32 of them. Puruliya is located in the semi-arid region to the south-west of West Bengal

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Burda irrigation system, we came to know, subsequently and through many more visits we paid in course of next two years during our research, has no secretary, no president, no treasurer, no cash book and not one case of financial irregularity or question raised by villagers or the loose group of organising villagers in course of its functioning for more than eight decades. There is no written history before we wrote something regarding the irrigation project that is on-going since about 1930s. The Burda irrigation system serves 200 families at present. We had the privilege of talking to Lalit Mohan Shandil, one of the pioneers and a living legend who was 105 year old. He died during the course of our work. For us, Burda irrigation project of Puruliya district is one of the oldest examples of self-organising systems in South-Asia. It is a farmer managed subsistence irrigation practice. It has in-built system of canal maintenance, water sharing protocols, punishment for recalcitrants, contribution of voluntary labour and yet there was no formal leadership. Meetings were convened by a traditional drummer, who would beat the drum and announce the date, time and venue of the meeting. Most villagers will assemble and will take decisions which will be mandatory. The more well-off farmers wanted this system to continue because they benefited from it and in fact paid compensatory labour charges for the poorer villagers in case they failed to report at the time when compulsory voluntary labour was to be contributed from each household. The rule is, in case someone is unable to work on such mandatory days of the year, a compensatory payment amounting to the standard daily wage of a person will have to be paid on the same day by evening. Whatever money is earned and expended is submitted in careful 79



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and proper detail by the so called ‘treasurer’ in charge everyday and no information or record is carried over to the next day. Everyone knows how much money is remaining in excess. Water sharing is a more difficult proposition. This protocol evolved has emerged from the long experience of the farmers. The protocol has provisions for meeting the uncertainties of rainfall and farmers told us that they do not have the problem of the domination of the farmers having their land at the upper reach of the canal. This solidarity among the farmers is remarkable because within a few kilometres, the farmers having their plots irrigated by government run canals have perpetual conflict between the upper reach plot holders and the lower reach holders. All over India, in most of the canal irrigation projects, tail ends of canals run dry. In spite of local governments in place in the rural areas, the phenomena of water not reaching the tail end (last one-third of the length of the canal) is fairly common. Example of a group of villagers having a common irrigation facility which they sustainably manage without allowing any political or outsider influence for such a long period of history is rare. We have found the presence of one kind of network or other linked with local irrigation practices in all other areas of West Bengal, a common phenomenon in South Asia (Sharma and Hemanth Kumar 2013, Mosse 2003; Sengupta 1985, Ludden 1979). Our visits to Burda revealed to us a number of noteworthy lessons. The village stood out, in spite of its non-descript appearance, as one very different from the villages close to it routinely served by 81



conventional irrigation facilities – such facilities had bypassed this village. The villagers had no complaint about that. Our lessons from the Burda were drawn up with an intention to learn ‘ecosystem management’, a term which they never knew. Tutors and the tutorial knew little about the intending learners, as we did not disclose our learning mission. The local villagers have given a beautiful name to this integrated system. They call it ‘sholoáná’. Sholoáná means entire population: cent per cent participation is what the idea of sholoáná conveys. In rural areas, almost all over the world, village people often show a sense of purpose, ethics and rhythm, while naming an idea: the poetics that is so profoundly ingrained in them, in the life they live. What did we bring back from Burda village? Most essentially an understanding of where should we carry out research to understand the discipline of ecology and ecosystem management better. Our intermittent, though year long, visits to this village converged our focus to the following descriptions: a. Villagers have sound understanding of diverse fields related to their living and livelihood. This list will include working knowledge in hydrology and hydraulic structures (small but requisite), crop growing, soil preparation and conservation, climate uncertainties, animal husbandry (for conjunctive use of livestock), use of waste for preparing manure and fuel, local market and naturally about biodiversity (they can easily identify the trees, birds, lizards or most other visible life-forms specific to their locality), they know their rivers, surrounding forests and 82



kinds of ecosystems which form part of their life and also about their social formation. b. Sustained ability to collaborate and cooperate among themselves and gathering social cohesion and solidarity in meeting the challenge of uncertainties in society and nature (rainfall mainly) in the semi-arid terrain with a reasonable slope. c. Institutional robustness and rare display of non-hierarchic and unbiased attachment to convention. Burda irrigation practice is managed by a self-organised system without any prominent presence of a leader or a headman. It has a design without a designer. Our discourse in irrigation management will be incomplete if we do not get into the matter of institutional robustness of the Burda irrigation system in more details. For example, description (c) relates to unbiased attachment to convention. What are the conventions that villagers in general have got used to?  For irrigation you have to seek the favour of local panchayat

and if there is any irrigation canal, and reach out the local office.  For transparency in public accounts you must maintain proper

cash book (as if maintaining cash book has stopped pilferage, if there is be hidden design).

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 The richer section of the village should enjoy relaxation of rules

like compensatory payment for absence during mandatory period of voluntary provision of one working person per family (after all rich people give loan in the time of distress). Burda sholoáná system provided a barrier to the above conventions, and thereby confined to their own understanding of their institution. Burda, though, is a small account and cannot be an impressive flag to flutter above the stronghold created by those who mandate social living and ready to ignore the Burda experience as a paradigm. On the contrary, a description of an unequal playfield will show the extent of damage that can be inflicted by the inertia of convention. Let us change gears and get to know about an irrigation system which was lavishly funded, most formal institutions in place at the helm and can serve as a tutorial event for management students and researchers. Scholars who were working for International Water Management Institute (IWMI) uncovered the descriptions in assessment studies in which they were engaged. We start with description one which relates to the matter of hierarchy. ‘Hierarchy’ in a bureaucratic setup can be least diluted, more so when institutions like the World Bank take up the reins. For World Bank funded projects, the levels of hierarchy also includes the recipient government’s functionaries and nothing is expected to be misused or improperly spent. The project in question had investment costs of around US $500 million. But ‘none of the associated documents (appraisal reports and evaluation) included 84



any assessment of benefits and costs’ (Barker and Molle, 2004). The project was mainly for canal lining aiming at improving the efficiency of irrigation. The authors also said that ‘reduction in percolation and seepage loss may have been at the expense of farmers depending upon groundwater’. Finally, the authors commented that ‘we do not know how much, if any, real water was saved by this investment, or whether water productivity was increased overall. It is safe to assume that neither the donor agency nor the recipient bureaucracy was interested in knowing’. Nowhere the assessment reported any violation of ‘hierarchy’ during project implementation. It may appear unsalutary for the World Bank helmsmen to learn from Burda. But the students and researchers in ecosystem management have enough lessons there.

A conceptual disconnect Irrigated ecosystems all over the world are tutorial examples of embodied, situated and place-based knowledge about ecosystems and their management. The lessons come from a large number of traditional practices, many of them present in the global south, and some of which continues to perform even today (Balasubramanian and Selvaraj 2003), and it also comes from historical failures of irrigation projects mostly in the post-colonial time and many of them large. Large dams failed on many counts18. But lessons in ecosystem management all failures conceal are considerable. One good example of such knowledge is retained in the review report of Bradford Morse on Narmada Dam. The findings of the review completed by Bradford Morse and his 18. For a detailed account, see Patrick McCully’s Silenced Rivers (1996).

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team comprise 39 points, out of which 15 are on the matters of environment. This report qualifies for being an all-time reference for the learners in ecosystem management. The review report exposed the elementary nature of the mistakes made by the professionals and administrators, and their nonchalance. It is difficult to believe that such arguments co-exist with the millions who intend to live an un-suffocating and sustainable life. Most of the mistakes could have been avoided. For example, the first four findings of the review were:  The Bank and India both failed to carry out assessments of the

human impacts of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. Many of the difficulties that have beset implementation of the Projects have their origin in this failure.  There was virtually no basis, in 1985 on which to determine

what the impacts were that would have to be ameliorated. This led to an inadequate understanding of the nature and scale of the resettlement  This inadequate understanding was compounded by a failure to

consult the people potentially to be affected.  Failure to consult the people has resulted in opposition to the

projects, on the part of potentially affected people, supported by activists. This opposition has created great obstacles to successful implementation. If people of common prudence begin thinking more seriously, these 86



mistakes were not chance-directed. The designers showed a lack of thinking and knowledge, at the same time. Let us examine this lack of perception in more details.

Ecological thinking and irrigation ecology The growth of irrigation as a self-organised domain has been subjectively muddled. The error in development paradigm has been one amongst the costliest to the society. Irrigation after all is an arrangement to assist agriculture. Historically irrigation projects developed exactly like that and in most cases as a part of water resource conservation practice. In fact as we read the detailed descriptions of these water resource projects we find amazing dimensions of ecological thinking explicit in the modifications and manipulations the designers incorporated in their project (Mishra, 1993, 2001). In essence ecological thinking is all about living creatively with nature. This knowledge of ‘living creatively with nature’ resides most visibly in so many traditional practices, in the indigenous knowledge systems and in the ecological history of a country. Without ecological quest it will be difficult to identify or interpret the large number of existing or in many cases demonstrations of creative practices kept out of focus. Without ecological thinking it will also be impossible to transfer those precious knowledge models to other locations of need. Ecological thinking is against domination prevalent in the human society, rich minority domineering over impoverished majority and even domination of humankind over nature. Ecological thinking, 87



on the contrary, is in favour of openness (Duarte, 2007). This openness is paramount because in a closed system the power structures remain consolidated and domination cannot be challenged from within. Ecological thinking sets up a specific observer - object (nature and man) relationship where the observer looks at the larger panorama and is caring about the well-being of the masses and the ecosystem they live in. From this standpoint, ecological thinking may appear to be biased because it is pro-people, and more pointedly proexcluded. At the same time, this way it helps bring out the design that deceives the common persons from receiving their necessary and legitimate share of resources. It also tries to understand and redefine prevailing entitlements and works towards rationalising the grammar of allocation and distribution allowed in the existing public arrangements. Ecological thinking helps setting up of democratic institutions through a continuous awareness campaign of rights and duties of ecosystem residents. I shall get back to Burda. Two questions used to agitate my mind: a. How could they make difficult problems look so simple? b. What kind of thinking brought the community together physically and mentally, and where could they aspirate most of their aspirations? What was that invisible bonding that reigned supreme for more than seven decades? The difficult problems were related to distribution of water, 88



unifying the villagers to give labour for the maintenance of the canal system free of cost, trust in the ability of collective leadership, complete transparency in expenditure of earnings without maintaining any perfidious instruments like cashbook and auditor’s statement and finally, political interference kept in abeyance. I understand that the villagers were thinking ecologically. Ecological thinking forms the basis of irrigation ecology. Irrigation ecology assembles the units of irrigated ecosystems. It is about knowing the interrelationships among irrigation, agriculture and village society through the influence of politics, business and ethics. Is this perspective essential? There is reason to believe, after Mollinga (2003) that irrigation engineers tend to be unaware of and/ or uninterested in the way technologies are shaped by and in their turn shape institutional and other social relations. Also, an appreciation of the social dimensions of technology is generally obliterated in the economics and management professional literature on irrigation. But it is not necessarily a default of the irrigation engineers. National Commission for Integrated Water Resource Development Plan observed that ‘there is widespread data secrecy practiced in India’ (Bandyopadhyay, 2006). The Commission has also noted that ‘the secrecy maintained about water resource data for some of the basins is not only highly detrimental, but is also counterproductive. Hydrological data of all the basins need to be made available to the public on demand. Bandyopadhyay further comments that data kept confidential provides a big barrier to the growth of science and ‘protects the existing paradigm and its 89



supporters from examination on the basis of scientific validity.’ Today, irrigation engineering and management is under rigourous scrutiny. Failures, which are large in number, are increasingly and unavoidably (because of a number of discontent within the fold of governance as well as popular challenge) getting researched19. Let us have more independent reviews of the irrigation projects (not only the large ones). We have an advantage of already having a benchmark set by Bradford Morse and his team. Avoiding mistakes, we have learnt from the Narmada review (Sardar Sarovar was the title of the report) needed no knowledge of quantum physics or molecular movement of human brain. It mainly needed a empathetic mind towards nature and residents affected by the project. These are not mistakes but are forthright reflections of a mindset that decides the discourses of modern development. The task ahead is not only about having independent reviews but it is more a matter of thinking together. Let us get back to Khairabera scheme. Khairabera Irrigation Scheme was designed at a time when Burda sholoáná system of community-owned irrigation practice was working securely. We were surprised that those who designed Khairabera scheme did not seem to know about Burda. This is not a chance omission, but a conspicuous shortfall in the cognitive domain of the irrigation engineers, the lack of elementary training of looking at the bigger picture. This is a near universal trend with the irrigation engineers (very often for the bigger schemes), and deserves to be challenged. An irrigation project planning and design 19. Vaidyanathan 2002, Jairath 1999, Meinzen Dick et al 2001, Raju et al 2006, Sivamohan and Scott 2003 are just a few of the useful researches, and much more critical research is building up.

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is incomplete without incorporating local knowledge, belief and choice, how the people interact with water and soil in their agricultural practices, how they innovate, their areas of conflict and solidarity. All these are inseparable part of irrigation planning, design and management. We are trying to impress upon the confluence of engineering and ecology in the domain of irrigated ecosystems. This is why this section finds place in this book. But then it was not only in case of irrigated ecosystems. Ecology has been overlooked in the entire gamut of natural resource management in the post-colonial. We move on to discuss this.

Exploiting Natural Resources in the Post Colonial For many countries, independence days did not always bring any fundamental shift in the way natural resources were managed in the colonial times. It was not much of a celebration time for resources like water, soil, air or ecosystems like wastelands, forests, deserts or coasts. Like overnight change of the constitution and politics managing natural resources did not enter into any awakened regimes of care and farsightedness. Natural resources remained matters of thoughtless exploitation. There are excellent studies on the local peoples’ generational knowledge in their ecosystems and natural resources management in various countries. Many of such incredible knowledge systems have long history and heritage. We are waiting to know and learn many more of such researches being carried out by anthropologists, ecologists and archaeologists. But little of this traditional knowledge stock became a part of postcolonial planning. The fantasy of ‘development’ paradigm promptly took over the newly formed centres of governance and 91



thinking. There was no time to answer the elementary question – ‘development’ for whom and by whom? ‘Development’ was certainly discussed reasonably early as an idea with practical implications (Crush, 1995) but it gained ascendancy in the post World War II period. Sachs (1993) describes the modern development doctrine as one introduced by Harry Truman, the American President. On 20th January 1949, in his inauguration speech before US Congress, President Harry Truman described the areas of poorer countries of the world as ‘underdeveloped areas’. An indelible sham of a concept was established, the remarkable aura of diverse traits, knowledge systems, worldviews were flattened instantaneously, from polychromatic to monochromatic. ‘That Truman coined a new term was not a matter of accident but the precise expression of a world-view: for him all the peoples of the world were moving along the same track, some faster, some slower, but all in the same direction. The Northern countries, in particular the US, were running ahead, while he saw the rest of the world – with its absurdly low per capita income – lagging far behind. An image that the economic societies of the North had increasingly acquired about themselves was thus projected upon the rest of the world: the degree of civilisation in a country is to be indicated by the level of its production. Starting from that premise, Truman conceived of the world as an economic arena where nations compete for a better position on the GNP scale. No matter what ideals inspired Kikuyus, Peruvians or Filipinos, Truman recognised them only 92



as stragglers whose historical task was to participate in the development race and catch up with the lead runners. Consequently, it was the objective of development policy to bring all nations into the arena and enable them to run in the race.’ (Sachs 1993)

Observers, ecologists included, sounded the first signals of warning. They were uncomfortable with the way natural resources were understood and plundered by the coveted march of development, leaving out the questions of distribution, which caused famine. Thirty thousand Bangladeshis died in 1974 due to non-availability of PL-480 foodgrains at the shores of Bangla ports (Sobhan, 1981). After a few decades, we got a smarter doctrine: ‘sustainable development’. But plundering of natural resources has not been stopped. Smokers are smoking as usual in spite of decade long statutory warning that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Human attitudes can be baffling. Warning of specialists, doctors or environmentalists can fall flat. Threats like, you can have cancer or the whole human race can disappear, time and again misses the target, inexplicably. Media supremos know this better. They continue to give competing weightage to the stories of death due to hunger and how Hollywood heroine uses her knife and fork. Thirty per cent of food produced over the world is wasted, reports FAO (2013), and yet we are developing sustainably. There is a bigger panorama. Ecologists try to capture its different facets. Food is produced to reduce hunger, we know. This is just one description. The dominant description, though not overtly noticeable, is that every grain of food produced fetches mounting 93



profits. Food is not produced to reduce hunger but to enhance business, no matter whether it is consumed or not. Very few products absorb so many crucial resources. We are at least aware of the fact that the prime-mover for this production chain is corporate greed and that is the dominant description. We are discussing a post-colonial scenario. Even the advanced idea of adaptive management system (Walters and Holling, 1990) seems to be naïve to meet the challenge of corporate business around natural resources. Hard thinking is often contingent. Description of a produce when it comes to the market is done by a group of professionals to serve the interest of the holders of the business, keeping the real producers estranged. Let us consider a few examples. A drying water-body or a river attracts encroachers. What the society knew as a resource belonging to all those residing in a specific area, will not remain so any more. Controls are loosening and relaxing to allow privatisation of the river banks where water no longer reaches. Privatisation of drying river beds is rampant. These are new areas of subjective challenge that ecologists have as beckoning frontiers. But the trend is not restricted to riverine ecosystems only. A gainful experience will be to visit Kutch, a coastal district in Gujarat, India. Kutch is a unique ecosystem or a collective of diverse ecosystem types. Located in Gujarat, it is a semi-arid area with tropical monsoon climate along India’s west coast, stretching for about 350 kms. Agriculture is difficult for lack of water. The people who live here, perforce rely upon the Commons for their survival, which 94



consist of mangroves, the estuaries, the Rann, scrub forests and wastelands20. This is why in this area only 20 per cent land is privately owned. It is not agriculture but raising livestock animals that the people here depend upon. Banni grasslands, one of India’s largest remaining grassland ecosystems, continues to provide livelihood for Maldharis who are the dominant population here. All of them are engaged in livestock rearing. In fact the total number of cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats and camels exceeds that of human population living in the area. In January 201121 a ten member team named ‘Perspectives’, a Delhi-based independent and non-funded research group of students and teachers working on issues of social, political and economic relevance, visited Mundra Taluka of Kutch district. Mundra taluka has the highest concentration of rural people in the entire Kutch coast and is also a place where about 10,000 fishermen live. The research group was informed by the local people that ‘until 1998, this particular bandher22 was located at another place which now hosts a private port and other backup facilities owned by the Adani Group, a household name in the region, and, as can be expected, not at all for benign reasons. According to the fishermen, when they were first made to leave their bandher, they had been 20. A Common Property Resource refers to resource collectively owned and managed by a well-defined group of users. Ideally governed by a common property regime, i.e. a system of established rights, duties, controls and punishments for violations agreed by the user group to ensure equity and avoid overexploitation.For a more extensive theoretical discussion of the Commons, see Gibson, Ostrom and McKean (2000) . 21. The first exhaustive socio-economic survey on the Commons in India in the post-Independence scenario, was published by Narpat S Jodha in 1986. A landmark study, it established beyond doubt that the poor people’s access to the Commons was being threatened as land was being appropriated for a variety of purposes, including for land reform. Commercialisation was certainly a factor, but the qualitative 2011 study by the Perspectives team on corporations and the Commons shows that the destructive potential of market has expanded manifold. Of course, abundant scholarly work on the Commons in India exists, see for example Gadgil and Guha (1992, 2000), Srivastava and Kothari (2012), to name a few. 22. Temporary fishing settlement.

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promised a compensation of `1 lakh per boat by the company. However, even this sum, which might seem paltry in exchange for the loss of a century-long habitat and occupation, was never delivered fully. Also, the company is currently under the process of expanding their Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in the area where Juna bandher is situated, which will further uproot fishing families there and in other neighbouring bandhers.’ This is just about the tip of an iceberg. The iceberg remains outside the scope of this small book. ‘Commons’ is a seriously researched area. Commons scholars, as they are called are well-entrenched in this academic turf. Who listens to them in this part of the world? Our leading environmental journals compulsively carry Adani Group’s advertisement. All great environmental conferences rely upon corporate donations and this is well accepted. In the business in biodiversity, developing countries are perpetual losers. International conservation agencies fund liberally to erect eminent signboards of bio-diversity hotspots, most of them in the developing countries, even host coveted conferences in distant islands whereas international trade drives biodiversity threats in developing countries. Nature, Volume 486, 7th June 2012 issue published an intensive research description by of Professor Manfred Lenzen (University of Sydney) and his globally spread team. The results ‘emphasize the importance of examining bio-diversity loss as a global systemic phenomenon,’ and ‘threats to species are often facilitated by supply chains involving more than two countries or producers, and majority supply chains originate in developing countries rich in biodiversity.’ Among the net importing countries – 96



the developed countries – 44 per cent of their biodiversity footprints are linked to imports produced outside their boundaries. We drink coffee never knowing that it is threatening ‘species in Mexico, Columbia and Indonesia.’ In fact the research has come out with fear-inspiring findings. Examining exporters and importers in unison shows that primarily the USA, the European Union and Japan are the main final destinations of biodiversityimplicated commodities. German imports are linked to 395 species threats, and Malaysian exports to 276 species threats. Malaysia exports palm oil, rubber and cocoa affecting 135 species (through their plantation agriculture) whereas Indonesia exports rubber, coffee, cocoa and palm oil affecting 294 species including Panthera tigris, the Sumatran serow, Capricornis sumatraensis, and Sir David’s longbeaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi (Lenzen et al, 2012) We still know many foresters who hold it in high esteem for having chased a forest dweller out of the forest in the name of protecting biodiversity. Who bears the brunt of such resource extraction? Regarding India, former President late K. R. Narayanan made some pertinent comments. At the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of India becoming a Republic, in 2001, the President Narayanan remarked: ...The march of development is having different kinds of impact on different sections of our people. It tends to widen the existing inequalities and create new inequalities. The already marginalized sections, the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, 97



are the greatest sufferers in this process... Let it not be said of India that this great Republic, in a hurry to develop itself, is devastating the green mother earth and uprooting our tribal populations... A great socialist leader had once said that a great man in a hurry to change the world who knocks down a child, commits a crime...

Mineral extraction has attracted international attention and mining has historically trammelled on the tribal peoples’ customary rights of forest use. In the latest episode on bauxite mining in Niyamgiri hills in Odisha (a state in India), London-based aluminium giant Vedanta was granted permission initially to mine for bauxite23, on tribal lands, against their worshipping practices of traditional deity Niyam Raja. Subsequently, following opposition by the tribals as well as judicial alacrity, the permission was revoked. Niyamgiri shot into prominence when, on 18th April 2013, the Supreme Court of India, in an epoch-making verdict asked the Odisha Government to seek consent of the villages on legal ground under FRA (Forest Rights Act of 2006), that ‘primitive tribal groups’ have a customary right to worship the mountains. The apex court further said that the FRA has been enacted conferring powers on the gram sabha (lowest level of local self government in India) constituted under the Act to protect community resources, individual rights, cultural and religious rights. Underscoring the legal imperative for the gram sabha referendums, the court opined that the religious freedom guaranteed to Scheduled Tribes and the Traditional Forest Dwellers 23. The investment related to the project in context was about `50,000 crores for bauxite mining and an aluminium refinery as an obvious addendum.

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under Articles 25 and 26 of the Indian Constitution (Jena, 2013). Production and Consumption of Bauxite in India 25

Million tonnes

20 15 10 5 0

2007-08

2008-09

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

Years Production

Consumption

Source: Indian Bureau of Mines The consumption figure for 2011-12 is not available

Above table is drawn on the basis of data available from Indian Bureau of Mines. India’s production has always been more than its requirement. We have 3480 million tonnes of bauxite available. I refrain from getting into elementary arithmetic to impress upon the readers that we do not need to expand our bauxite mining base. Indian industries lament that domestic consumption of aluminium is about one-tenth of the global average of 11.2kg per capita. Ecologists will conclude that that is not any indicator to unsustainable living. Not surprisingly, at a public rally in March 2013, former Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh called for a moratorium on bauxite mining for the next 20 years. This was said in the context of opening up of over 460 million tonnes of deposits in Andhra Pradesh for exploitation by refineries within the fold of power. Jairam Ramesh has said everything. Nevertheless, bauxite mining is likely to get newer and newer allocations. 99



Sustainability of superprofit will prevail upon the concern that the President of India showed in his 2001 Republic Day address. Tribals may wither away a few years earlier than they thought they would. Exploitation of natural resources is not just entrenched in deeper questions of equity and social justice, it brings up for examination the flip side of ecological thinking, which is compulsively destructive, as the above examples show. But the outcomes of the above examples are largely visible, whereas the next sub-section focuses on surreptitious and deeply detrimental resource extraction.

Plants, shoots and leaves: Mobilising the obscure Description of nature changes from past to present, also from one place to another place. It can be in an evolutionary way or it can be a big leap. Our ancestors thought that sun revolves around the earth. But, this description changed and we know that the earth revolves around the sun. For about 300 years, natural resources were considered to be inexhaustible. The descriptions changed. We now distinguish between non-renewable and renewable resources like sunshine. We know non-renewable resources are getting exhausted, unless recycled. This change of description of nature resulted in a paradigm shift. We are now concerned about the limits to growth. Description of an object or an event can differ and can even pose conflicting stands. This depends on the position the observer takes. For one kind of description, a wetland is an ecosystem that recharges groundwater, irrigates agriculture and is a habitat for birds, fishes, 100



plants and a large number of water-loving life forms. It is renewable. Another description of wetland finds this as a convenient open space to accommodate real estate. This is non-renewable. Conflicting description of nature is an order rather than an exception. New descriptions thus result in new projects. In this section we are discussing one such new project. Technical definition of the project is ‘biodiversity prospecting project’. Generally people do not associate the term prospecting with philanthropy or nature care. Usually a financial interest is associated with the word prospecting. Prospecting biodiversity is precisely such an entity. The project is about incisive search for commercially potential species. These species collected through mysterious route maps, will undergo processing. After processing the processed substance reappears as medicine or cosmetics (herbal derivative as a common denominator) for which a huge number of buyers are ready to buy. A new world of choice is ferociously being manipulated at the tail end of the project. Biodiversity prospecting has completely changed the inter relationship between corporate finance and environmental conservation. Prospecting biodiversity is a project that displays only the tip of the iceberg of an emerging worldview. In theory it has reassembled the perceptions of biodiversity. Whereas in practice, it has oriented the very direction of conserving biodiversity, surreptitiously. It is new age capitalism where conventional resources become older versions. Plant, shoots and leaves create a new backdrop, a total explosion of media blitzkrieg in changing choice. Everybody likes herbal. Conserve biodiversity to preserve green mines upon our earth: new 101



identity for our common heritage. A silent merger of conservation projects and corporate leadership. Ecological history is set to begin a new chapter, new investigating and invite new scholarships. We now need ‘new narratives of life and culture’ (Escobar, 1996). How does all these matter to a learner in ecosystem management? No guidelines are available as yet. We will have to sit and think. We can start with a popular project for conserving biodiversity – developing the peoples’ biodiversity register. This is a new concept proposed by eminent thinkers and handheld by students and teachers of conservation biology. Controversies relating to this document have also surfaced. On 12th November 2012, K.P. Laladhas, Member Secretary, Kerala State Biodiversity Board (KSBB) wrote a letter to the Principal Secretary, Department of Environment, which said local bodies had the responsibility to prevent bio-piracy (The Hindu 13th November 2012). This was in relation to Peringamala panchayat allowing UNDP team of officials access to the Peoples Bio-Diversity Register (PBR). “By doing so, the panchayat could have compromised the precious biological assets that were painstakingly documented by the Biodiversity Management. At a time when bio-piracy has become a matter of grave concern for countries across the world, this issue has proved to be an eye-opener for us” said Laladhas. Few questions can be listed and these are all common sense matters:  UNDP is not a private corporate agency and the team in

question included one MoEF (Ministry of Environment and 102



Forests) official and chairman of the State Biodiversity Board. Why then it is unjust to pass on the the register is not clear.  Why did the member-secretary KSBB become so proactive

against a panchayat to stop bio-piracy, had he not had any hidden agenda? The way the matters of biodiversity rights are handled all over the world, it will be difficult to get the answers of these two seemingly straightforward convictions. On the part of the villagers, the custodians of primary knowledge of biodiversity stock, a lot more alertness is warranted. Ecosystem managers can campaign for these tops so that the persons who matter can remain alert. In fact dialogues and conversations on the topic of alertness can be fruitful to imbibe watchfulness including the designs of disguised outsiders24 in taking away their age-old, generation-wise held ownerships on biodiversity stock upon their own land and water. There is an eerie uneasiness. Should the interest of the country of origin remain a matter of controversy allowing the priceless stock to shift from its roots or a no-nonsense regulation be clamped? We have perforce to wait. This can be a complementary, if not add-on project to the existing biodiversity register making project. It has the potential to set up an interface between the conservation campaigners and the village volunteers. Survival of species has become a matter of interest among powerful players that serve their profit. It is not time yet to say that wars will 24. One example of such watchfulness is found in Sandh Karmari, a village in central Bastar. For details, refer the mining diaries of Madhu Ramnath, 12 July 2013, in environmental magazine Down to Earth.

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be fought to establish ownership of species or more importantly its derivatives but whether it will naturally remain with the country of origin is a matter of conjecture. The spectre of getting lifted out or being forced out is already prominent while dealing with environmental refugees. We step into that discussion in the next section.

Fatal exclusions and disappearing identity “By taking away land from the poor, governments are actually taking away their livelihood...Does the government need to acquire thousands of acres of land for private companies?” Justice V Gopala Gowda, Supreme Court of India

To exclude is a normative grammar for the civilised society. No questions asked about how much of civility is ingrained in this. The discourses on exclusion are not always well-meaning and can also be tainted. After all, their children and our children are not same an uneasy reflection deep down in the psyche. There will be no overnight metamorphosis. However, positive thinking, positive research and positive collaborations are on the rise. All these are important for learners in ecosystem management. Academically it will be debilitating to avoid this social factor which influences ecosystems and their functioning. Exclusions are not necessarily caste-based, colour-based, faith-based, place-based or genderbased. Superprofit pulverises any dissent - even from its initiators and simply excludes them. 104



Knowing about exclusion may preferably begin where it has happened most clamorously, and has inflicted irreversible ecosystem damage. We begin with an incident where a fatal sense of priority of forest guards25 caused loss of life of ten coastal fishermen. The incident took place close to Jambudwip, one of the islands of Sundarbans that is in deltaic West Bengal (the easternmost state of India). On 12th November 2002, in the Bay of Bengal there was a cyclone. A group of fishermen were returning desperately driving their fishing boats. As they were close to the source of Jambu island (south-west of Sundarbans area), trying to enter Vishalakshi creek through which they knew how to negotiate their boats, the armed forest guards refused them landing.26 Their argument was that they were protecting Jambudwip, an island falling within the forest reserved for mangroves and tigers. Though recorded history proclaims that the island has never been inhabited by any tiger. The sea was still rough. The boats turned, twisted and capsized27. On a piece of brick and mortar pedestal, erected unimpressively, the author saw the names of the fishermen who died on the spot28. 25. Following the Supreme Court Order of 1996 in T N Godhavarman Vs Union of India and the subsequent May 3, 2002 circular of the Ministry of Environment & Forests directing the State Governments to evict the encroachers who have encroached upon forest lands after 1980, the Forest Department, Government of West Bengal banned the fishing and fish drying activity in and around the island of Jambudwip. Since October 2002, the fishermen engaged in this activity were unable to approach the island. Of course, these fishermen have been engaged in seasonal fishing activity for four months in a year (October – February), since 1955 (Raychaudhuri, 1980). The Forest Department had issued the fishermen passes both before and after 1980, and had earlier never considered the fishers as ‘encroachers.’ 26. One surviving fisherman narrated this story of what happened on November 12. He narrated “It was a normal day right in the middle of the fishing season. November 12, 2002. There was no warning. Air weather reports predicted a clear day. Suddenly, the weather turned rough. We knew that we had been caught unawares by a cyclone.” “Some boats headed to Jambudwip to escape the cyclone. When we neared the creek, we were turned away by armed policemen and forest guards. They just pointed their guns at us. The government had erected pillars on the creek and iron chains were drawn from one pillar to another.” For more details, see http://www.tehelka.com/story_main7.asp?filename=Ne102304in_the_eye.asp. 27. Unsurprisingly, this event was sparsely reported in the media. The West Bengal Forest Department had violated Coastal Regulation Zone 1 notification by erecting pillars on the creek. For an overview, see the report of the NGO fact finding team http://aidindia.org/main/content/view/90/474/1/1/. Also, see Sebastian Matthew’s Jammed in Jambudwip (Samudra, March 2003). 28. The names of the deceased fishermen are Ratan Das, Anil Das, Haribilas Das, Anup Kumar Halder, Sanjay Patra, Uttam Das, Gopal Pramanik, Dipak Pramanik, Biswajit Das and Bhola Ghosh.

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How could ten fishermen, all in the name of forest conservation legalities be forced to die by the ruthless forest guards, solitary custodians of all we know about preserving forest when there was a clear option to save their life? A well informed documentary film29 was produced to understand the entrenched conflicts resulting out of the forest department’s holy agenda to save tigers. Beyond that a few reports were circulated. No serious research or fact-finding was planned by any institution or university departments. The matter sank into oblivion reasonably quickly. Media was largely indifferent. We get to unearth the happening in Jambudwip (or Jambu island) from the painstaking work of anthropologist Bikash Raychaudhuri, who was with the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI), and spent the season of October 1967 to February 1968 in the fishing boats of the fishermen. ASI published his work in a book titled The Moon and Net in 1980. Jambudwip was being used by fishermen leaving the shore mostly from Kakdwip (located in the mainland). Fishermen used a part of the island temporarily for four months for fish drying every year. Locational suitability on the part of the shore as drying bed was understood on the basis of their traditional knowledge and mastery over coastal ecosystem and marine ecology. Their presence protected the mangroves because the fishermen needed the plants to reduce the dash of winds over the fish drying beds that was all sand. The mangroves and the fishermen lived in the same family of nature and complemented each other by being there. The fishermen learned the significance of mangrove 29. The film, titled ‘Under the Sun’ was directed by Rita Banerjee, and can be accessed at http://dustyfootindia.com/?p=406

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conservation earlier than most of the forest department officials30.

Source: Census of India (1991)

In their deposition before a Central Empowered Committee formed by the order of the Supreme Court, the Forest Department professed to have taken the uncompromising stand because they accused the fishermen of clearing the mangrove vegetation. Their proof of evidence was National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) maps for the period of 1981 to 2001. According to Dr. L. K. Banerjee, Retired Joint Director, Botanical Survey of India, who has worked on mangroves of Sundarbans for more than 30 years, 30. The fishermen had told the fact finding team that in the second week of January 2003, they had caught three persons with a boatload of mangroves and had taken them to the police camp on Jambudwip, but no FIR was lodged and they were released.

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‘Jambudwip has successive stages of vegetation, comprising mainly Avicennia species of mangroves, the species of grass like Porteraesia coarctata and Phoenix paludosa. The species diversity on the island is not that significant.’ In his article ‘Jammed in Jambudwip’, Sebastian Mathew, Programme Director of International Collective in Support of Fish Workers, has commented “the satellite imageries of Jambudwip for the period 1981 to 2001 from the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) furnished to the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) by the Forest Department as ‘irrefutable proof ” of mangrove destruction show dense mangrove vegetation coverage except in areas that are allegedly cleared by fishermen. Moreover, since high resolution satellite images clearly showing deforestation (in Jambudwip) to the detail that the NRSA images are claiming to portray have been produced in India only from 1998, the authenticity of the images as irrefutable proof for the period prior to 1998 needs to be independently verified scientifically”. Besides, the NGO fact finding mission mentioned earlier also says in its report that the NRSA experts have clearly stated that ‘the raw data was provided to the SBR (Sundarban Biosphere Reserve), the data was not processed by them nor any interpretation of the images were given’. The Forest Department made their misconceived interpretations, without appropriate input from the NRSA. Even when there was a dialogue going on between the Fisheries Department and Forest Department, forest guards set fire to the temporary hutments of the fishermen. So, ten fishermen killed, temporary hutments razed, and use of the island stopped forcibly. 108



The illogical stubbornness to protect the forest dislocated the livelihood of more than 10,000 inhabitants. This is a quick summary of appalling hyperactivism of the Forest Department. What happened to Jambudip? Who were those born equals, the faceless thousands who lost their identity? Is there any reason to pause and look back for the learners and researchers in ecology and ecosystem management? Available information about their practices may not be voluminous but it is certainly sufficient to understand them, and their outstanding performance as ecologists and ecosystem managers. Jambudwip was a seasonal fish drying place carefully chosen by the fishermen for a number of natural patterns. It had a creek, Vishalakshi creek, which we named at the beginning, which allows a self-landing port for the boats, it allows a convenient stream for primary washing of the fishes before laid for drying, it had on one side a mangrove forest that protected the temporary hutments and fish drying beds from the wrath of coastal wind. Serendipity did not settle the fishermen in Jambudwip for this temporary fish drying activity. It was a result of careful survey of all the islands in proximity of the fishing fields in the deeper sea. The fishermen themselves were aware of the intricate details of the behaviour of the sea, the fish shoals, when the sea is relatively calm and when exactly it is going to be fierce and unmanageable. Anthropologist Bikash Raychaudhuri did a splendid work in detailing up the knowledge of these fishermen after years of scrupulous research. As Jambudwip was forcibly delinked from the total practice of traditional coastal fishing it resulted in the eventual collapse of the entire system. This was 109



because the fishermen could not find any other suitable island area large enough for fish drying31. While introduction and multiplication of counterproductive trawler fishing which is considered inimical to sustain local fish stock - has continued unabated, the sustainable fishing practice of the natural ecologists, who had almost flawless knowledge of the unquiet bay waters, gradually ceased to operate. This is a textbook example of deliberate destruction of an ecologically sound resource practice to ostensibly preserve the sanctity of the Forest Act of a country, when the same Act has often been violated by the Department itself. In India the author is unaware if any school in ecology or any eminent ecologist uses The Moon and Net as reading or reference material. Ecology has a much bigger turf to observe and learn. Within a short distance from Jambudwip, not far back in history, it was all in the name of tigers that ‘as many as 17,000 people died’ (Mallick, 1999) at Marichjhapi island in the Sundarban delta over the period of January-May 1979. The declared reason for the forcible eviction of the refugees was ‘illegal encroachment on Reserve Forest land and on the state-and World Wildlife Fundsponsored tiger protection project.’ The earliest academic analysis about the Marichjhapi refugees and their massacre by the erstwhile government over a period of five months (January – May 1979) came from Nilanjana Chatterjee’s unpublished thesis (Midnight’s Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation, 1992). Though the 31. Discussed in a meeting that this author held with some of the leading fishermen who are still alive and somehow active. The meeting was held on 29th September 2012 in Kakdwip, South - 24 Parganas, West Bengal.

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contemporary media in Bengal published about the massacre, academic attention has been sparse (Mallick 1999, Jalais 2005), and Amitav Ghosh’s 2003 novel The Hungry Tide drew popular attention to the Marichjhapi massacre. Outside of this, however, intellectual attention to this immense scale of massacre has been sorely lacking, leave alone any incisive analysis. Within one year of settling in Marichjhapi, the refugees converted a barren island into a liveable place, an ecosystem that did not take any external assistance in the form of knowledge, fund or subsidy. The refugees, who came from East Bengal (Bangladesh after the Liberation war of 1971) had by their own efforts created 12 settlements, laid out roads and drainage channels to prevent waterlogging, as well as built a school, dispensary, smithies, a pottery, cigarette (bidi) workshops, a bakery, seven fisheries, boat building yards, 170 boats, four marketplaces with 300 stalls and the beginning of a major dike system to hold back the tide’ (Chatterjee, 1992 in Mallick, 1999). When the refugees landed at Marichjhapi in April 1978, they declared that they need not wait for any aid from the Government towards their resettlement there. They only demanded that they be allowed to stay at Marichjhapi as citizens of the Union of India (Sen, 2009). As seen above, their acumen had made them create suitable living conditions and within a few months, they had much to show regarding appropriate living in a less known ecosystem which was difficult for them to survive. In a written Memorandum to the Members of Parliament while 111



visiting Marichjhapi prior to their eviction, the island inhabitants noted “We started our new lives with a full arrangement of daily consumption such as living house, school, markets, roads, hospital, tube wells etc. We managed to find our sources of income, also establishing cottage industry such as Bidi Factory, Bakery, Carpentry, Weaving Factory etc and also built embankment nearly 150 miles long covering an area of nearly 30 thousand acres of land to be used for fishing, expecting an income of `20 crore per year. That may easily help and enable us to stand on our own feet. Moreover, after one or two years washing by rain, preventing saline water to flow over those lands will yield a lot of crops such as paddy and other vegetables. We have distributed lands in Marichjhapi amongst six thousand refugee families in the shape of paras, villages and anchals32. Nearly a thousand families build their houses in different plots in group system and have been residing there for about a year.’ In effect, the government undertook the eviction on behalf of the environmental movement of the time and while not involved in the eviction or Marichjhapi massacre, the environmental movements achieved a victory from the result, while certainly staying away from publicising the massacre (Mallick, 1999). Very few islanders in Sundarbans have developed on their own or have been provided with an appropriate environment by learned outsiders, or a liveable ecosystem management model for their 32. Local term used to mean a specific area bigger than a neighbourhood but much lesser than a standard village administrative unit

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sustainability and flourish. Fund and outside guidance are almost free-flowing. There has been a plethora of institutions, government departments, World Bank and NGOs of diverse size ranging from World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (for sometime) to local players. Professedly, all have been collaborating to make the life of the island people better. We know the results and local residents realise it better. Are we sure we have nothing to learn from the refugees of Marichjhapi, do they not have any model to talk to us, in pregnant silence, about ecosystem management? The Marichjhapi massacre was a direct outcome of the conflict between environmental preservation and peoples’ rights and goes to the heart of the trade-offs between human rights and environmental preservation. There are costs from environmental preservation to people who are displaced as a result or who stand to lose access to land. In this case, the poorest people paid with their lives while the benefit went to animals, tourists and tour operators (who brought tourists to visit the Reserve Forests, see Mallick, 1999). This is a trend in many underdeveloped countries in the tropical South, and India especially abounds in such examples of eviction - tribals make way for projects, getting uprooted from their habitable base. Guha (1997) writing about Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka, where tribal inhabitants from long ago were being doggedly refused forest use by the Karnataka Forest Department points to this discriminating approach. He said the tribals wonder why, when they are being evicted, is The Taj – the largest hotel chain in India – being invited by forest department officials to build a resort inside the Park? Guha succinctly points out: ‘Conservationists too, want a world which 113



includes the tiger and the rainforest ...Their plea, however, is to recognise wilderness as a distinctively North Atlantic brand of antihuman environmentalism... Protected areas in the countries of the South must take full cognisance of the rights of the people who have lived in (and oftentimes cared for) the forest long before it became a National Park or World Heritage Site.’ We shall now try to learn from a different kind of ecological challenge. This challenge is emerging from increasingly painful experiences of a larger and larger population of project oustees, often known as environmental refugees. For example, dams, large, medium and small have been built around the world. Promoters of large dams are now going slow due to undesirable fallouts in the downstream ecosystems. Dams produce a great number of oustees, often with paltry compensation. Similarly, most mines drive out the local population, invariably rural and largely less prosperous. These days we are also coming across Special Economic Zones which require throwing out of the landholders. However everything seems to be in order so long alternative law or some kind of ‘housing’ is provided to the oustees. Environment Departments or funding agencies (like the World Bank and etc) are happy to see such provisions in paper to allow the project activities to start. What have been the experiences of those rehabilitated? Are they doing well, are they happy or are they struggling, unable to cope with the new agenda of life imposed upon them? Jaideep Hardikar, whose book is one of the few to be devoted exclusively to the plight of the 114



oustees of development projects, says the book-writing experience changed his perspectives and he was able to drop many of his preconceived notions and in fact tried to look from the other side, the side of the displaced, a subaltern perspective. All such descriptions are historically significant. For an observer, this 180degree change is essential, since it enables the author to see that the: ‘…Process of uprooting is painful. Emotional, economic and psycho-sociological issues apart, diseases plague the oustees in their new homes. Corrupt bureaucrats eat into their cash compensation awards. Hundreds of them don’t even get a penny. Fraudulent banks cheat them. Family feuds emerge. In places where the people are re-settled, host villagers become antagonistic to them. Hunger comes knocking on their doors almost instantly. Mental health problems are common. Women evictees struggle to fend for themselves. In no time their village bonds crumble and relations break. Many yearn for no more than basic food and shelter. Some migrate to cities to start their lives afresh; some manage to restart their lives; most fail.’

Ecologists need to take this view into account. Hemadri et al (2008) in their paper Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India, described the fate of an oustee that shakes our entire belief structure: Two decades after his uprootment from the land of his ancestors, Nanhe Ram still speaks little. Looking much older 115



than his sixty years, he sits for long hours outside his dilapidated hut in the resettlement village of Aitma. He has no land, no cattle, no sons; it is his ageing wife who labours all day in the forests or fields of the big farmers of the village, to keep the fire burning in their kitchen. There is anguish but little recrimination, as he talks haltingly of the past. The first time they heard about the large dam that would submerge his village, he recalls, was when daily wages were 12 annas (which would probably be in the mid-1950s). Their village, like the entire region, was entirely unconnected to the outside world, and until then they had rarely encountered government officials. When men on bicycles wearing trousers and shirts would ride into their villages to speak of the dam, all the tribal residents of the village would run away in fear into the forests. He did not know then that a gigantic thermal power complex was being planned in the neighbourhood of his village, at Korba, for which the two rivers of his ancestral habitat, the Hasdeo and Bango, were to be dammed. Fifty-nine tribal villages like his were to be submerged, 20 completely and the rest partially, along with 102 square kilometres of dense sal forest, to create a vast new reservoir of 213 square kilometres. No one consulted with or even informed the 2721 families of these 59 villages, who had been condemned to be internal refugees to the cause of `national development’, about the project and how it would alter their lives so profoundly and irrevocably. Some 2318 of these families, or an overwhelming 85 per cent, were tribals or dalits, who like Nanhe Ram were the least equipped by experience, 116



temperament or culture to negotiate their new lives amidst the ruins of their overturned existence. The survey work continued for six or seven years, and it was in 1961 that the first phase of the project, for the construction of the barrage and major canal was sanctioned. Nanhe recalls the fear and excitement when a small plane flew in as part of the on-going survey work. However, it was only a decade and a half later, in 1987, that the first settlement, Nanhe’s village Aitma, was actually submerged. In the intervening years, construction continued apace, but no one from the government planned or as much as spoke with them about how they were to reconstruct their ravaged future. In 1977, a few months before their actual submergence, the farmers of Aitma were packed into a truck and driven to the divisional headquarters of Bilaspur, located in the heart of the Chhatisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh. Nanhe recalls that they arrived at the imposing office building housing the District Office in the late afternoon, and were bundled into a courtyard. An official addressed them, informing them that their village would be drowned by the dam reservoir only months later during the next monsoon, and that the government was therefore paying them the first instalment of their compensation. For Nanhe, this was a niggardly five hundred and forty rupees. When their truck returned them into their village, it was morning. They found that the local revenue officer, the tehsildar was waiting for them, to recover from their 117



compensation Nanhe’s land revenue dues. Nanhe lost to him three hundred rupees, and the remaining two hundred and forty also disappeared before long merely in day-to-day survival. During the meeting at the District Office, someone had timidly asked – But where are we to go when our village drowns in the next monsoon? The official had replied tersely – How do I know? Why don’t you go to your relatives’ homes? But some weeks later, a band of activists held a series of meetings in their village. How can they ask you to go to the homes of your relatives? – they thundered. Did your relatives build this dam? They organised demonstrations and rallies, in which many young tribals of the village also participated. Nanhe was bewildered and terrified, and he held himself aloof. Eventually, the government conceded that they would be given house sites in a resettlement colony located in the forest uplands. In the few months that remained, Nanhe made plans in his own way for the future. Where and how they would live, he did not know. He was worried first about his cow, whom they all loved. He knew that he would not be able to take care of her in the resettlement village, at a time when even keeping his wife and two daughters alive would be very hard. He also could not think of selling her, because she was like a member of the family. So he gave her to an Ahir cowherd, and promised to pay him a hundred and fifty rupees each year so that he would look after her. Nanhe continued despite all his subsequent tribulations to save and send money for the upkeep of the cow for ten years, until the cow died. 118



Just a day before the monsoon, the trucks arrived. They were given only a few hours to bundle their belongings into the trucks. They were then driven to the resettlement village, in which house plots of 0.05 acres of land each had been hurriedly cleared for them in the forest. The rains broke early, and Nanhe and his family spent the entire monsoon huddled with their few belongings under a mahua tree. In the dry spells, Nanhe struggled with building a small hut, while his wife scoured the forests for food. The remaining instalments of compensation were paid only 15 years later, in 1992. Nanhe received a cheque of two thousand rupees, which he used to repay loans to the moneylender. It was around then that for the first time, under pressure from activists, the government initiated a few livelihood programmes. Although the government has since spent some twenty million rupees in the resettlement region in recent years to belatedly provide livelihoods to the displaced families, there has been little success. Fishing in the new reservoir is dominated by outside contractors. Four million rupees were spent on a poultry farm, which ran for a few months, with 12 beneficiaries who were given 100 birds each. The birds suddenly died of some illness, and the farm closed down. Amber charkhas or spinning looms were installed, but raw material supply and marketing were erratic. The looms provided wages in fits and starts, and that too of only one rupee a day. The resettlement villages are at the periphery of the large artificial reservoir, connected by earth roads that get submerged 119



after the rains each year. In these inaccessible, remote, artificial settlements, not only are jobs hard to come by but life is very hard in other ways as well. Schools, health centres, credit cooperatives and ration shops rarely function. If someone is seriously ill during the rainy months, the only way to reach a hospital is a perilous journey of three hours aboard a small leaking dinghy. Not surprisingly, of the 208 families that had been resettled in Aitma, only 60 remain. The rest have migrated, either as encroachers in the forests or into the city slums, in desperate search of means for bare survival. Nanhe is among the few who remain, because he had neither the strength nor the hope to struggle to start life anew one more time. He sits quietly outside his hut for most of the day. But sometimes when he speaks, he says softly to anyone who is willing to hear – When I am on a boat in the middle of the reservoir, and I know that hundreds of feet below me, directly below me, at that very point, lie my village and my home and my fields, all of which are lost forever, it is then that my chest rips apart, and I cannot bear the pain….

Illegitimate exclusions, ruthless demolition of identity, demanding natural resources for conspicuous consumption and limitless lust for superprofit do not add up to describe any acceptable management of ecosystems. The way things were precipitated in 120



the above cases was in reality expressions of unethical human mind. We cannot recount all of them in India alone, let alone the rest of the world. The irony is that the discipline of ecology is excluded from being considered when the subject exclusively studies rapidly changing relations between nature, natural resources and humans. This is about a period of crisis for the human race. How many years of growing up an emerging subject can entitle itself? We had many years of forest conservation biology as emphasis area. Great number of ecosystem types and management experiences are lying unexplored. How would people know that ecology is a useful discipline for them? How can this outstanding knowledge of living broaden its miniscule constituency?

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CHAPTER 3

Improvisation and eligibility in ecosystem management Origin of ecology and ecosystem management Hunter-gatherers were the first humans who were natural ecologists. In fact they were all ecologically regimented communities. They were not literate persons but they communicated enough within themselves to retain their defence against aggressive exteriors. Most of the content of these communications, presumably, were ecological in nature. We may also call them proto-ecologists. Hunter-gatherers needed sound and practicable knowledge of the forest ecology where they were to search for their food and game and health care. Ecological variables included climate, season, forestdensity, movement of prey animals, prey-base, variation of prey habitat with monsoon and summer, availability of water. A noteworthy invention for example, was a ‘needle’ made of bone and used to tailor coats from animal hides. This discovery freed both the arms of the hunter during winter because he could wear his dress instead of wrapping the hide and holding that himself. We use needles even today. It is needless to say that the design remains the same. Research on hunter-gatherers has been carried out mainly by the archaeologists and anthropologists. We have no systematic lessons 122


IMPROVISATION AND ELIGIBILITY IN ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

in ecology from the two-million year history of the huntergatherers, the ecologists or proto-ecologists. Lessons, for example will be the culture of equitable sharing or spacing their children they allowed to themselves and such others practiced in plenty. There was no private ownership. They had no hidden personal agenda of storage or accumulation. Management is a part of living. Living with nature in a way is a kind of management. Remarkable examples of ecosystem management are exemplified in the animal kingdom. Smaller the animal more elaborate is the process of living with nature. We have not been able to reconstruct any of this, or even aimed at learning from it. This remains a minefield of research in ecosystem management surprisingly untouched by human pursuit. Humans, in their life as hunter-gatherers were ecosystem managers at rudimentary level. The task of management was rarely complex. We may call hunter-gatherers as first generation managers of their ecosystems. As they were changing into a different lifestyle, the lifestyle of agriculturists in the main, the task of management rapidly changed and became much more complex. New thinking, new innovations, new patterns, new division of labour, setting up new social relationships – all these new management challenges led to a substantial improvement in the capabilities of the human race as ecosystem managers1. That was the arrival of what we may call second generation managers of their ecosystems in human history. Some of the traits of those ecosystem managers have transcended 1. A plethora of research has put forward theories of how the transition took place from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists. Starting with the most recent, some of these will include Carey (2013), Smith, Zeder (2011), Bowles (2011), Jones and liu (2009), Kennet and Winterhalder (2006), Richerson et al (2001), Law (1996), Rindos (1980).

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even into our modern times, largely unchanged. Mainstream discipline of ecosystem management has overlooked their roots. Students of ecosystem management have their best tutorials in agricultural fields. We need a shift in pedagogy to this extent. But that will have to begin with ‘ecological history’. We briefly discuss the importance of ecological history in the next section.

Importance of ecological history Why do we need to know about ecological history in the first place? When a pharmaceutical industry carries out a study on herbs, the purpose is to develop a medicine and earn super-profit by overpricing it. Similarly, when a market research is carried out for product promotion, the purpose is visible. When an investment banker carries out risk analysis, specialised mathematics, his purpose is clear – to make more money by confusing others. Why then do we study or need to study ecological history? Invitations to conferences, academic committees, awards, all these are understandable. But then if it is all about that and very little about protecting ecosystem, then we must stop and rethink. History of mankind is the history of class struggle, Karl Marx said. We do not know2 if he had discussed about the continuous struggle humankind had with nature and the way such struggles shaped history. Understandably, during the time of Marx, nature was not an adversary as it has become today. Not much was happening to attract the notice of the thinker towards the influence of nature that shaped the history of humankind. That the humans came into 2. More recently, works of Marx that were hitherto not translated and published, are coming to light.

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being was a natural phenomenon, but that it grew, that it evolved, collaborated, fought each other, learnt to love, hate, speak, write have all been in association with and in relation to nature. All these are attributes of nature and elements of ecological history. Ecological history is something that traces in time line the human interrelationship with nature. At the first place it cannot avoid or set aside the observer’s position when she observes. How should an ecologist, begin to observe the history of the metropolitan city of Kolkata? Kolkata has two rivers, one close to it, to the west, the Hugli, a distributary of river Ganga and the other, 28km down east, river Kulti. Both these rivers reach the Bay of Bengal. The city draws its water requirement from the river Hugli and releases its wastewater to the river Kulti through an outfall canal and a unique wetland system. It has copious groundwater. The wetland system, which is shallow and absorbs enough sunlight, is a natural biological reactor treating wastewater and also extracting its nutrient through algae-bacteria symbiosis growing fish, vegetables and paddy (more details in the next chapter). This also explains why Kolkata continues to be the cheapest metropolitan city. Taking them together, the city can be defined as an ‘ecologically subsidised city’ (Ghosh, 2004). This has been an observation in ecological history. The findings changed the course of wastewater management and wetland conservation for the city of Kolkata (Ghosh, 1985, 1987). This is how purpose and position of the observer are crucial, a small example though. On a much bigger scale, Mark Elvin (Elvin, 2004) observed the ecological and environmental history of China from a unique position and brilliantly summarised his observation as follows: 125



 First, China has an unusually long record which allows tentative

answers to many questions that are hard to answer for other areas.  Second, it complements, and contrasts with the environmental

histories of other major countries and peoples. It often provides a critical analytical challenge when testing any general theory mostly formulated in some other context.  Last, it provides a perspective in which to examine the

developing environmental crisis in the People’s Republic of China today, the origins of which predate modern times. Retreat of the Elephants, where Elvin makes these observations, covered 4000 years of history and touched anything that a scholar in ecological history can possibly imagine. Ecological history requires this kind of profundity and multidimensionality. There are widely acclaimed works on environmental and ecological history, and leading journals to take forward scholarly debates in every continent (McNeill, 2003)3,4. There are also journals not specifically devoted to environmental history but consistently 3. Environmental History, a journal founded in 1976 dealt primarily with American history (less so now than before) while Britain has a counterpart in Environment and History, founded in 1995. Environment and History, published in Britain since 1995, is devoted mainly to European and European imperial subjects, with many articles on Africa, India, and Australia. These are the two most highly regarded journals. For a more extensive review on literature on environmental history, read John McNeill’s Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History (2003). For a historical account of evolution of global environmental history, see Grove and Damodaran (2009). 4. Rather than begin with journals, it will be useful to speak of history in the Indian context by first mentioning Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha's The Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India and followed up by their Ecology and Equity. Both these authors are well known in their academic territories. Both of them have taken counter-positions against Euro- North American view of ecology and environmentalism. But it must be remembered that the very definitions of ecology and environment are tentative. An attempt to differentiate between ecological and environmental history was also made by Arnold and Guha (1995). Thereafter the emphasis especially in India, has been on environmental history, marked by distinguished scholarship.

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supporting such themes, one example of which is Pacific Historical Review. Europe’s tryst with environmental history journals has come much later than America5. In Asia, the focus on environmental history in journal form began much later. All of us can learn from such scholarship when we know what we have to learn or are trying to search for. But on hindsight, such scholarly works, related to the history of ecology and ecosystems have very little impact on the future of sustainable management of human living on this earth. Research and studies in ecological history are influenced essentially by historians, natural scientists, biologists, archaeologists and anthropologists but very little by ecologists leveraging on the knowledge of the ordinary. ‘Ecology’, Paul Sears observed, while commenting on contemporary curriculum ‘is reserved until toward the end of a major program and so exists largely for the elite… the benefits of ecology should come largely through wide popular understanding, this is a serious matter’ (Sears, 1964). Even after 50 years of this historic expression we are waiting for such responsible academics in ecology and ecological history to dominate the areas of application. Take this recent example. ‘We are illiterate people. But finally after 25 years, we are happy that the babus (officials and experts of archaeological directorate, Government of India) have shown interest in our findings. We want the excavation to start as early as possible,’ said Biswajit (Times of India, Kolkata, October 30, 5. Annales: Economies, societes, civilizations (since 1994 Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales) is widely regarded as the ‘most admired and influential history journal of the twentieth century, but surprisingly has neglected environmental history. About eight decades ago, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch had set up Annales school with the initiative to legitimise, for professional historians, new fields of inquiry that had cattle, trees, diseases, and bodily functions (or at least their results) in them. Bloch in his acclaimed book ‘French Rural History: Its Essential Characteristics’ (London, 1952) is credited with adopting an ecological approach characterised by an appreciation of the fundamental importance of environmental factors to an understanding of agrarian society.

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2013)6. Biswajit and Bimal Shaw, two school dropout brothers, fishermen by profession, living in a small hamlet in Gobardhanpur in Pathar Pratima Block of South 24-Parganas district, West Bengal, have collected artefacts, which are set to rewrite the history of Sunderbans, if not the whole of Bengal. Initial comments from the directorate confirmed that human settlements existed at Gobardhanpur and its vicinity as early as 3rd century BC. It lasted till 3AD and after a gap, the relics indicate a new civilisation from 7AD. The Times of India report further pointed out that the discovery will ‘rekindle a long running standing debate on British colonial historiography, which has always implied that the inaccessible Sunderbans were brought under the human habitation by the British through the much talked about ‘lot and plot’ method. The antiquities clearly point out to a much older indigenous civilisation, thus calling for a new debate’. This is how formal scientific enquiries are frame-worked to extract the benefits of ecological perception ‘through popular understanding’ as envisaged by Sears. But there is a caveat. Directorate of Archaeology is a government outfit, where scientists are well paid and have assured pensions. It took them so many years just to respect and recognise the ecological intuitions of the fishermen brothers. ‘This attitude of dithering to recognise what is valuable (emphasis author’s) is not endemic to an archaeologist’, remarked my geographer friend. The error lies with our system of knowing in general and is not confined to any one discipline, and must be rectified if our knowledge of ecological history is purported for better living. 6. To read the whole story, click: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-1030/kolkata/43526452_1_sunderbans-two-fishermen-tiger-reserve

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Larger and larger areas on earth are not paying any heed to what ecologists are saying. Is it at all important to listen to ecologists? This is where ecological history of more than two million years of humankind provides a few answers. Hunter-gatherers were there on earth (we have a few communities still living), for more than two million years. Thereafter agriculturists and whatever we are, have just been for about last 10-15 thousand years. ‘Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest living lifestyle in human history. In contrast we are still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it’ (Diamond, 1987). They knew at least this much in their relations with nature, to what extent they could obtain from nature, how to relate to each other in sharing the food and all other resources though there were conflicts at times. They also knew not to slow down below certain limits of alacrity. Most importantly they did not allow inequity to settle in the name of rapid growth. There were innovations, few of them path-breaking, the needle for example. But the benefits of innovation were equally shared. I have no intention to suggest a reverse journey to the time of hunter-gatherers but I definitely intend to learn a few core lessons from those who practiced ecological living for far too long a period of history. Do we learn from these lessons from ecological history as important? Are we ready to choose rising inequity together with accelerated growth? Are we ready to choose between intensely polarized community and a world free from unfair competition, between mining rights for capital giants and the God-forsaken tribals, set to lose their rights to live respectfully, freely and with pride? These are just a few triggers7. 7. An interesting addition to this list of learning could be how we eat today. Lambert (2004) speaks of how the change from hunter-gatherer to sedentary agriculture has spoiled our eating habits and encouraged overeating, diseases and related ills.

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Ecological history should not remain a turf for the scholars waiting for their research to be accepted by the editorial boards and printed in the journals. It has to be very much about the interest it can create among the ordinary. It demands a shift in the way the work of ecological history as it is generally understood. It will require a change in the process of learning as well in teaching – a paradigm shift in the pedagogy that will initiate the ordinary, create interest in them, revisit human relations with nature and unlearn the decadent lessons of propaganda tsunami. For centuries, ordinary people have set examples of remarkable ecological footprints. In fact an important part of ecological history has been the history of ecological improvisation. We shall open up into more details on this ecological activity in the next section.

Ecosystem Improvisation – A festival of the invisibles ‘I realised there is a huge difference between working for the community and working with the community.’ Farhad Contractor, Sambhaav Trust

Ecosystem improvisation is not a part of the conventional text in ecology or ecosystem management as yet. But at the ground level, it takes place everywhere. It seems to be an omission where theory has divorced practice. Improvisation is not restoration. It is beyond restoration. In fact, improvisation is one of the foremost transformations that take place in ecosystems in most parts upon mother earth before the beginning of history of homosapiens. 130



Those who improvise ecosystems generally refrain from writing textbooks. It is painful that we could learn so little from Paul Sears8, who in 1964 could visualise and remarked: ‘Blanket solutions from distant centres of power can seldom be trusted. It was this fact, combined with my belief that, as a matter of political health, the citizen must face the facts where he lives, that led me in 19359 to suggest the need for ecologists at the local level.’ Ecosystem improvisation, as we are discussing, is not such a familiar term to ecologists. I have preferred this new-description in place of ecosystem restoration for a number of reasons. Restoration sets its limit up to whatever the ecosystem was before getting damaged. Improvisation has no such limit. Again, restoration can only take place when the ecosystem is damaged but improvisation does not require any damage to take place. It can be thought about and implemented at any point of space and time, and at the same time improvisation invariably includes restoration. I am not indicating that the work of restoration is easier, I am only rationalising the limits of ecological activities. Ecosystem restoration gives the residents back what they were used to, ecosystem improvisation introduces them to new levels of mindfulness, advantages, manoeuvrability and flourish. Improvisation is a human instinct. Many of the farmers, fishers, forest dwellers and forest dependent communities are compulsively improvising things around them and making living more efficient 8. American ecologist (1891-1990) who became one of the first students of human ecology. 9. Read Paul Sears Deserts on the March (1935), a pioneering book that introduced to the public the general principles of ecology.

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and congenial. Other than restoration, upgrading is the nearest formal description of projects which are occasionally undertaken. But in improvisation the task of upgrading does not necessarily work within pre-defined boundary conditions. In fact upgrading is an activity in the formal domain, while improvisation is not that. It need not always be a formal project. It can be the result of willingness of a family, a village, a community, a nation or national conglomerate. It can be a spontaneous effort and may not even have a petty cash book to enter daily transactions of expenditure and receipts. Improvisation initiatives are open, participatory, vibrant and rarely obtained by an agency through a formal officialdom. Let us move on to a few examples for a better understanding. We begin with the example of rejuvenation of a dried out river in Rajasthan, India. Farhad Contractor (secretary of Sambhaav Trust, 132



the NGO involved in rejuvenation work), took a few pictures explaining the transformation. Shree Padre, interviewing Contractor, wrote about this unique story of rejuvenation of a river by the people which I quote: ‘Utilizing a traditional method of water conservation called Johad,10 which obstructs the water flow resulting in recharge of ground water, villagers and Sambhaav Trust11 in Rajasthan have given a second life to the Nanduwali River – a historic event with no precedent in the entire country. Within a short span of five years, the river is gushing with water and groundwater levels are rising leading to overflowing wells. Migration of the rural folk in search of work to cities, has stopped. The past glory of this ancient land has returned. And most important, the villagers have regained self confidence and dignity. A sense of social responsibility pervades this land and the people have realized that now they can solve their own problems.’12

This is about transformation of Nanduwali river through people’s movement. A festival of the ordinary at its brilliant best. Nanduwali river is in Rajgadh taluk in Alwar district, which is about three hours from Jaipur. Backward classes (Scheduled castes), form majority of the population here.

10. In the Chhotanagpur Plateau area (eastern India), Johads are known as Jorbandhs and are used by local people for harvesting rainwater. 11. The NGO works on water specifically in the desert areas of Rajasthan only. 12. The original writing appeared in Taranga (Kannada) magazine, on 2nd February, 2009 and was translated in English by Harish Sharma in June 2009.

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Knowledge about the Nanduwali revival is widely available in the public domain. However this book only carries highlights. For example, the total project cost, said Farhad Contractor in his interview with Shree Padre, is `30 lakh ($ 50,000) which included travel and administrative cost. The benefit of the project reached about 20 villages and half of the expenses (`14 lakh or $ 23,300) was borne by the villagers. ‘No engineer’, said Farhad, is ready to believe that ‘this work could be done at such a low cost. When people take up the work on their own, it is easy to get the work done’.

All pictures courtesy – Farhad Contractor

The lead institution or the Sambhaav Trust, understood the challenge of rejuvenating the river completely differently from the conventional development projects. The working of the Sambhaav Trusts is also completely different. They only have three volunteers 134



(karyakartas) – Kunj Bihari Sharma, Narendra Sharma and Chandrashekar Dadhich. Satish Sharma is the block coordinator. There is no office and no vehicle. There is no board announcing the organisation. This organisation is different in all ways. There is importance only for work. This is how Farhad Contractor has built this organisation. “We are not working for the people, but we are working with the people”, says Farhad. Volunteers of this organisation do not hold M.S.W degrees. Farhad adds: “There are no educational qualifications needed to join this organization. They have to be good community workers and honest. That is all”. They took up the task of motivating the community for this project seriously and spent no more than one year to build up ties with the local community and win their confidence. I have tried to understand this step as re-familiarisation. The project personnel lived in the villages, mingled with the locals and perceived clearly the root cause of their misery. Within the next four years the river was flowing with water, wells were filled up and the green cover of the landscape was restored gradually but surely. The underlying idea was to instill confidence that people can solve their problems. Previously Mother Nature provided water bodies and the green cover along with them and we started living with this endowment. Then our forgetfulness destroyed these endowments by taking away the green cover. The present initiative is a conscious societal revolution to restore the earlier harmony. his precisely is an ecosystem approach to management of sustainable living. Wherein lies the essence of rejuvenating Nanduwali river? Rivers in Rajasthan are all seasonal – monsoon rivers. The project area being largely a hilly tract, the landscape slopes are relatively steeper. Each 135



drop of rain falling on the river catchment swiftly flows down and the river may fail to grab it even during the monsoon. Rejuvenation was two-fold. One of the methods was structural, and the other was nonstructural. The structural methods included construction of johads or small check dams. The water collected behind the johads forces its way to the river through small rivulets or canals. At the same time it recharges groundwater, which in turn enhances river flow. The second method of arresting raindrops is non-structural – to increase the green cover – a method well-known to retain the raindrops within the catchment. The villagers created community governed forests enforcing strict discipline among themselves. The whole project has become a festival of the masses. Today it is a continuous project increasing the length of the river thus getting rejuvenated, as villages after villages are adopting the two-fold water conservation model and getting the feel of endlessness in living creatively with nature. This is what ecosystem management is essentially about. To learn from a water-scarce area about how to manage water has its inherent strength as a tutorial. To be an ecologist, you need not be an ‘ecologist’, as we said in the beginning. Our next example is about forest management from an area, that is known to the world as Maoist invaded13, can be an educative experience Our teacher is the head of a panchayat or local selfgovernment in an Indian village within the forested area in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh state.

13. Officially known as Communist Party of India (Maoist-Leninist), Maoists are well spread-out over the tribal tracts of Chhattisgarh state. These tracts are forest ecosystems used for a notorious purpose.

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Panchayat being the lowest rung institution in India cannot be exempted from the curriculum of ecosystem management for this part of the world. Panchayats can demonstrate exemplary things. That is, allow ecosystems to flourish through local wisdom, to be collectively governed, sustainability of the natural resources ensured, generational knowledge not snapped, emerging tools selectively and carefully adopted, and inclusive system laid out where the weakest can participate without fear or favour. Most of these are constitutional rights one way or other. In the opposite extreme, the panchayats can also uphold an ostensible officialdom emanating fear, fantasy and falsehood, functioning as hierarchic, fund-driven and rent-seeking instrument, to covertly sustain a rigged market hidden behind. Lessons in managing ecosystem will require experiences along this entire bandspread of institutional diversity. Examples of how a panchayat may not properly function are far too many. We shall, however, try to fall back here upon such experiences where the best of human qualities are displayed, preserved and protected. Readers will now get to know about the story of Damodarji. The story was originally told by ethnobotanist Madhu Ramnath (Ramnath 2013). It should have been a ball-by-ball description of what Damodarji achieved during his 35 years tenure as the head of a Panchayat institution wherefrom we could learn a lot of ecosystem management. I shall perforce avoid that route and can hope to agitate the minds of inquisitive readers by choosing some highlighted parts of the whole. Damodarji completed his studies in Jagdalpur College and came 137



back to his village Sandh Karmari once for all. This was unusual because most educated adivasis move away from their village to become school teachers or forest guards. In a different context Tuhiwai Smith (1999) describing the Maori in her homeland of New Zealand, points out: ‘The more educated they became, the more it was assumed that they would not want to return to their own communities. Assimilation policies in education were intended to provide one-way roads out for those indigenous people who qualified’. Evidently, Damodarji went against the grain.

As he came back home he was shocked to witness the fateful disappearance of forest in many places, courtesy forest department initiative in selling timber that gave the villagers 30 per cent of the sale proceeds. ‘The department’s working plans are guides to the periodic extraction of timber and fuel-wood, and of bamboo. In all 138



forest districts the onset of the dry season is awaited eagerly as the felling and loading, and the taking away has to be done before the monsoon sets in again…the impact of these projects of the Jungle Depart as the adivasi unknowingly but correctly refers to them has rarely been monitored, no part of the state is free from the project or potential projects whose logic defies the other stated purposes of the same department! Only the people living in and around such forests see and feel the effects of such management. And it is obvious that the people of a place do not figure in the Jungle Department’s (forest department in government parlance) plans, neither in the premise not the conclusion’ (Ramnath, 2013). Damodarji took up the task of restoring this forest as he became the Sarpanch (Panchayat head) when the election came by in 1976-77. Today, after more than 35 years, the entire 215-acre forest displays the return of the lost grandeur and re-establishment of faith on what a community enterprise can do. This is not a model set by any European or North American ecologist or forest biologist. This is the result of spontaneous knowledge of ecosystem improvisation and management of local ecologists, grown within the womb of the forest that they are so familiar with. We have to learn to internalise the robustness of the cognitive pathway. Damodarji, restored a 100 acre patch of old sacred grove dedicated to Mauli Devi (local deity as protector of the village). This work was difficult. A weekly bazaar (local market) started functioning at the edge of the grove beside a huge pond. The market attracted a large number of villagers. A new path was created dividing the grove into two and disturbances ensued. The grove grew thinner. Damodarji could bring the villagers together and stopped the 139



operation of the bazaar. Villagers agreed to close the path. Disturbances to the grove were reduced. Gradually, the earlier richness of the grove was restored. Most of us, who are familiar with the life of forest dependent communities, many of them adivasis, have seen the way a large contingent of village women, walking along long trails come back before dusk from inside the forests with large headloads of firewood. In the present case, these women were from distant villages in Orissa, the neighbouring state. Damodarji could understand the detrimental impact of such countless trips on the forest. He initiated a method of arousing collective feeling, voice and management steps through dialogue, discussion and commitment to a cause that was an ingrained trait of the indigenous people. The insight of Damodarji as an ecosystem manager was evident as he took the village youth, two to three at a time, and explained the problem of deforestation to them. These youth were being transformed into vanguards of the ecological revolution that is now in the making. Damodarji is eminently eligible to become an Emeritus Professor of ecology and ecosystem management. This gives us an understanding of improvisation and not merely restoration, neither about meeting the challenge of forest oustees. Even after all these, Damodarji could not become a smart Sarpanch who ‘is essentially outward looking and concerned with government schemes that bring in money and its distribution. Many of them have pumpsets installed in their lands for a double crop; some buy vehicles; some (buy) tractors that are hired out to 140



other farmers’ (Ramnath, 2013). In fact we also get to know from the description that one innovative Sarpanch has ‘bought himself an instant photo device with which he takes and prints pictures on the spot. With so many applications for so many schemes, all of which require a photograph, the side business flourishes!’ The big question, the description adds further is ‘whether these young Sarpanches in Bastar can be convinced about the importance of forests, and whether they have the time to consider these matters; or whether we have lost them to the mainstream along with its appearances, desires and business patterns to the detriment of adivasi (indigenous) society’ (Ramnath, 2013). We have come to know about a living educator of ecosystem management. Where do we go from hereinafter? Can we recommend an ecosystem research to be initiated on the way of doing things by Damodarji? This work will be to look critically at the pedagogy, the management skill, the attributes of leadership, knowledge of the forest or the ecosystem Damodarji worked for, love for his fraternity, far-spreading vision and most importantly, how to become an ecosystem manager. Ecological improvisation has not been a focus for mainstream ecologists mostly growing up along European and North American vision. That did not of course affect the projects of ecological improvisation as initiated by ecologists like Farhad Contractor, Damodarji and many like them in the South. Of course, there are very few mainstream ecosystem researchers who are keen to bring the glory of the ecological improvisation to the forefront as a learning module. The reason is for the readers to follow up. 141



How to learn ecology and ecosystem management from such happenings? We have seen how ecological improvisation becomes a festival of the invisible. Advisably, we have to learn through grassroot participation in such festivals. In such part of the world where basic services for survival are scanty, people take up the role of improvising their ecosystems. These people, often work in tandem with unswerving outsiders, who step in and become members of the consortium of the locals, introducing effective technology and scientific temper. They may not have completed theoretical studies of ecology and ecosystem management the way mainstream theoreticians have looked into. But what they do and wherever they do should be the places for the new generation ecologists to chase and reconstruct their subjective benchmarks.

On eligibility, hegemony and cognitive apartheid Proto-history says that adoption of agriculture as a fundamental tool for less uncertain living has transformed us from nomadic ancestors. It is also known that since the beginning of agriculture, such producers in many parts of the world discovered plenty of useful ecosystem functions which have been sustaining the global population for the most part of lived history. They have innovated, improvised, scaled up and standardised ecosystem management in a manner far excelling other sections (including what the learned have ever thought of ). Except for a few scientists we have hardly recognised them as ecologists or as the originator of ecosystem management. Farmers may not have known ‘Ecology’ by that nomenclature, but they knew the subject as a part of their cognitive armoury much before we introduced the term ‘Ecology’. Farmers, 142



from the remote past, have their own language and legitimately so. It is for us to decode their symbols and language. Other than farmers there are communities like fishermen, forest-dwellers, wetland communities, dry land communities, floodplain communities and many more. All of them have a number of outstanding models in managing ecosystems. The point however is that the farmers or the agriculturists, came up with most of the models and they are the parents of the subject of ecosystem management – no matter who gave the English name to that expertise and when. Any one who names the newborn does not necessarily give birth to the child. These people by themselves have no eligibility for research fund for furtherance of ecologically sound agriculture. We have denied their eligibility by promoting and seeking biased normatives. This is a kind of wilful segregation, we may call it ‘cognitive apartheid’, in our present discussion. One may call it differently. But the evidence of denial remains unaltered. How portent and yet least discussed is the limitation in the chapters of epistemology in ecosystem research? We can step out a little bit. It is commonplace to pejoratively compare the wit of one who has acted foolishly to resemble that of a rustic farmer (chashar moto buddhi, in Bengali). Even a few decades ago, we have instances associating people of a lowly merit with an entire linguistic clan (‘oorhe’, meaning ‘people of Odisha’). These imprints of cognitive apartheid are in our culture, in our mindset, in our language and even in our expressions. It is not just about the English speaking world and the rest. In most languages it will be possible to locate similar connotations while describing imagined 143



irrationalities or irregularities. Cognitive apartheid is a disease of the mind, an insinuation that has not been taken seriously and has been allowed to erode the social, cultural, emotional, political groundings of the human race. We do not breathe fresh air. The attitude of apartheid and denial of eligibility to frame the theory by those who know the subject of ecology and ecosystem management does not lie hidden. The farmers, fishermen, forest dwellers know ecology and ecosystem management not because they chose to learn them in place of physics or history but because they have learnt it through lived experience. We know that ecology, ecosystem management and for that matter ‘environmentalism’ have largely grown under the hegemony of Euro-North American scholarship and fraternal constructions. One popular example brought here can be an eye opener for us. For more than two decades all kinds of development professionals – from an NGO novice to chief advisor even up to the head of the country – have been pro-actively using, practising or promoting the concept of ‘participatory management’ as a catch phrase. A magic tool, it seemed, to co-opt the poor, the wretched, the excluded and all those who are the cause of concern for the welfare dispensers. We have rarely enquired about the roots of this paradigm, and hardly tried to demystify the convenience of its brokers in establishing the supremacy of this tool. Suddenly, in village studies A, B, C and D, were all drawing participatory maps and these maps have made life simpler for the funding authorities, development initiators, commissioners, CEOs releasing corporate social responsibility funds, and all the players active on the turf. A 144



professor of sociology in the University of Delhi probed the map mania of the learned illiterates. Illiterates in the sense that they had scanty knowledge of the language, belief and livelihood practices of the targeted community.14 To drive them to draw so called maps simplified their task. Prof Sundar found the inadequacy of the maps in many ways. In one of her efforts to do social mapping in a North Indian village, she discovered that an upper caste young man who was involved in the work, had entirely left out the scheduled caste hamlets. More important than this, ‘…There are also certain crucial things about local knowledge and the way it becomes accessible that are being ignored. Apart from the scepticism associated with thinking that class relations – and the distance between the city-bred researcher or even activist and villagers – can be obliterated with the stroke of a felt pen or covered up with coloured powder, there is perhaps also a dangerous assumption that villagers are more spatially and visually oriented and less able to cope with direct verbal questioning. As anyone who has listened to the rural old telling their stories knows, language and communication is not a problem. The problem perhaps lies instead in the outsider’s lack of understanding of the nuances and her/ his need for visual and hence, easily understandable data, rather than in the villagers’ need to communicate thus. In very few instances have I come across even NGO personnel, let alone government staff, with any significant knowledge of tribal languages.’ 14. For a full account, see Sundar (2000).

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It is not just about the language. In fact, ‘The debates about intellectual and cultural property rights cast the contestation of knowledge in a new frame. The ‘commodification of knowledge as intellectual property, of collective knowledge as public knowledge, and of knowledge as a value-added takes the struggle into another set of cultural interpretations. Now indigenous people have to prove that what was used for centuries to heal the illness was something which was discovered and then had a value-added to that discovery through some sort of scientific process’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999)15. Let us get back to a contemporary experience where I find the models of ecosystem management continue to be developed by the advanced farmers. About a decade ago, in a state-wide initiative to map popular conservation efforts across ecosystems, a wide array of interesting examples came up. One was that of Sri Anil De, a farmer, in Gosaba block of South 24-Parganas district, West Bengal. He is a progressive and thinking entrepreneur, (not all of them will be like Sri De) who had been farming for more than two decades and therefore had extensive experience. The focus of the project he was working in, involved expansion of agricultural area followed by improving the agricultural processes. The project started around 1975-76 in the Sundarbans, an ecosystem where farming can be especially challenging due to high levels of salinity in water and in the soil too. 15. In 2000, members of United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organisation established an intergovernmental committee (IGC) on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. In 2009, they agreed to develop an international legal instrument that would give traditional knowledge, genetic resources and traditional cultural expressions (folklore) effective protection. Till 2013, the process has been hampered by complex legal technicalities and a lack of political will from governments. Strong rejection from major powers like the US, Japan and the European Union, to an international legal instrument has also been a threat in the negotiation process on this issue, an official at the Indonesian foreign ministry pointed out. For further details, see http://www.thejakartapost.com/bali-daily/2013-09-05/protecting-genetic-resources-still-a-longprocess.html

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Around the late seventies of the last century, farmers were already cajoled to use chemical fertilisers and pesticides which were easily available even in far flung villages16. Agribusiness knows marketing to the hilt. That long term uncontrolled use of these chemicals permanently damages the soil and its sustained productivity was not observed by most farmers: a sensitivity lag which is a boon for the dealers of fertilisers and pesticides all over the world. Mindful farmers like Anil De began to look for alternatives. A number of experts came from outside (without much of a knowledge about the ecosystem) and recommended their own organic innovations. None of them worked satisfactorily. There was an additional problem. To get the soil samples tested turned out to be a difficult task and in fact was not practicable. This is not an unusual scenario in many parts of rural India. At the end of a long but fascinating story of process development, Anil De and other concurring farmers found satisfactory alternatives of rampant use of fertilisers and pesticides. It needed a few years of dedicated research. To replace chemical pesticides, they prepared a concoction of cow dung, cow urine and water digested anaerobically for seven days. The end product becomes an organic pesticide at the first place. It is ready to be applied on the basis of a guideline that they have experimented. The concoction worked wonders. Similarly, they improvised upon the traditional idea of compost pits (1.5m X 1.2m) preferably situated under the shade of a tree. They have used 16. This had become possible because of the marketing techniques and expansion of agricultural extension as a fallout of the Green Revolution.

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a combination of a small portion of chemical fertilisers over household organic waste and cow dung mixed with pond sludge. That the innovators also used some amount of chemical fertilisers is an evidence of their adaptive capabilities and scientific attitude. They also innovated pesticide alternatives using tobacco leaf (pata) because it has been found to contain a poisonous ingredient, higher doses of which can even kill cobras, the villagers observed. Interestingly, the importance of tobacco leaf is more evident to the village women. In fact the innovators had developed a number of organic pesticides specifically designed to kill different kinds of pests by breaking their breeding cycles – a practice oriented wisdom indeed. We do not ever call Anil De or any such unsung persons an ecologist or describe their work as any attempt in ecosystem management. Anil cannot express his findings in English and has no idea that the world of mainstream knowledge begins with someone presenting a paper in English. At any point of time there will be more than a few Anil De’s intelligently advancing the knowledge of Ecosystem Management. This wisdom is their part of life. And are we there? Where are we lagging behind? Why in spite of having a huge repertoire of ecological knowledge and knowledge in ecosystem management, no less richer than the biodiversity stock that Indians are proud, we hardly have any acknowledged original work in the theory of ecology or ecosystem management? There is almost no funding initiative to promote such efforts, efforts to allow flowers to bloom where seeds are lying underneath, growing, but growing 148



unnoticed. We are denying Eligibility to ourselves, unable to challenge the hegemony of the Northern subjectivism. The same way we are stumbling to allow tribals and poor people their right to land when it comes to a question of mining or construction of power plants. Cognitive apartheid is a wilful barrier to ecosystem learning and management. It blocks the mind of the learner or implementer to accept lessons free from bias. The victim of the disease thinks in terms of ‘transfer’ of knowledge in place of ‘exchange’ of knowledge on a level ground and tries to force knowledge products which are not transferable upon the recipient communities. ‘Not transferable’ because the products can be useless, harmful or destabilising but always remunerative for the transferer by virtue of the stronger and hidden social position from which the transfer is organised. What happens when we rise above these mental limitations of cognitive apartheid? Does it bring any change in our intellectual endeavours, our way of looking at things, epistemology that we leave imprints? There are those who are free from the bias and when they engage themselves, there can be effective ecosystem management. Certainly, very few of these projects are termed ecosystem management projects but they are essentially about managing ecosystems towards their improvisation. Readers may follow to the experiment being carried out by a professor of physics among two of the poorest of communities of India. The name of the village is Amlashole, in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, India. It has at present about 145 families, of 149



which about 120 are Munda17 families and 25 are Sabar families. Both these tribal groups have been researched by anthropologists and social thinkers. Mundas in Amlashole are mainly agriculturists and consider themselves superior to Sabars, who are huntergatherers who rely mostly on forests for their survival18. Amlashole came in the news in 2004 for starvation deaths among Sabars who were not allowed to enter the forest. The professor started a non-formal school for the Mundas and Sabars since 2006. He did not have any formal project in mind. Neither did he have any pre-conceived notion of the work he was intending to undertake. He had a clear thinking mind unlike those who aim to ‘transfer’ technology, ideas or fund, assuming that they can think better about the welfare of the denied, excluded or destabilised, or have better plans to change the life of the wretched. He only had an intention and expectation to work for the welfare of these excluded communities. The professor, belonging to the realm of physics, did not carry with him any intellectual baggage of reformist ideas and theories. He wanted to meet the challenge head on and know the problem from them and in most cases take directions of improvisation also from them, their lives and their way of living. He is running a school which has not been linked with the mainstream educational guidelines. The professor has written all the books for this school himself where he has used the dialect of the Sabars while teaching 17. Sabars and Mundas are both Scheduled Tribes found in the Chhotanagpur Plateau region in eastern and central India. 18. Sabars are gatherers actually since hunting is banned and animals are hard to find in the forest. Mundas have generally been disdainful regarding the Sabars, whom they used when possible, for their own purposes, exploiting Sabars in the process.

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language and even mathematics. This has made the school very popular among both Mundas and Sabars. They can learn with known things and objects they are used to seeing in their daily life. How did the professor go ahead with his idea of setting up a school? Schools are important in ecosystem improvisation. He did not have any hackneyed syllabus in mind and whatever is being taught there is an outcome of discussion with the parents whose children are now studying. No standard books are used for teaching. Books were redesigned and re-created in a manner in which the children were likely to find interest. Local dialect was introduced in the books and immediately the interest of the children to read the books increased. No intellectual overlordism was practiced. Moreover, as the professor talked with both the tribal groups there was little reason for the hiatus to continue in the courtyard of the school. The children mingled together irrespective of their different roots. The result was far reaching and evolving. The social distance between the two tribal groups has started withering away. The professor had to plan this but his courage in setting up a level playing field in the areas he was trying to bring about change for the better, brought about unthought-of dividends. The professor emphasised maintenance of cleaner health. He introduced mid-day meal in the school on collective effort and planned a healthy menu using local vegetables and about three years after the school started running, the government started providing cereal supply made available under the Government of India programme. The rule in the school is that no child will be allowed to eat unless he/she cleans his/her hand carefully. This 151



habit rode across the communities and had a consequential effect. Mundas had not liked the Sabars for their unclean habits. Now that children are being educated to a healthier lifestyle it has had a snowballing effect on their parents. Sabars as a group have become an improved lot so far as health and hygiene is concerned. This has also enhanced their acceptability and self-respect. The above areas have been well researched in various contexts by Indian sociologists but lessons are not mainstreamed. Existing evidence amply illustrates how the adivasi children’s intimate knowledge of the environment is ignored and finds no place in the curriculum, not only that, they are made to accept the inferiority of their culture, which persists into later life (Sundar 2010, Nanda 1994). Taking a case of textbooks prescribed for the Bonda mountain people, a tribe living in the border of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, where it is taught that ‘Bonda life is very strange indeed’ Nanda analyses the devastating impact that the inability of the non-natives to understand the self-sustaining subsistence economy had on the Bonda learners, compromising their self-respect relentlessly. He points out: The school primers, perforce, contain the perceptions and prejudices of the non-tribal pedagogues who draw up the curriculum. Such a curriculum considers the symbols and lores of the dominant group as common knowledge, and that of the clientele’s as ‘strange’. Such a bias imputes a deficiency in that tribal children are forced to mis[sic]regard their own culture as ‘strange’ and their style of life as a ‘curse’. It is through the curriculum that a sense of deficiency gets reproduced ad 152



infinitum, until it systematically dislodges the pupils from their own symbolic descent. The content of the curriculum inculcates in the clients a code of conduct that denies the credibility of the tribal collective conscience. It is not without reason that the most successful in the school are disenchanted with their tribal setting and seek to emulate status symbols prevalent in the dominant culture. Under the prevailing pedagogy, the symbolic patrimony which a Bonda child inherits, perishes. In order that the symbols of the market and its ideological representations are meaningfully lodged over the symbols of subsistence, the tribe must be declared backward and primitive.The school is its pedagogic declaration. It is not that the experiences, encounters and existential imperatives of the tribal clients do not find a place in the curriculum, but that such components in the curriculum are subjectively assigned a subservient place. Such a cultural transmission is ‘discouraging and demanding’ for its tribal clients in that it trains the younger members of these groups to internalise their subjectively assigned subservient position in society (Kumar, 1985 in Nanda, 1994).

Cognitive apartheid is explicit in the new crescendo around indigenous knowledge incorporation. In an instance of an ecodevelopment park being developed in Himachal Pradesh19, it was found that ‘While the official attempt to bring in indigenous 19. Ecodevelopment is a World Bank funded project that seeks to remove human pressure on the natural resources inside selected national parks and sanctuaries by creating alternative economic opportunities. In this case the Greater Himalayan National Park in Kulu district, Himachal Pradesh was going to be protected for its unique wildlife, and the local knowledge of wildlife was fundamental to drawing up the management plan for the project. For a full account, see Baviskar.

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knowledge has only resulted in collecting and filing away a rapidly drying miscellany of botanical odds and ends, what has gone unacknowledged is the critical contribution of indigenous knowledge in making the entire research programme possible’ (Baviskar, 2000). The author has described the lack of scruple of ‘scientific experts’. She writes ‘the indigenous knowledge developed by villagers to manage a subsistence economy based on the integrated use of natural resources is now being acquired by ‘scientific experts’ as data to be incorporated into new management regime aimed at optimising conditions for wildlife... Local knowledge is transferred to the scientific experts and made to serve a new management objective, which ironically runs counter to the interests and ideals of local people’. It is surprising then, that with such contempt, there will hardly be any attempt to examine tribal knowledge systems with due respect, or learn from the knowledge of their environment. They refuse the roots even when learing from them. Insinuation is characteristic of professionals who are in a position to exercise hegemonic control. Even when such professionals engage with ‘traditional ecological knowledge20’ possessed by native populations, which is now accepted to be potentially useful, they set the terms of how such knowledge should be utilised and 20. Scientists and other professionals usually think of this kind of knowledge as static and unchanging. This is typically the result of Euro-American perceptions being imposed on native worldviews (Nadasdy 2005, 1999). Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as it is referred to by scholars working in this field, is a constantly evolving way of thinking about the world. Although views covered by TEK are described as 'traditional', this should not be taken to mean that they cannot change. Use of the term traditional implies the repetition of a fixed body of data. Each generation, however, makes observations, compares their experiences with what they have been taught, and conducts experiments to test the reliability of their knowledge (Barsh 1997). TEK is linked to long-range consequences of human action and environmental change; therefore adherents to TEK should always be able to modify their activities and responses if environmental conditions so demand (Pierotti and Wildcat, 2000). We deliberately avoid abundantly using the term 'indigenous knowledge' as it is fraught with epistemological and political problems (Agrawal, 1995). However, we do refer to the population as indigenous people, simply to distinguish them from non-native populations who are schooled in formal systems of knowledge. Education becomes a very contentious area of debate as does knowledge creation (Sundar 2010, Nanda 1994).

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documented. Methodology is thus set by them. This essentially means lifting traditional ecological knowledge out of milieu and ‘compartmentalising’ them according to pre-defined categories rather than utilising them after understanding their value and thereafter refusing them the neccessary returns they deserve. Also, knowledge obtained out of the worldview of the native populations is ‘distilled’ and reduced to a set of facts and figures meant to be archived and preserved21, instead of being ploughed back into the native population after possible value addition. Often, what is perceived as irrelevant is peeled off and ‘drop(s) out of the database’ (Cruikshank, 1998; Nadasdy, 1999). The politics of creating knowledge and bureaucratic rigidities ensure that scientific knowledge and expertise gets extended into the indigenous communities and prevents their participation in the management of the resources. On the other hand, Bruno Latour (1987) argues that production of scientific knowledge is part of an overall social process that produces both the artefacts of science as well as their utility. He argues that the artifacts of science do not possess the seemingly magical and cross-cultural utility that people ascribe to them but work only in very specific conditions, that is, in the laboratory they are produced. They gain outside acceptance only when intense effort enables those conditions to be reproduced outside the laboratory. For Latour not only the meaning but the very utility of a scientific theory or instrument is entirely dependent on the 21. The utilitarian traditional knowledge digitisation project in India – an outcome of the WIPO initiative discussed above – while pragmatic in its objective of preventing false patent claims, nonetheless is inaccessible. It illustrates how knowledge, despite being created for a positive outcome, can actually become fossilised and non-usable for the ordinary people.

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extension of the social, physical and conceptual networks that give rise to them. He sees the extension of these networks as intimately connected to power (Latour, 1987). Knowing about ecosystem and ecology come spontaneously to a large number of village people, especially those who live outside the influence of ‘development’ projects. It is a continuous pedagogy and has no interface with the way the learned learn ecology. Rarely textbooks or tutorials in ecosystem management reconstruct their fundamentals after learning from those who practice the subject as their classical ability, a knowledge they acquire not by choice but to keep living. Nonetheless, there is a brighter side. Number of ecologists and ecological schools are discussing these epistemological vibrations and new thoughts are emerging (Berkes 2012, Morrow and Hensel 1992, Cruikshank 1981). We shall mark these as areas of hope.

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CHAPTER 4

Relating local practices to sustainability

“Economics develops in an intellectual vacuum of high mathematics and unrealistic models, isolates itself from fundamental critiques, and reaches precarious conclusions which, while they affect everyone, are conspicuously lacking in democratic input.” Richard Peet with Elaine Hartwick

“The World Bank’s primary goal is to reduce poverty.” The World Bank

Impoverishment barrier and living sustainably I am not an economist using even the most lenient yardstick. I do not know what capitalism is except that it promotes private property. Capitalism does not defame accumulation of wealth. There are others who defame greed and yet are deeply entrenched in it in their lives, covertly and overtly. I consider this bunch of humans as the greatest threat to an ecosystem and our life on earth. I thought readers may need this small prefatory before discussing sensitive matters like sustainability and impoverishment. Impoverishment is the process and impoverished is the outcome. We will discuss the process. Inconspicuous though, there is a hole to start with. Neither poverty nor wealth can be uniformly distributed. 157



Such things never happen and can never happen within the expanse of market economy. While one section, microscopically small, will accumulate more and more of property, another section growing larger and larger will perpetually be entrenched in poverty. None of these events happen by chance. They happen by design. We have observed results of endless projects of natural resource extraction and their generally irreversibly affecting land use. There is another cap. Allow me to call it Pauperisation Cap. Compare it with emission caps. Larger and larger sections of humanity of the global South grow and die in poverty. Let us look at it carefully. These lesser earthlings are not allowed to get pauperised. They are to remain in suspended impoverishment but not pauperised. The reason is simple. If an impoverished person gets so poor that she cannot even buy a cellphone then she turns out to be of lesser worth to the global market. There are poverty and livelihood schemes abound so that the impoverished do not get pauperised and continue to buy the commodity. This is the state of suspended impoverishment where all development designs converge. Pauperisation is not admissible in the global economy. Poor cannot be allowed to get pauperised. There is a continuous and ‘learned’ contest to define poverty line. Such asymmetries and confrontations are known as signs of healthy democracy. Democracy encourages debates, Results are of lesser consequence. There is always an attempt to show that the line is too eliminative. More people should be marginally above BPL (Below Poverty Level) if the line is pushed down. I think the line here is one of ‘pauperisation’ level than poverty level. The so called poverty 158


RELATING LOCAL PRACTICES TO SUSTAINABILITY

line is one below which the born equals will have to be provided with money so that she comes back to the market and starts to buy. Where else she has any significance being there. Market is more potent than any government and is also more powerful than most social and environmental movements. Even armed revolutionaries and terrorists all over the world, it is known, have million dollar military budgets. Common sympathisers’ donations are too meagre to financially support such high value purchasers. Definite winner in all the cases of explosive encounters is the military spending. Global size of this market was close to 800 billion dollars in 1998 (Human Development Report, 1998). In the same year allocation for basic education for all was $6 billion, for water and sanitation for all $9 billion, while cosmetics in USA $8 billion, ice-cream in Europe $11 billion. Also narcotic drugs $400 billion (based on 1998 Human Development Report). There is nothing new about a data published in 1998, except that it speaks loudly about the efficacy of the bromide used by the powers-that-be. No discomfiture, not to speak of any protest has been known to have registered anywhere against this abysmal inequity in priority. We also find that market based environmentalism is already there as a new money spinning instrument. It is prominent in Africa and searching for openings in other parts of the world (D’Souza, 2002). It can be debated if pauperisation cap is an essential facility that supports ‘sustainable development’. But the debate itself will be hardly of any significance to an ecosystem manager. It is immaterial if one is fond of the new age paradigm called ‘sustainable development’1. At 1. An enormous amount of literature is available on sustainable development, which is not being recounted here. For a historical review of the concept of 'sustainable development, read MacEntire (2005).

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Priorities for those who run the world (annual expenditure - all expenses in billions of dollars)

Military spending in the world Narcotic drugs in the world Alcoholic drinks in Europe Cigarettes in Europe Business entertainment in Japan Pet foods in Europe and USA Basic health and nutrition Perfumes in Europe and USA Reproductive health for all women Ice cream in Europe Water and sanitation for all Cosmetics in USA Basic education for all

780 400 105 50 35 17.6 13 12 12 11 9 8 6 (Based on the 1998 Human Development Report data)

least for this she does not become an agent of the Establishment altogether. Equally immaterial is whether one calls sustainable development virtuous or vulgar (Vucetich and Nelson, 2010) or an oxymoron. For this choice of expression she does not become a branded Marxist-revolutionary either. What most of these learned believers remain unaware of is the concerted role of theirs’ is confusing the ordinary people. The system works elsewhere and beyond: a system that appreciates more and more of erect gait bipeds, explosion of the ordinary. These blessed souls should at least have money 160



enough, if necessary to be pumped through cash subsidies, euphemistically displaying concern for the pauperised. Money is needed to go to the market and buy more than what she bought yesterday. An elementary reminder that every commodity sold has footprints on natural resources, environment and ecology. This is the root of understanding natural resource conservation carefully hidden from the wisdom of natural ecologists. Impact of the expanding consumption level is recorded in contemporary sensor termed as ecological footprints. Ecological footprint is a useful computation for discoursing sustainable living. How are we placed after having calculated our ecological footprints? A moderate scenario suggested by UN assuming current population and consumption trends continuing we will need the equivalent of

3.0 1960-2008 Ecological Footprint 2.5

2008-2050, Scenarios Moderate business-as-usual Rapid reduction

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

y-axis: number of planet earths, x-axis: years

Source: The Global Footprint Network

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two earths by 2030. A 2010 report of the Global Footprint Network has commented that ‘The result is collapsing fisheries, diminishing forest cover, depletion of fresh water systems, and build-up of carbon dioxide emissions, which creates problems like global climate change. These are just a few of the most noticeable effects of overshoot. Overshoot also contributes to resource conflicts and wars, mass migrations, famine, disease and other human tragedies – and tends to have a disproportionate impact on the poor, who cannot buy their way out of the problem by getting resources from somewhere else’2,3. The conflict of solemn commitments and actual distress is pronounced4. This conflict renders the challenge of sustainable living rudderless and ill-defined. Everyday a demographic catastrophe is approached asymptotically. The process of population growth has been slowed down but neither stopped nor reversed. The rate of growth is a result of market manipulation not overtly visible, but not unimaginable. Science has given longer life span to those who used to die early. We are happy. World Health Organisation is happy. UN is happy and also happy are the players in the market. Larger period of life gives them more business. Good for market.

2. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/ 3. Rice (2007) analyses that trade shapes uneven utilisation of global environmental space by constraining consumption in low and lower middle-income countries. 4. Robert Chambers (1995) offers an interesting exploration of how the views of professionals regarding poverty differ from those of the poor themselves.

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Two entrepreneurs in Bangalore try living on $2 a day Three weeks ago, two city-bred, upper-class aspiring entrepreneurs from Bangalore embarked on a mission: learn more about India, by subsisting for a month on what the average Indian does - just 100 rupees ($2.04) a day. So far, Tushar Vashisht and Mathew Cherian, both 26, have lost nine pounds and four pounds, respectively, and complained of dizziness and depression from a lack of food. Milk is a treat, traveling more than five kilometers (3.1 miles) a day can blow their budget and saving money is incredibly difficult. They say they miss dental floss, deodorant and toilet paper. "This has been a humbling experience," said Mr. Vashisht, a former investment banker with Deutsche Bank in San Francisco and Singapore, who says his banker lifestyle now seems "unreal." He said he plans to live on the average Indian's income one day a week for the rest of his life. Mr. Vashisht and Mr. Cherian, a computer science graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been tracking their "lifestyle experiment" on a Facebook page and a blog that breaks down their spending into pie-charts and graphs, and tracks their grocery shopping and caloric intake. The two met when they were both working at the Unique

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Identification Authority of India, a government project that aims to assign a number to each Indian citizen, in part to make sure that subsidies reach the poor. Recently, they both quit their jobs there to start a company together, selling education and health care content to India's more than 600 million mobile phone users. The 100 rupees-a-day project is a way to help them better understand average Indians' choices, they said. To arrive at the 100 rupees-a-day figure, they took India's average per capita income, which works out to 4,500 rupees a month, and subtracted one-third of their budget for rent. Normally, they rent an apartment together in the Bangalore suburb of Bellandur, so they decided to move into a 10- by-6foot room used by their landlord's household help, to replicate what they might be able to afford to rent on their combined budget of 3,000 rupees a month. That left them each 3,000 rupees a month, or 100 a day to spend on everything else, from food to Internet use to utilities. From their old lifestyle, they kept the clothes they were wearing, their laptop computers and a badminton set. Their insights into the life of the average India, so far: *A manual laborer in India's lower middle class requires 3,000 calories a day, but invariably receives less. If he wants to add calories, he has to load up on carbohydrates because "protein is

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ridiculously expensive," they observed. *Addiction can cost dearly. "You smoke, you drink, you lose," said Mr. Cherian. A beedi (hand-rolled cigarette) or gutka (mix of betel nut and tobacco available in sachets) or alcohol addiction can add 30 to 50 rupees in daily costs and decimate the food budget, they say. *Mr. Vashisht and Mr. Cherian could not afford to hire household help, which is a staple of every upper-middle-class Indian household. They found that cooking and cleaning, including hand-washing their clothing, could take them each three hours a day. *Life, including work, home, school and shopping, must be conducted within a five-kilometer radius to be economical, and even then the bicycle is the only really affordable means of transport. Any kind of economic shock, such as medical expenses, can be devastating. After three weeks, the two managed to save 350 rupees. For their final week, they plan to subsist on 32 rupees a day, the spending limit India's Planning Commission set in a controversial affidavit filed with the Supreme Court to define the poor. Urban dwellers who spend at least 32 rupees (less than

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a dollar) a day on food, education and health care would not be counted as poor, the affidavit said, and would therefore be ineligible for government subsidies. Using that poverty line, 37 percent of India's 1.2 billion are poor, but many say that line is unrealistically low. For their last week, the two men will be living in the suburbs of Kottayam, a city in Kerala state, after investing their savings in two 140-rupee train tickets. They plan to cook over a wood fire, wash their clothes outdoors and drink well water. After deducting the Planning Commission's estimated spending on rent, utilities and transport, they will have 17 rupees a day for food, about one-third what they have been spending over the past three weeks. The "budget that planners have envisioned is not - even by a long shot - enough to have a filling, balanced diet," said Mr. Cherian. "Widespread undernourishment will have serious consequences to the future of India," he predicted. Saritha Rai, The New York Times | October 20, 2011

It is not just numbers. It is so much about choice. What will the ordinary buyer buy even if he has to borrow? To possess a cellphone is an example. This choice is definitely influenced. There is nothing illegal in influencing choice however unethical it may be. There are large number of products which are known to 166



allocate 90 per cent of their return from sales as product promotion. A rickety baby in Ethiopia was carefully fed with a bottle of Pepsi by her mother which she knew as the only nutritional diet she could afford. This story is well known and there has not been any protest anywhere against this extremely powerful method of influencing choice. Readers of this book may have read this story elsewhere and I think it is not wrong to read it again. Genocide should always be repeatedly discussed lest it fades into oblivion. So where are we now? We are increasing in number, steadily. We are also buying more and more per person, a habit that starts from the bottom of the society up to the top where sky is the limit to consume5,6. There is enough arrangement to take loan so that one may buy. Thorstein Veblen7 wrote about conspicuous consumption 40 years ago. Neither the rise in number nor the change in perception of necessity at every social, economic and cultural level is as something to be challenged or reversed the way we discuss climate change. So far so good. Are we then unprepared to accept the consequence of this slow but deadliest assault on mother earth as an ecosystem? 5. John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as a US ambassador to India for long time, wrote a now-forgotten essay titled ‘How Much Should a Country Consume?’ Here he pointed out that there was noticeable ‘selectivity in the conservationist’s approach to materials consumption.’ For, ‘If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is possible to work to increase the supply, or decease waste, to make better use of the stocks that are available, and to develop substitutes. But what of the appetite itself? Surely, this is the ultimate source of the problem,. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. Over it hangs a nearly total silence. It is as though, in the discussion of the chance for avoiding automobile accidents, we agree not to make any mention of speed!’ (Galbriath, quoted in Guha – 2006, How Much Should a Person Consume?, Permanent Black) 6. Elsewhere, Carl Sauer, Professor of Geography at University of California, Berkeley, mentioned '…we have not yet learned the difference between yield and loot. We do not like to be economic realists.’ (Sauer, 1938 in Guha, 2006) 7. The Theory of Leisure Class’, with an introduction by Galbraith, printed in India in 1974 by Vikas Publishing House

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An interpretation of a lay ecologist like me of what is going to happen to our living, will hesitate to predict sustainability. Whatever I have written here may be contested. Easily. I do not either have any ability or faith in exploring laws of nature or ecology. I am describing things as I have observed. I may have a bias as anyone else may have. My descriptions may be helpful to those with whom I share this bias. This mindset is difficult to describe as it is difficult for a mother to describe her attachment to her child or the way it is difficult to describe a river for the communities who spend their lives by its side.

Wastepickers and re-use: the ‘filthy pigs’ of the poorer cities ‘...And they strode the dusty roads and streets of the exhausted Southlands, their mouths tightening greedily, their eyes everywhere, searching, calculating, appraising the values that were left behind in the holocaust of war.’ Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers

When I was in school, I recall one of my playmates taking me to where he lived to show how his mother was making packets (known as thonga in many parts of India) from newspapers she procured. She used to sell those packets to local grocery shops. Such small earning was crucial for them. My mother used to keep the newspapers stocked carefully and sell them towards the end of the month to a hawker who routinely moved around the locality. 168



We were alerted by a typical call of the hawker loud enough to reach the eagerly waiting ears. Sometimes I used to be present when my mother shifted this stock to the hawker at the agreed exchange rate. But I always doubted the way the weighing was carried out. But all that was good fun. My mother narrated that the little amount of money she used to get was vital for meeting the end-ofthe-month necessity. I do not know of any such practice of housewives in the affluent countries. In fact newspapers are one of the largest contributors of the waste which America sells to China (Humes, 2012). Americans consume and thereby generate 102 tonnes of garbage per year per person and are yet on the run for desperately consuming more and more to sustain the economy that sustains them. ‘They (Americans) must be induced to step up their individual consumption higher and higher, whether they have any pressing needs for the goods or not. Their ever – expanding economy demands it’ (Packard, 1958 in Humes 2012). I never understood that this snapshot description picked up from my own backyard was more significant than what I thought to be in my yesteryears. I now realise, as a person with common prudence that I interpret our society to be more ecologically conscious than the wasteful North. Re-cognising civility of a socialite is one project that I can unhesitatingly post as a task of an ecologist so long it means not to be as foolish as maximising consumption as a way of life and thereafter crying for sustainable development8. 8. In 1963, the year after Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring, one American historian commented upon the ‘paradoxical ability’ of the American people ‘to devastate the natural world and at the same time to mourn its passing’. (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1998).

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Photo credit: The author

Photo credit: DISHA, Kolkata, www.dishaearth.org

But where then we have proved ourselves lacking such elementary levels of civility (in the area of waste management) is in the way we look down upon the ragpickers – also called wastepickers – hunting along the city streets rummaging the stockpiles of garbage, for re170



usable objects they can sell9. Ragpickers are not respected in a manner a peon in any office, or a rickshaw puller or even a scavenger is. They are the ‘filthy-pigs’ of the society, cleaning the Augean stables and amassing the disrespect hurled at an under-graded species (again wrongfully though). But realisations are dawning. In course of last two decades winds of change have started blowing. Wastepickers are getting attention of well meaning non-governmental organisations in quite a number of cities in Asia. In some cases they could perceive extended empathy and respect which they have never experienced before10, or even think about it. It may be proper to link these tendencies with the beginning of ecological approach to solid waste management. Many Asian and African cities have excellent working systems of waste recycling. The zabbaleen11 system in Cairo city is amongst the oldest example of how waste management can become an income generating activity (Asaad, 1996). The city of Bandung, in Myanmar follows a unique resource recovery module. The waste management system there has developed as an integrated whole with composting being the important activity to financially sustain the whole process (Poerbo, 1991). It includes sorting of wastes and selling of 9. A report by the World Bank estimates that solid wastes in urban areas of East Asia alone will increase from 760,000 tonnes/day to 1.8 million tonnes/day within 25 years, while waste management costs will almost double from US$25 billion to US$47 billion by 2025 (Urban Age, 1999). It is clear that SWM in future will expand in scope and complexity. It will also consume a considerable proportion of city budgets. 10. For an interesting perspective on wastepickers in a comparable African city, see the film Welcome to Lagos at http://vimeo.com/11206466. Also, see report by Gerdes, P. and E. Gunsilius (2010), “The Waste Experts: Enabling Conditions for Informal Sector Integration in Solid Waste Management”. Lessons learned from Brazil, Egypt and India. Eschborn, Germany: GTZ. 11. Zabbaleen literally means ‘garbage people’ in Egyptian Arabic. They are descendants of subsistence farmers who started migrating from rural regions in upper Egypt to Cairo in the 1930-40s. In cultural context the word refers to teenagers and adults who have served as Cairo’s informal garbage collectors for approximately the past 70 to 80 years. Spread out among seven different settlements in the Greater Cairo Urban Region the zabbaleen population is between 50,000 and 70,000. However their existence and way of life came under threat after the Cairo Municipal Authorities’ decision in 2003 to award annual contracts of $50 million to three multi-national garbage disposal companies. Also refer to the report cited above.

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recovered materials, composting of organic waste, to be sold to the output to urban farming and such others. Bangkok had a different experience. Following the economic boom (1987-1996) the traditional resource recovery system of the informal sector collapsed due to labour shortage and rapid increase in wage rate. The Bangkok Metropolitan authority (BMA) adopted initiatives for waste separation practices at the household level but it failed in the slum areas. Drawing lessons from this the famous “free eggs in exchange of wastes” programme came up as a community initiative in the Klong Toey slum of Bangkok, to promote separation and recycling of waste (Thepkunhanimitta 1998; Amin 2006). This approach succeeded to supplement the government efforts to solve the waste problem at the community level. There are notes of concern as well. Nepal rang an alert bell while choosing a waste management programme using external assistance. The traditional participatory management system at the community level that worked in tandem with the municipal authority collapsed with the adoption of an externally aided and designed project since 1981 (Thapa, 1998). Dhaka has exemplified the viability of decentralised governance in waste management. A NGO led initiative (Waste Concern) has demonstrated the economic viability of small-scale decentralised community based compost plants. Many people are earning their livelihood through collecting and recycling waste (Sinha and Amin, 1995). In India, good examples are set up by cities like Ranchi, Vejalpur Nagarpalika, Suryapet, Raipur and also in some parts of Mumbai and Bangalore. Kolkata has one of the oldest and largest 172



example of community-based recycling practices in the informal sector12. In metropolitan cities in particular, waste pickers do not anymore get easy access to medical garbage. It is a casualty to their earnings. Medical plastics (a lot of virgin plastics) fetched better prices. Notwithstanding health research, waste pickers endure health hazards habitually as the sub-alterns do. In India elaborate rules have been set up for the management and disposal of bio-medical waste13. This has been a good step forward. As it also happens, within a short time, doubtful nexus have come up between hospital authorities and allotted agent to remove the waste. Included in this nexus are those who recycle the plastics. Essentially, virgin plastic, which is a major component of the medical waste prompted hidden contract between the traders and authorities (Hodges, 2013). In a small way, Asian and also African cities, as it can be seen, have started voting in favour of utilising waste as resource. Impressive practices are already being pursued while others are re-orienting their plans to incorporate waste recycling. Priorities are changing in deed. Recycling non-biodegradable waste in the poorer parts of the world mostly begins with waste-pickers. For ecologists, points to remember to initiate thinking will include:  Waste-pickers be linked to the door-to-door collection system

regularly. This will avoid unhealthy task of scavenging from the waste-dumps. 12. To know more about this, see the next section on the East Calcutta Wetlands, also see Ghosh 2005. 13. See Government of India guidelines on biomedical waste, at http://moef.nic.in/downloads/publicinformation/salient-features-draft-bmwmh.pdf

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 Additional supports can be designed by way of establishing

appropriate social security measures.  Livelihood supports can also be extended through improved

market linkages and effective scientific research for value addition. A number of Asian cities have experimented with new approaches to manage the problem of solid waste (Furedy, 1997). In many cases remarkable results have been observed. Failures have also been important for drawing up future projects. Out of this array of diverse initiatives a clearly visible pattern is emerging. New initiatives are increasingly relying upon a set of social. Secondly these changes incorporate concern for environment as well as evolving social formations. It contributes to the task of upgrading urban solid waste management by way of identifying the emergence of two interlinked priorities namely:  decentralised governance, and  managing waste as a resource

Recognising these two priorities of modernisation is likely to make the task of municipal solid waste management easier and more focussed. All social changes require theory and practice to go together and raise their level of understanding the events commensurably. An incredible example used to lie in Kolkata’s backyard. In Dhapa, east of Kolkata, since the turn of the 19th century, a Bengali 174



zamindar14 introduced the practice of co-recycling of solid waste and wastewater15. He developed an ecosystem to grow fish and vegetable in alternate strips of garbage and wastewater channels. This was a unique examples of waste recycling (Furedy and Ghosh, 1984, Ghosh, 198616). The practice itself is living laboratory for us to learn ecosystem approach. If the British government allowed the experiment of co-recycling and its subsequent development into such a comprehensive self-reliant system, independent India never cared to understand the contents of this practice and allowed its collapse. Indeed, one of the richest heritage of ecological improvisation of waste recycling practice is lost for all practical purposes. Not only that we have failed to protect it, but we do not even know the dimensions of such a failure. Core content in all the new generation practices, has been the involvement of the local people. Decentralised governance is crucial in empowering the municipal residents. To start with, a decentralised approach to solid waste management one will need to ensure direct involvement of the local people along with mobilisation of additional internal resources. Average Indian people are neither demanding nor responsive. Most individuals are detached from the very process of solid waste management and do not see much of their role in it. This behaviour of the residents is one of the causes for which the prevailing solid waste management systems do not reach the desired or designated levels of success. Decentralised governance for that matter rests largely upon 14. An Indian term for feudal landlord. Here, his name was Bhaba Nath Sen. 15. Kolkata perchance has one of the largest waste recovery and recycling system in the world. 16. This mimeograph is not available for checking.

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collective wisdom. Unfolding of local wisdom can bring striking changes in providing basic services. For every patch of land inhabited by humans there will be distinguishing features which describe the human-environment correlation imbibed within the system. There shall also be, in most cases, the presence of a few intelligent and experienced people who know a lot of these distinguishing features. This collective wisdom, which indeed is locally evolved, is crucial to the welfare and sustainable living of the humankind. Unfortunately the aggressive marketing techniques of externally funded activism for development planning has rendered the significance of local wisdom essentially redundant. This is in spite of a routine and ritual reference to participatory approach in the professed methodology/strategy written for the preparation of the development plan. My experience with some of the new generation experiments in solid waste management in non-metropolitan municipalities led me to construct a few postulates. Let me call it learner’s postulates which are as follows. These postulates may have no role beyond setting up dialogue around them and move forward to construct subsequent landmarks of lessons from practice.  For more than a hundred year the poorer countries have set

better examples of reuse and recycling of urban waste.  In the third world countries scope of local level innovation is

immense. An upgrading plan should leave open opportunities 176



to such innovations to be incorporated in the planning process.  It is improper to ignore the diversity in economy, culture, and

knowledge stock of the third world cities and force upon them a uniform agenda for solid waste management regionally or countrywide as an agenda of the local people.  An agenda for upgrading solid waste management should not

be drawn up in a hurry, what-so-ever may be the compulsions.  In many cases mobilising internal resources can be a better

option than accepting external financial assistance when it comes along with obligatory repayment schedules. For many cities in Asia, so much so in India, municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is undergoing a structural change17,18. Slowly and in a small way reforms are taking place in social practices, design of institutions and governance relating to MSWM. New assumptions are replacing the older ones. More and more municipal residents are entering into the fold of unified management of a public service matter. Waste is increasingly being recognised as a resource. All these things taken together, one can observe that the subjective base of this sanitary engineering discipline looks like it is evolving to respond to the rising challenge of a crucial municipal responsibility and thereby setting up examples in ecosystem management, without understanding though. 17. Glawe et al (2006). For a co-existing perspective on some American and European cities, read Moi and Sonnenfeld (2000). 18. For a perspective on the presence of the private sector in SWM, refer: Shafiul Azam Ahmeda, Mansoor Ali (2004): Partnerships for solid waste management in developing countries: linking theories to realities; Habitat International 28 (2004) 467–479, http://www.bvsde.paho.org/bvsacd/cd43/ali.pdf, accessed 30 November 2013.

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The e-waste segment19 is fast growing20. Unfortunately, this includes clandestinely imported e-waste, which India, being a signatory to the Basel Convention, is forbidden to do, and this import is an increasingly expanding activity21. Despite the existence of Basel Convention, designed for prevention of toxic waste deportation from rich to poorer countries, the toxic trade continues at a rampant scale for economic pressures and incentives to export. A recent update on the work of the Indo-European Initiative showed that the persistence of involvement of children in dismantling e-waste, without the minimum of protection continues to be a threat22.

To an ecologist, waste – particularly solid waste – provides a new indicator to assess the progress of the civility of a community. It has a wide range varying between waste recycling communities to wasteful communities. To what extent a community or a race or a nation or a country is civilised depends upon the amount of waste it has to throw away. It is not a matter of debate for all of us to enter upon. It is a question of how late we shall be to understand the 19. In India e-waste is governed by Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules 2002. 20. The total annual e-waste generated in India in the year 2007 was 3,82,979 MT, including 50,000 MT of imports in India. The amount available for recycling is 1,44,143 MT but due to the presence of considerable refurbishment market only 19,000 MT of e-waste has been recycled in that year. Distribution-wise, of the total ewaste generated, Western India accounts for the largest proportion at 35%, followed by the South at 30%. North and East account for 21% and 14% respectively. This was available from an Indo-European e-waste initiative, refer: BIRD/ GTZ (2007): E-waste Assessment in India: Specific Focus on Delhi. 21. For an overview, read The Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) released the report Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia with the assistance of participating organizations in February, 2002. This report revealed the millions of pounds of electronic waste being exported to developing nations by the developed countries to prevent the escalating mountains of e-waste in their countries. 22. DISHA and Toxics Link (2013): WEEE Recycling Project, Kolkata: From January 2011 - January 2013

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validity of this premise and reach the deluge that much quicker.

The East Kolkata Wetlands and Managing Wastewater Serendipity had me there. It was an infamous wetland then. Vaguely known as Salt Lake where ‘perhaps there are large water areas and fishermen’ as most people knew it at best. It was not a landscape of any consequence to the metropolitan life, neither to those who lived nor to those who were the caretakers. I was invited to advise the State Government (West Bengal) about the feasibility of reusing or recycling wastewater from Kolkata. That was early eighties of the last century. I knew nothing about it, nor did the learned scholars, thinkers and planners any where. Unavoidably, I started travelling along the outfall canal, twenty eight kilometres long, from the last sewage pumping station to the east of the city flowing down towards the nearest available river which was the receptacle for the flow. The receptacle river or the Kulti Gong flow to the Bay of Bengal via throbbing estuaries at the mouths of the delta23. Nothing unusual about it. Unprecedented things happened at the edge of the city where the most unique example of using wastewater in fisheries and agriculture were created by the local thinkers and implementers24. They have possibly outshone every available stock of knowledge in wastewater recycling anywhere in the world. I started to learn about 23. Clarke, W (1865). CMG (1945). 24. India is a signatory to the Ramsar Convention since 1982, and has 26 wetlands of international importance in the country. East Calcutta Wetlands, now called East Kolkata Wetlands, is the only wastewater wetland enlisted from India. World-renowned as a model of a multiple use wetland, the site's resource recovery systems, developed by local people through the ages, have saved the city of Calcutta from the costs of constructing and

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these wastewater utilisation practices to carry out the task assigned to me I have stated earlier. It turned out to be a long involvement. Taking lessons in ecology and ecosystem management cannot be package units. Classroom learnings are necessary but particularly insufficient in case of ecology and ecosystem management. The understanding blooms in the mind of the learner in its own time and not along the programme timings of the class-rooms. Trying to do it quickly or through a crash course will get us aborted babies. We have plenty of them. Every single book written in English which most learners in this discipline understand, describes wastewater as a ‘pollutant’. For the thinkers and implementers of the East Kolkata Wetlands, who had no exposure to the learned perception of wastewater, had other ideas. More precisely, had a different worldview. It took me a long time to understand that. For them, around the initial decades of the last century, wastewater was a ‘nutrient’ for the ecosystem. Introducing wastewater in ponds, detaining it for sometime profusely enhances algae population. Fish grazes on algae – and early morning is beautiful. Harvest the fish and go to the auction market, earn your cash, return then and there. No bank, no credit, no assurance. Goods produced are exchanged against cash. This is the sustaining theme of a practice which is struggling against immense pressure of the real estate dealers and administrative apathy for the past few decades. I mapped this ecosystem in 1985 (Ghosh, 1985) naming it as the East Calcutta Wetlands.

maintaining waste water treatment plants. It is the largest wastewater wetland in the world to be enlisted as a Ramsar site (Ramsar Information Sheet).

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The East Calcutta Wetlands as per Ramsar Information Sheet. It has the approval of the relevant departments of the Government of West Bengal and the Ministries of the Source: Ghosh 2005 Government of India.

In South Asia there are very few sewage treatment plants at work. Not that the technology is inappropriate. But the bigger picture around a sewage treatment plants have repeatedly erased it as a functioning unit. This is well known. The lessons of the underprivileged, ‘uneducated’, ‘non-literate’ local assembly of the natural ecologists, who could visualise sewage as nutrient, designed and evolved an ecosystem that has survived without any support from external establishment or external consultancy support from outside25.

25. Wetlands and Waste Recycling Region, Government of West Bengal, Kolkata; David, A (1959) Bose, B.C. (1944). Ghosh, Dhrubajyoti (1983).

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The quality of effluent from a shallow pond which detains wastewater from municipalities for more than 20 days, is comparable to, if not better than, that from treatment plants using the best known technology for wastewater treatment. This is a testament in the tropics for a sanitary engineer. The connoisseurs of the resource recovery practices in the wetlands to the East of Kolkata should therefore be recognised as torchbearers among the practicing ecologists and ecosystem managers for the poorer parts of the world with ample sunshine. Why do we stress that as a paramount practice? Substantial contribution towards the knowledge in ecology and ecosystem management especially in the matters of merging theory and practice, emanates from this unique wetland ecosystem we are describing. Let us have a sharper focus on some of the many units of management practices. All of them have been carefully innovated, time-tested, socially embedded and works within a web of life typical to the ecology of the place. There has been nothing overnight in this assembly and yet seems to be just there in the moments of crisis. Growing an ecosystem is generally a slow and evolutionary although sudden changes are included in the trajectory. At the same time sudden changes break the web of ecosystem until a new equilibrium is reached. Such sudden changes took place a number of times in the history of this wetland practice when the older web of life gave way to the next pattern of interrelationship (Ghosh and Sen, 1987). We have left a question unanswered. Why do we say that East Kolkata Wetlands is a tutorial ecosystem for the learners and perhaps also for the learned. Let us pick up a number of smaller 182



constructs. All of them are inter-related but independently visible. There are patterns within patterns. Atop a narrow bamboo pole a piece of discoloured cloth flutters. It was a flag sometime ago. The place is windy. Kingfishers, very temporarily try to grip the pole somewhere near the top to have a bird’s eye view of their prey. The water bodies are the place where many kinds of fishes live together. The pole sways from left to right like the gesticulation of a lawyer and the kingfisher is unsure of the post. The bird flies away. The large water bodies, sometimes 20 hectares and also smaller than that, had their banks eroding. This was happening as the waves dislodged the embedded soil from its natural grip along the embankment. Waves all over the world are known to do that. Ask a civil engineer and a reply will come even before the question is completed. ‘You should place concrete blocks, stone boulders or brick and mortar depending on the fierceness of the wave’. In the wetlands to the East of Kolkata, ripples are generally gentle but the fisherman or the fish producers did not know hydrodynamics or could afford any civil engineering solution to save kilometres after kilometres of embankment around every water body. Most of these water bodies have a name. But these people learnt Physics by practice. They understood that the challenge is to break the surface waves before the waves were reaching the shore. We have started learning ecosystem management. The local people have set up a demonstration of human ingenuity which is unique 183



to this wetland and I have not been able to locate such an example anywhere. The management is simple. Along the margin of the water bodies they retained a three meter-wide skirt of water hyacinth. Poles at an interval of about 3-4 metres are secured firmly to the pond bottom and along the embankment. A galvanised iron wire (2-4 mm. thickness) is tied with the poles to set up a fence to stop the water-hyacinth from leaving the demarcated boundary.

Water hyacinth lacing, an outstanding example of traditional ecological engineering from the East Calcutta Wetlands. Source: Ghosh 2005

What is great about this assembly? The waves break right upon the hyacinth skirt and lose their energy. They have nothing more left to dislodge the soil particles from their situated pattern. No concrete blocks needed. The embankments did not erode through the last eight decades. We call it ecosystem management. Let us observe another pattern of events. In this learning module the major teachers are the elderly village women within the wetland area. The teachers are bonafide illiterates. There are about 30 villages where the farmers of the fish ponds or paddy fields live in clusters of homesteads. Many of them have been staying there for more than hundred years. 184



Women collecting snails

Around noon, groups of elderly women wade through the shallow ponds slowly. They have a container resting on their waist and is held firmly by the left arm. Just the way village women do in this part of the world. The task they take upon themselves is far more interesting than their countenance. They collect snails from the pond bottom and keep it in the container. They enjoy this work as they keep talking to each other, laugh loudly and discuss so many topics they know. This work is for an hour or two at the best and is also the most enjoyable part of the day they look forward to. What do they do with those snails? The learning pack for an ecosystem manager begins to unfold unusual events. The elderly ladies sell the snails to someone waiting for them in the bankside offices. These offices are mostly brick, mud and tiled hutments with two or three rooms and a courtyard and invariably one big weighing scale to measure the daily fish catch. These shelters are known as Aalaghar or site office of the fishery establishment. These Aalaghar can be seen for most of the fisheries using wastewater. 185



These waterbodies spread over 4000 hectares and are more than 200 in number which are varying in size but very little in depth. It is good to pick up snails from the bottom of the ponds because they are not desirable for the rapid-weight-gain environment for these fishes. Fish will have to gain fat rapidly and augment the sale proceeds for the investor. Fishes need a smooth pond bottom where they can rest and gain fat. Snails are no comfortable seats for them. Now, why should the elderly ladies be so gracious to enhance the business of fishing? Not for nothing. They get a satisfactory payback against the collection of snails they sell. They now have the cash in hand for the evening booze and have a few coins left for their grandsons’ hallmark demands. She need not ask for any pocket-money from her not-so-friendly daughter-inlaw to support her entirely personal expenses. Unless one spends days, weeks, months and years by the side of these ponds it is impossible to realise the reason for which there is robustness behind the serenity. The learning module has not been wrapped up. The snails purchased from the elderly ladies are crushed and then allowed as a feed to the paddle of ducks that will be found as a friendly member of the ecosystem family. The ducks are the happiest while swimming in the fish ponds and duck droppings is good as fish feed. Now the learning module for ecology and ecosystem comes to an end for this one-of-many patterns which are fused to form a new large pattern which the world has come to know today as the East Kolkata Wetlands.

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CO2

bacteria Waste water from cities carrying bacteria (hosted on faecal matter)

respiration

sunshine

Fish grazes on algae

algae

photosynthesis O2 We eat fish

(Bacteria needs O2 to grow)

(Algae needs CO2 to grow)

Algae-bacteria symbiosis in wastewater ponds

In the tropical areas, shallow fish ponds fed with municipal wastewater at a certain interval of time augments growth of algae as the sunshine reaches the pond bottom and optimises photosynthesis. Algal respiration, in turn, helps bacteria floating atop their faecal habitat grow profusely and in turn respirate carbon dioxide to further multiply algal population. The fishes graze on algae. This process continues and the ponds need no further nutrient to be added as fish food. This natural symbiosis is the basis of phenomenal fish yield. This is how we learn about local knowledge in living creatively with nature. Thus the ecosystem in question is teaching us ecology and ecosystem management and also comes up with an answer through their practice that is relevant to all cities in the tropical and sub-tropical region upon the earth. One reason is because the only type of energy available in the system is solar energy. From solar energy to photosynthetic energy where algae plays the pivotal role and thereafter joins the bacteria to complete the symbiosis that upholds the system.

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We were moving along an uncharted pathway of learning ecology and ecosystem management in the area of municipal waste water re-use. There is a fundamental difference in the wastewater re-use process to which we have been getting introduced. Instead of the ‘end of the pipeline’ technology for waste treatment and re-use that we are used to read in the mainstream texts or research outputs in the wetlands to the East of Kolkata, waste treatment and resource recovery on the contrary is a socio-cultural practice. It is a way of life for the farmers and fish producers. It is a knowledge innovated and practiced for decades and thereby made robust and sustainable. It has been a self-organising, self-evolving system that has been working without text-book knowledge and financial support from outside26. Most of my lessons in ecology have been from the natural ecologists of the East Kolkata Wetlands and most of the learning has been a kind of unlearning the accumulated flair in conventional texts in ecology27. The path of unlearning to learn better was laid by Sir Albert Howard, bout whom we have discussed in Chapter 2 of our book. True difference between university scientists and the agricultural researcher (very much true for an ecosystem researcher as well), Sir Albert said, ‘lies in the ability to discard, which needs great courage, decision and judgment’ (Sir Albert, quoted in Howard, 1953). 26. ‘Self organising systems’ is a prominent and complex area of research having a very long history that started from Immanuel Kant, who first used the term self-organisation (Keller, 2008). In the recent past, Ashby (1962) (reprint 2004) and Bertalanffy (1968) have expounded much on this concept in the field of natural science. Ecology is only recently trying to incorporate the concept of self-organisation within its fold and that is particularly in the form of ‘community self-organisation’. Social scientists have been using this concept relatively loosely, in the sense of its literal meaning. Equator Initiative, a UNDP funded project focusing on the tropics, emphasises on community self-organisation systems. East Calcutta Wetlands provide opportunities for extensive and in-depth research in community-self-organisation. 27. For an interesting contrast dealing with what formal learning in ecology and ecosystem management can be, read Joel B Hagen’s (2008) ‘Teaching Ecology during the Environmental Age, 1965-1980’.

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It took time for me to understand that the natural biological system set up by the local farmers allowed so many incentives to earn money. The algae, particularly the blue-green algae has a market, so also have snails (snail meat is a delicacy in some of the places in the Mediterranean), harvested water hyacinth is a buffalo feed then and there and also an input for hand-crafted objects which are saleable28, bacterial isolates obtained from these wetlands were found to enhance the quality of washing as additive to detergents (Malathu et al, 2008). Tourism is yet another area of opportunity.29 (Ghosh, D and S Sen, 1992). It took me more time, however and I could gradually understand how important a pattern is for an ecologist to appreciate, how do locals negotiate non-linearities and uncertainties in the ecosystem, how do odour, colour and taste replace the role of a field laboratory in assessing water quality accurately enough, how so often we fail to appreciate the art and science of living creatively with nature. A completely unknown pedagogy seems to lie hidden underneath the eerie silence of a splendid ecosystem. Such are the places where theory and practice merge and a learner enjoys learning ecology.

28. Hyacinth has a role in metal ion removal from the wastewater ponds and is being researched from the present wetlands (Ray Chaudhuri et al, 2008). 29. Recently, these wetlands are being focused on for conducting tourist walks.

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A silent disconnect and de-suffocating agriculture We tend to ignore the changes and processes which have been taking place in the plant. This is, in reality, a selfish and brutal method of dealing with the subject. If we focus our attention on the plant and instead of regarding it as a machine which grinds out so much food for us we look upon it as a living individual completing its life cycle under certain conditions, we obtain valuable information even from an experiment in which the end result is rendered useless by some climatic circumstance. Sir Albert Howard and Gabrielle Howard

Impact of agriculture on nature and human society is one of the fertilemost areas of ecosystem research and new generation ecologists can cultivate knowledge upon this complex and nonlinear substrata. I am a learner in this minefield of epistemology. In course of my rendezvous with the rural, I can connect a number of incidents which are indicative of matters of significance in describing ecosystems and the change taking place through past decades around agricultural praxis. In the mid-seventies of the last century in connection with my project on village ecology funded by the Institution of Engineers (India) through its West Bengal state centre, I remember to have stayed in a village of West Bengal30 for about a week. It was a twostoreyed typical village house, mud built, with a spacious courtyard and a low shed inside. It was my colleague’s ancestral house. His 30. Bengal, with its staple crop of rice, was not the hot seat of agricultural revolution sweeping through the wheat growing countryside in India in those days. So penetration of methods of modern agriculture such as mechanisation/ machine-based labour or improved seeds were not yet entrants till the time when I visited.

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mother, a natural guardian, was an elderly widow with a body bent around her overworked waist, was unbelievably hard working. Her day started at four in the morning. She was always smiling and was never found scolding anyone other than herself. These were the kinds on which our village societies rest.

Sripur Village

To reach the village from the nearest rail station we had to walk about six kilometres mostly through agricultural fields and village roads were worse than what we have today. But walking in solitude is the best tutorial for a learner in Ecology preferably with a village person as a guide. Most village persons are thorough with the primary units of ecosystem description. I got to know for the first time that fishes rush against the flow of water, frogs wallop insects, a row of marigold is so effective in pest control. How the field slope is manipulated to optimise irrigation. How immoral villagers spoil others’ agricultural plots by draining the 191



water out when it must not be, why villagers avoid sitting for morning ablutions on the catchment-side of a pond, including my first experience in defecating in an open field was also during this visit. If I can find time to me, a small guidebook in learning village ecology can be easily compiled for the future endeavours. We discuss this much to say that such familiarisation is unavoidable and necessary, in the process of learning ecology and learning to measure changes. But I did not know at that time that I was observing a much more crucial disclosure. During evening time the villagers (males generally) have a habit of sitting together in front of a road side tea kiosk. Some of them sat on two or three benches facing each other, while others would be squatting on the ground, discussing so many topics. Agriculture was generally discussed, as a main prop wherein the elders carefully passed their experiences to the youth. This was a typical evening get-together in many Indian villages in front of a tea kiosk occasionally after dusk. I could see how knowledge percolated from elder generation to the other, how effortlessly the tutorials were conducted31. Over the past twenty five years, the more I met the younger generation farmers, the more I observed a behavioural shift that was difficult for me to internalise. In all these villages which were 31. Louise Howard, at one time Chief of Agricultural Service of the International Labour Office, Geneva, speaking of the agricultural scientist, mentions, ‘The agricultural scientist, who in some respects has such heavy difficulties to contend with, is especially favoured. He has at his elbow a very experienced set of helpers, men who have farmed all their lives and whose fathers have farmed before them and whose inheritance is a very rich and varied traditional accumulation of knowledge’ (Howard, 1953). For further reference, read G. T. Wrench, Restoration of the Peasantries (1939), p12. For an exhaustive account of traditional productivity and practices of Chinese farmers, read F. H King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911), also read Chapters 7 and 8, and pp 461-469 of Mark Elvin’s Retreat of the Elephants (2004). For more on the traditional wisdom of African farmers in the context of present day technologies, read Stocking (2003).

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put to the influence of agro-chemical inputs causing change in the basic pattern of agriculture, the flow of experience and knowledge was relegated. The younger farmers have started showing disrespect to learn from their elders. They openly say that they don’t need them. Dealers are enough to take guidance from. It is amazing, but true. A country with a few thousand years of knowledge in agriculture, completely snapped its links with its agricultural heritage. A heritage has been silently and irrevocably lost. A library withered away. If a young researcher in ecological history begins to familiarise with the present day agriculture, he will have little chance to know how a fundamental shift has crept into the very process of knowledge transfer. Dealers representing agrochemical companies have taken it over from the older people who were the only repository of a continuously evolving and lively wisdom32. This marks a shift in the nature of authority in acquiring knowledge. Dealers took over from the village elders. This was my first lesson in ecological history. The enormity of loss that farmers have been baited to incur and the magnitude of the price to be paid for dependence on the agro-dealer has had a multiplier effect33. But the most gruelling part is that the dependent consumer is not ready to understand it so long as there is food on the plate. That the farmers do not talk to each other about the use of inputs is one of the products of a well thought-out business plan (see diagram 1). In fact this seems to indicate a second major change in behavioural 32. This is not to say that the wisdom was complete in all respects. However, any attempt at improving agricultural practices and benefiting the farmers had to be informed by local conditions, which the older practicing farmers were adept at addressing. For further reference, read Howard (1940), An Agricultural Testament. 33. Over the past few years, consolidated thinking has taken place regarding the taking of the Green Revolution to Africa. Here also, there has been an active reliance on agro-dealers and they are being groomed as sources of knowledge transfer (Scoones and Thompson, 2011).

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First few steps of a business plan in the post-colonial How about making money from agriculture? This can be done by producing suitable inputs which farmers will be tutored to buy in large quantity. This will need establishing that the world requires a lot more food grains. Which entails fomenting the fear of population growth, diminishing grain stock and threats from natural disasters, subaltern ideas (including communism), terrorism and armed insurgencies. Bring ‘population growth-national security’ theory at the forefront. Promoting high-yielding seeds (never mind if it means shrinkage of local seed variety and ruthless assault on bio-diversity). This will have to be preceded by setting up of closer relationship and networking with scientists and scientific institutions. Artificially enriching soilsubstrate capability by adding chemicals mainly nitrogen and irrevocably damaging it by over-extracting its endowments for crop growing, (deliberate long term damage of ecosystems for short term profit nevertheless).

Dismantling the historically evolved local food habits by forcing uniform-meat based, counter nourishing and potentailly harmful food habits.

Carefully ensuring the silent disconnect between the ten thousand year old traditional knowledge in agricultue and the farmers who were continuing with and evolving one of the most extensive knowledge of ecosystem management or earth.

Note: In 1965, the US was in the process of revamping its programmes of food aid, as part of a larger concern about global population growth and in August 1965 the Lyndon Johnson administration put India on virtually a month-to-month arrangement for food aid. These explicit links between population, food aid, and agricultural policy were stimulated by a conference of demographers, policy makers and others, which was held a month ago, in July.

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pattern of the humans in course of its history of civilisation34. The unifying psyche in both these cases has been the temptations of certainty, from collective wisdom to individual willingness. This unstoppable willingness to live more comfortably where one has to work less, think less and reduce dependence upon the unpredictability of nature to a greater extent than was possible then. But the disconnect was visible not only at the interface of generations of farmers but also, pointedly, between scientists and the agricultural field. But this disconnect precedes the first one by more than three decades. Eminent agricultural scientist Sir Albert Howard, who spent 26 years of his career in India provided some indication of this when he commented: ‘The approach to the problems of farming must be made from the field, not from the laboratory…The views of the peasantry in all countries are worthy of respect; there is always good reason for their practices; in matters like the cultivation of mixed crops they themselves are still the pioneers. Association with the farmer and the labourer will help research to abandon all false notions of prestige…all engaged on the land must be brother cultivators together.’35 A few rich men in the North and their friendly academicians thought they would make money out of agriculture. Not of course by buying land and producing grains and selling them at a profit. Making money out of agriculture was a far reaching idea that 34. Individualised farming, a pronounced side effect of the Green Revolution, can have very harmful outcomes if practiced without caution in fragile landscapes such as the Sundarbans. McCarthy (1990), speaking of the role of foreign assistance and commercial interests in the exploitation of the Sundarbans writes: ‘Privatised agricultural…production, as it is being promoted in Bangladesh, encourages individualised decision-making and atomistic productive activity…the opportunity to overexploit resources is fairly easy and goes largely unchecked.’ 35.. Louise E Howard (1953), Sir Albert Howard in India.

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changed the ecological history of the world and working of most of the ecosystems on earth. The new business idea on agriculture imagined marketing of inputs may largely be imported to the farmers. The nature and quantity of input to be purchased by a farmer will be influenced and indirectly forced upon them. A new set of agriculture needs to replace the older version where inputs were never purchased but procured within the system36. Thus we now have modern agriculture and the ‘revolution’ is called ‘Green Revolution’. The business idea was a paradigm changer, the biggest weapon in hand being produce enhancing technology. Farmers will yield to discontinue with their old practice of organising inputs themselves from within the ecosystems. They will buy inputs and buy in flattering quantity. This evolution of a business strategy in agriculture changed the post-colonial history of the world, is an agreed area of knowledge and will remain outside the ambit of this book. But the new agriculture had unavoidably needed discontinuation of the ten thousand year practice of learning. No more learning from the ancestors. Not much learning from the ecosystems either. New pundits arrived, taught about a new family of inputs for more production, though may not be better production. These inputs assured temporary relief from the prevailing setbacks in traditional agriculture and baited the turn towards an artificially manufactured nitrogen-aided37,38 higher 36. See report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture (1928), Introduction, Chapters III,VIII and XII. The selfdependent agriculture changed in the British colonies, having to permanently accommodate the growing of agricultural commodities for purposes of trade. 37. Nitrogen, artificially produced using the Haber-Bosch process sped up the growth of fertiliser factories. Indian

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yield which in the long run pushed farmers into a rat-race onto an unforeseen turf for competitive survival where an ever-increasing battle readiness was demanded. After all modern agriculture is purported to be a business39. It has got nothing to do with hunger, poverty or sustainability (Perkins, 1997) except using nuances and idioms to punctuate promotional texts and policy persuasions. This idea was much less complex to start with. The life of hunter-gatherers was different. ‘Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving... escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals’ (Diamond, 1987)40. Temptations of certainty brought the first major change in the behavioural pattern involving production relationships tied up with nature and humankind. And yet there are ‘at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health’ added Diamond. farmers used low amounts of nitrogen fertilizers before 1939, specially on the staple cereal crops. In independent India, the first two decades were marked by continuing food aid from the United States which left the rural economy shattered. In the summer of 1965 the US informed India that future aid would depend on India’s allocation of foreign exchange on fertiliser or on building fertiliser plants in India. For an update on the state of nitrogen usage, prominently in agriculture, release of potentially dangerous ‘reactive nitrogen’, its impact on the nitrogen cycle and on the environment, see Galloway et al (2008). 38. The report ‘State of Indian Agriculture 2011-12’ states that: ‘…the N, P, K balance particularly, in high fertilizer use areas (e.g. northwest) is seriously distorted. It is apparent that an integrated nutrient management approach is required to enable a balanced use of fertilizers for optimum results. Also, the setting up of adequate capacity for soil testing needs to be continued’. 39. India imported the largest ever consignment of Mexican wheat seeds, 18,000 tonnes of Lerma Rojo 64, bred by Norman Borlaugh and used by Mexican farmers. This was the largest single seed transaction ever in the developing world, and was tremendously complicated. This wheat arrived in India in mid-September 1966. India was provided up to $1,00,000 to help pay for it (Perkins, 1997), which it had to pay back later. 40. Diamond (1987, 2002).

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‘First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants – wheat, rice and corn – provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities’ (Diamond, 1987).

The way hunter-gatherers were keen to leave behind their lives that was difficult and uncertain, likewise the farmers struggling with low yield, unpredictability of climate, drought and continuous hard work, were almost waiting to change their way of doing things. Modern agriculture trapped them into readymade solutions to their difficulties and the sales executives of modernity never told 198



them the full story – neither were they expected to tell the farmers. This is not a place to open up matters on Green Revolution the world saw mostly in India and Mexico (though also in Britain). It is all about ‘acute ecological and economic distress’ said M.S. Swaminathan41, one who has undisputed authority to comment on Green Revolution. There is also a story on the social side42,43. For quite a few years, an effort to establish organic farming44 is visible although acreage cover is insignificant. Organic farming will not be profitable for a certain period depending on local conditions. Thereafter it rounds up the deficits and profit accrued goes up. There has been research in the past to show long term nutritional benefit of organic agriculture vis-à-vis chemical agriculture45. This is a generally agreed scenario. However, there is another point to add. Organic farming requires, inter alia, intense hard work, love for the products, commitment to quality, close surveillance and willingness to be self-reliant. For about a decade I have been trying to observe the farmers’ attitude towards organic farming. But I have not found farmers, as 41. For details of Prof Swaminathan’s role in bringing the Green Revolution to India, refer John H Perkins’ Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (1997). For full details of the above comment, refer The Churned Earth by Shrivastava and Kothari (2012). 42. Both economists and political scientists have put out an immense amount of research on the social side of India’s Green Revolution. It is beyond the scope of this small chapter to enumerate all of them. But useful references may be political scientist Francine Frankel’s (1978) ‘India’s Political Economy: 1947-1977’. Daniel and Alice Thorner have also done useful research connected to the Green Revolution, one example is Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, 'The Agrarian Problems in India Today’, in Land and Labour in India (1962). For an exhaustive anthropological debate on the agrarian situation vis-à-vis the Green Revolution, read Chakrabarti et al eds (1984) and especially VKRV Rao’s valedictory address (pp 138-151), in Agrarian Situation in India, Anthropological Survey of India. 43. For an interesting commentary on the Green Revolution from today’s perspective, read Chapter VI, ‘Science of Profit’ in Harvesting Despair, Perspectives (2009). 44. For more on this, see David Tilman (1998). See also Tilman et al (2002) for an analysis on ‘Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices’ in Nature. 45. Reganold et al, (2010), see also BenBrook et al’s 2008 study State of Science Review: Nutritional Superiority of Organic Foods, The Organic Center.

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individuals or in groups, falling in line to tolerate the initial deficit associated with organic farming to stride, nor are they ready to shift to a hard work routine of an organic farmer. Apart from the lazy farmers argument, organic or near-organic agriculture is, as it had to be, severely critiqued by genetic scientists46 busy in moving genes to set up transgenic seeds. This is understandable. On the one side we have costliest scientists, leading scientific journals, frameworked conferences, while on the other a handful of differently thinking researchers and farmers with a paucity of fund (this does not include advocacy specialists such as well-meaning international NGOs). The winner of the debate won it much before the debate started. Are we allowed, at the present juncture of history, to be so naïve as not to see this? Mendelian genetics paved the way for western science to produce a set of yield enhancing technologies that brought the prospect of plenty and of making a profit by growing plenty. Profit became the key concern, even above geopolitical considerations, and it completely changed agriculture and its relationship with the ecosystem. This led to a two-way disconnect. The prevalent prudence of food habits in the tropics, where nutrition was derived from a number of sources in the ecosystems of which the particular peoples were a part, did not rely exclusively on the products of cereal-based agriculture for sustenance47. Biodiversity helped 46. Transgenic seeds are seen increasingly as an important option to contribute to food security, though a wide debate exists about its efficacy in dealing with hunger when much existing foodgrain is wasted (IMechE report Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not, 2013; FAO, 2013). Some views on potential of transgenic agriculture may be found in Trewavas, (1999, 2002), Morkeberg and Porter (2001) and Huang et al (2002). 47. Read Y. L. Nene’s (2006) ‘Indian Pulses through the Millennia’. Also, see other publications of Asian Agri History Foundation such as Kashyapiyakrishisukti translated by S. M. Ayachit (2002) and Nuksha Dar Fanni Falahat by Emperor Shah Jahan’s eldest son Dara Shikoh, translated by Razia Akbar. Other Indian examples

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sustain nutritionally, and on a wider scale, culturally. Nutritional strategies based on biodiversity did not ensure perpetual plenty, however. That attraction came from higher yields, and also encouragement of business-politics co-management. The transition of perception was from seeing food as a source of sustenance to seeing it as a source of better earning and better living. This model has worked ever since. The worldview behind food has changed48,49. What has come in its place has secured a firm seat.

would be K. T. Achaya, Indian Food – A Historical Companion (2997) and A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food (2003). 48. For an interesting comparison between the some intakes of traditional and modern societies, see Chapter 11 of Diamond (2012). 49. For more lucidly explained writing on food and the recent debates, see Tansey (2002) Food Security, Biotechnology and Intellectual Property, QUNO, Geneva; Tansey and Rajotte eds. (2008), The Future Control of Food, Earthscan; McMichael (2009), to name a few from the vast array of research.

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To bring the farmers out of the catastrophe of overuse of inputs and dubious seeds50, and for them to break loose from the overwhelming influence of input dealers is an upheaval project. Desuffocating agriculture, for that matter, has to become another business plan that makes profit, lot of profit. Good examples of path-breaking farmers, in organic farming or other sustainable practices, may not be capable enough to turn the tide. That demands a change of perspective. That we are not prepared as yet to learn from eventualities is clear from the way climate change is being tackled all over the globe. The impact of this planted agriculture will however be far more exacting and space to negotiate will be far less.

50. For more on seeds and the politics of seed, read Tansey (2011).

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CHAPTER 5

Reassembling the pedagogy: practice-theory-practice When science is used in support of policy-making, it cannot be separated from issues of value and equity. Donald Ludwig, Marc Mangel and Brent Haddad

Ecology, ecosystem management and all of us A person’s knowledge in ecology and ecosystem management mainly depends on his/her activity and work in managing ecosystems through which one gradually realises the phenomena, interconnectedness, disconnect and non-linearities, the patterns, languages and semiotics. Through such activities in ecosystem management the person also understands in varying degree, about certain relations that exist between individuals. None of such knowledge can be acquired apart from activities in ecosystem management. The aggregate knowledge in ecology is not created by fragments of knowledge retained only amongst a few individuals. At the same time it is not an exclusive product of theory as it may appear in the textbooks of Physics or Mathematics. This is how the discipline of ecology may be conceived better for its difference in characteristics with many of the other disciplines. Merger of theory and practice is compulsory for knowledge gathering in ecology and ecosystem management. 203



In contemporary history of ecosystem management and development, the responsibility of stewardship to direct and push the efforts towards better living of the majority of human life, inflicting minimum distress on nature and other remaining life forms, lies with those enlightened ‘ordinary’ who are practicing ecosystem management and are constantly interacting with the process of theoretical development in ecology and ecosystem management, growing in tandem with them. This will better ensure avoidance of theoretical dogmatism as well as empiricism born out of bits and pieces of experiential knowledge in a particular time and place. Nature of ‘ecosystem experience’ and ‘ecosystem expectation’ are indeed diverse. This is why, ecosystem knowledge is not only placebased and time dependent but should also be understood as group specific. Groups of humans can have entirely different worldview, experience of and expectations about ecosystem specific to that group character. The expectations and experiences can be converging as well as diverging reflecting their respective group interests. They can lead to apposition as well as opposition. Such experiences of conflict and co-operation among groups is one of the least researched areas of ecology and ecosystem management. A ‘same-size-fits-all mentality’ engulfs many a mind engaged upon ecosystem related academic turf. There are exceptions. Say for example, in the field of indigenous research. The seminal studies of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, including ‘Decolonising Methodologies’, are highly respected. She worked with the Maoris of New Zealand and comprehensively challenged the contemporary methodologies 204


REASSEMBLING THE PEDAGOGY: PRACTICE-THEORY-PRACTICE

(Tuhiwai Smith, 2001). There has been epistemological enquiry into indigenous knowledge systems incorporating concepts of nonlinear dynamics leading to practical guidelines for sustainable development (Dutta Majumder, 2013). There are islands of hope all over the world to combat the lopsidedness of the development of knowledge of ecology and ecosystem management. How do we know that a knowledge in ecosystem management is good and/ or effective unless it produces anticipated result. There can be multiple sets of ecosystem knowledge for one particular ecosystem instability where each group is apportioned by wearing the badge of its group interest. Groups develop their management plans according to their interest. In Jambudwip ten fishermen were killed because of the remorseless solidarity of the forest guards with a kind of ecosystem management the forest department thought to be appropriate and effective(!) There are a large number of management action plans for various ecosystems to be effective to cater the interest of conservation and sustainability. Yet there are reports where the work of consultants, specially the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports are framed in favour of the industries or development projects involving diminution of bio-diversity or damage to ecosystems. So these were also ecosystem knowledge wearing the badge of the business interest instead of conservation. A learner or researcher is free to choose his badge. How do we set up a good description? Let us get back to my experience while walking along an embankment in the Sundarbans 205



(Chapter 2, Page 38). It is about a loop I chanced my focus on. This could easily have been avoided as all other outsiders have done. On the contrary the description probed deeper. It demonstrated the way a vulnerable community living continuously under the stress of natural hazards as learning ecology and ecosystems management and using it for their survival. It spoke further, about our ignorance in appreciating the tutorials where the village people are learning ecology and ecosystems management. A good description brings all of them in front of us. From the example of loop-defence against moderate cyclones we may collect three elementary lessons for creating good descriptions. Lesson One: To familiarise the things in relation to its surroundings and thereafter study them from within. Lesson Two: To study both the internal and external movements of the things. Lesson Three: External influence is the outer causation of change whereas the cause of change is chiefly internal. Internal arrangement of things is the key to the development of ecosystems and ecology. The loop was overlooked by others because it was not seen in relation to its surroundings. Chances of contraptions of this nature lying inconspicuously are more probable in landscapes which are lived by ecologically handicapped communities (most of the dwellers in Sundarbans are ecologically handicapped). This alertness to locate such inconspicuous events comes from the observer’s 206



experience in working with the diverse ecosystems and careful reading of the experiences of the others. Once the surprise became a matter of enquiry the subsequent steps were easier. Matter of immediate description became the types of movement of the various units of the ecosystem, both internal and external. External movement was the surge of wind from the seaside, the likelihood of the movement of the thatched roof that could be blown away, the internal movement of the dead weight that helped stop the blowing away of the thatched roof in case of moderate wind surge. It is also true that similar geographical situations in near similar social descriptions the ‘loop-defence’ against the wind surge was not commonly found. This is why it has been said that external influence is the causation for change but the key to the innovation is chiefly the internal configuration of things. This was before the beginning. I have said that we need a good description of the project when we are expected to come up with ecosystem management directions. A good description is also a starting point for learning. It can be the first step for assembling the pedagogy. The concernment is to reach as many of those who are ecologists and ecosystem managers by virtue of their lifestyle and livelihood, although they never know how these subjects are defined or styled. Happily, researchers have already taken up this task in some parts of the world. Learners and researchers in ecology and ecosystem management 207



should invariably move in a group1. While forming such groups, it is not usual to include psychologists. This is because the story of mind of the ecosystem residents is not in the forefront of perceived understanding of ecosystem research. Equally important is to include scholars in social polity. New generation teams for ecological research shall comprise those conversant in life sciences, physics, hydrology, geology, psychology, sociology, politics and embracing subjects like geography. In future smaller groups will be a possibility when ecologists get trained in the basics of all these or most of these core disciplines (Ludwig et al, 2001). This requires reassembling the pedagogy and this is what the last chapter of this book aims to flag emphatically. Setting up the pedagogy itself can be an interesting research project and theory-practice duality should form the subjective grounding for the work to be carried out in diverse ecosystem types. We shall now try to perceive about writing better descriptions.

Writing better descriptions: the unmarked triggers Writing description will require knowledge of a number of disciplines. But it does not attempt to interrelate disciplines, rather transcends them. It is not about analysis, but synthesis (Maturana and Varela, 1980). The present narrative is not intended to organise a polemic on writing descriptions. I only have a number of interesting triggers which are not usually listed in text books.

1. The idea of moving in groups or working in a group has also been critiqued by scholars. They also have sound reasons and I am not completely equipped to suggest which one is better. My own experience will continue to support this hesitation and allow things to happen, because I am not convinced enough to recommend which way to go.

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Patterns: how things get connected

Forming patterns is a tendency of nature. Importance of pattern in describing ecosystems is not usually found in learned discourses. Whatever we have learnt from history is that pattern is a vital indicator or signal at the disposal of ecosystem residents in recognising how the systems work, when it ceases (pattern alone provides flawless clue to that), threats are anticipated, the areas needing innovative improvements. Carefully observing the patterns in nature helps forecasting climate, locating disorders in landscapes, agricultural fields, water regimes and also in social encounters, political interactions etc. Not only that this list is seemingly endless but it is also without mistake. Patterns can be visualised almost everywhere in any ecosystem, in the living of the smallest species up to the most intelligent ones we call human beings. It is unfortunate that mainstream ecological teaching and learning is not sure about the centrality of patterns. Understanding pattern, said Fritjof Capra, ‘will be of crucial importance to the scientific understanding of life’ (Capra 1997). It is difficult to miss the significance of pattern in the study of ecology and ecosystem management. In this awe inspiring tendency of nature, human beings are also included with all our baggage of greed, selflessness, hypocrisies, solidarity and so many others. We display pattern in our individual countenance, group behaviour, class collaboration and conflict, racial priorities, religious pathways, spiritual connectivity and even no less in the art of pick pocketing, bank robberies, etc. Everywhere we can locate the presence of a typical pattern.

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Patterns connect. Patterns can be seen, can be heard and also can be sensed. My grandmother was blind but could recognise her grandchildren, more than ten in number, the moment they shook her hand. Grandmother could recognise a sensory pattern of the hands she shook individually for each of her grandchildren. Physically challenged are very sensitive to recognising patterns. One of the greatest musicians of the West, Beethoven who was born in 1770, became deaf before he was 30.2 Yet, he was one of the greatest musicians of our time. The entire world of music displays patterns. In fact there are pattern of patterns or a metapattern. Even relatively untrained ears can effortlessly distinguish between folk music, classical music and contemporary music and about the fusion as well. This is about pattern of patterns. Each piece of music inevitably has its own pattern upon which it rests and flourishes. A listener recognises the pattern which is essentially a definite and unalterable arrangement of musical notes that leads to a distinguishable identity. It has not only been the ecologists who have missed the importance of pattern in understanding ecosystems. Gregory Bateson, a leading scientist of our time linking mind and nature once remarked ‘why do schools teach almost nothing of pattern which connects’ (Bateson, 1979). Thereafter he followed it up with a splendid description of his teaching to a group of students using crabs to explain patterns in nature. He was teaching people ‘who were not scientists and the bias of whose minds was even anti-scientific, all untrained as they were, their bias was aesthetic.’ Students were told to examine a crab and come up with their observations. The first 2. http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Bio/BiographyLudwig.html

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thing they said was that the crabs were symmetrical, that is, the right side resembled the left. They also observed that one claw was bigger than the other, that is, it was not symmetrical. Going back to symmetry, one of the students said that one claw is bigger than the other but both claws were made of the same parts. This was a ‘noble’ statement, commented Bateson, ‘How the speaker flung into the trashcan the idea that size could be of primary or profound importance and went after the pattern that connects. He discarded an asymmentry in size in favour of deeper symmetry. At the end of this class, the central thesis that Bateson was aiming at, he said, ‘The pattern which connects is a meta pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is the meta-pattern that defines the vast generalisation, that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.’ Pattern is neither a dogma nor a bias and far from being imaginary. Patterns are real and are the guiding force in minimising disorder or entropy. In fact restoring or establishing pattern is the foremost method in reducing entropy, a disorder in any ecosystem. Distinguishing patterns, or not missing the non-trivials, is a good beginning in observing, understanding and knowing ecosystems, but certainly is not an end in itself. It is therefore advised that while writing descriptions one should take note of the significance of pattern in the ecosystem. This will lead to a better synthesis towards a new pattern. Priority: taking public decisions privately

Setting priorities is at the core of ecosystem management. In fact life starts with setting priorities and exercising choice. It is impossible to implement any kind of ecosystem management, 211



good, bad or average, without setting priority, overtly or covertly. A project will have many kinds of prioritisation. Few of them will be essential. For example, one of the priority analysis will include the future of project-displaced persons. Priority in such cases will uncompromisingly lie with the vulnerable facing the ordeal of displacement. Simplification of understanding this priority or in essence prioritising the interest of the promoters of the project in place of the oustees is sub-human. It reduces the compensation for the settlement and thereafter defers the payment for the land for their tilling, the only source of their livelihood. In many cases the land they get is not a farmland or at least inferior to the quality of land they were used to till. Jaideep Hardikar has written a clear factual account of the distress or deconstruction of the project oustees, be it a mining project or a thermal power or irrigation dams and has raised a sensitive question of prioritising and require a clear bias to decide or take sides. What happens in all these cases is that public decisions are being taken privately. For an ecologist any substantial chance of getting the whales killed and harvested is not desirable. Science can wait3. Most decisions in managing ecosystems are public decisions. When such decisions are taken in camera and taken against the interest of the ordinary and particularly against the sustainability of resource system, existing theories in ecosystem management treat it as an externality. Things here will have to be changed. Whatever happens in relation to managing ecosystem is a part of management consideration well nigh. For otherwise, ecosystem management as 3. For a full account of the incident, read David W. Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism (1981).

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a theory will remain incomplete. Victims and vulnerables of such private decisions overpowering natural resource exploitation will continue to have no interest in the theory or communiqués of ecosystem management. I do not have anything more to say in this section except that I shall introduce some of the many, almost countless, instances of public decisions being taken privately [(Rainboth, 1990, Budd 2006, Goldman (2007, 2005) Mehta (2005), Perspectives 2012)]. This will essentially be a revision of contemporary ecological history. What we can take pride in is the quality and authenticity of the reporting of such disquieting incidents. This is where our hope lies. Guidelines to ecosystem approach in its core content have not included the steps to meet the consequences arising out of public decisions being taken privately. This is a shortcoming in management thinking4. How serious is the impact of public decisions being taken privately or how deep unjust rooted has this practice become embedded in the mindset of the literates is a matter not discussed enough. We do not easily come out of our own comfort zone. In Nature (Volume 496, 11 April 2013) Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University of Canberra discusses applying geo-engineering research to mitigate climate change. There is nothing proven about this approach but there is a constant call at the right places. According to the author: 4. For an interesting piece on the pitfalls of faulty management, read David W. Ehrenfeld’s ‘The Management Explosion and the Next Environmental Crisis’, Tenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures October 1990, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Edited by Hildegarde Hannum, accessible at http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/publications/lectures/ehrenfeld/david/the-management-explosion-and-the-nextenvironmental-crisis

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‘There are a few hard questions for those who believe ‘we should at least do research’. To start with who is this ‘we’? Is it the ‘rogue’ geoengineer Russ George, who wants to fertilise the oceans with iron so that he can generate carbon credits to sell? Is it the eccentric Russian Yuri Izrael, who is experimenting with aerosol spraying? How about oil giants such as ExxonMobil, which for years funded climate-science disinformation and is now talking up the prospects of geoengineering. Does ‘we’ mean the Chinese or the US military, the organisations with the best access to the equipment needed to deploy a sulphate aerosol shield? And who should pay for the research? Should it be the public, through national research programmes? Or is it all right for it to be billionaires, backyard tinkerers and oil companies? Shell now funds research into liming the oceans through the Cquestrate project, and ConocoPhillips among others, is investing in biochar research.’

Another question Professor Hamilton asks is ‘Who should own the result of the research? Should individuals or corporations be issued private patents? So how do we prevent the formation of a powerful constituency of scientists, investors and politicians after a quick fix, a lobby that could manipulate the political system to downplay or override serious concerns about safety in order to see its technology deployed? And if we do the research and obtain the hoped-for results, and the demands for deployment become overwhelming, who will control what is deployed, and when and where? If deploying a solar shield has divergent effects on 214



precipitation in rich and poor nations, who decides where the rain should fall?’

Prof. Hamilton says that ‘we should have satisfactory answers to these questions before developing the means to engineering the climate. Prof. Hamilton’s anxiety is true for any other ecosystem or ecological threats where the shadow of private or business alacrity increasingly overcast more and more of public interest. Worldview: Re-explaining Controversy

Knowledge of Science, after about 300 years of unchallenged hegemony, crossed the limits of Newtonian mechanics (also described as the limits of Normal science). Scientists were coming up with new thinking like irreversibility, entropy, arrow of time, uncertainty, cybernetics and yet more. Observer became a part of the object and that was since the beginning of quantum mechanics. Big pictures in explaining ecosystem approach ceased to be big enough. The time and position of the observer who took the picture, observer’s own mindset, attitude and belief, observers worldview to be precise, can create diverse set of pictures conveying messages no fewer in number. Ecologists cannot any longer exclude the impact of worldview on the matters of knowing, learning and revisiting the theories. Worldviews have a longer shelf life. As environmental engineers we know municipal/wastewater is a pollutant. This will have to be treated in sewage treatment plants. During the last three decades or so India constructed about a hundred sewage treatment plants for the major cities. Very few of them work properly. Yet the immediate 215



answer from an environmental engineer to treat municipal waste water is to construct a sewage treatment plant. This is a conventional option. Rarely one is going to question the merit of this choice. It is a costly project with text book designs and costly projects are preferable for good night’s sleep for the decision makers, the engineers, the contractors and the intermediate rent-seekers. Among the mainstream players the worldview of the domestic waste-water as a pollutant and sewage treatment plants as the way to reduce pollution remains intact. It is like inertia of knowledge; takes time to set in and takes time to move out.

FISH FARMERS WORLDVIEW WASTEWATER IS NUTRIENT

MAINSTREAM WORLDVIEW WASTEWATER IS A POLLUTANT

The fish farmers and fish producers in the wetlands to the East of Kolkata had a different ‘worldview’ of municipal waste-water. They looked at this flowing city waste as ‘nutrient’ and changed the history of Kolkata’s waste-water disposal. We have discussed this earlier in a sub-section of Chapter 4. 216



My experience in wetland conservation has been long drawn, spanning over three decades (but not always the only thing I had to do). I had an altogether different approach to understand the importance of wetlands from those who were bird-lovers. All over the world the bird-lovers were the ones who initiated wetland conservation. They were dedicated and could set up an international convention (Ramsar Convention in 1971) for wetland conservation even before the Stockholm Conference (1972). It was entirely a species-based movement and I was not with them and yet I thought wetlands are important. I understood it differently. I was used to a kind of landscape where wetlands are abound and people have uses for them. Subsequently these uses, so long these were not a threat to the ecosystem, became known as ‘wise use’. In fact wetlands, in many parts of the world, provide secondary sustenance to the poorer communities in villages. My worldview grew around those ecosystem residents unlike the others who were committed to the conservation of birds. These two worldviews are definitely different. In course of last two decades a major shift has taken place in the minds of Ramsar think-tank and they have changed their core conservation objective from species protection to wise use of wetlands by humans. A change of worldview re-oriented the basic priority of a conservation movement the world over. But the ‘species bias’ and ‘wise use’ centrality are not at all mutually opposed to each other in so far as the protection of the wetlands is concerned. I was trying to figure out the worldview that caused seemingly unstoppable enthusiasm in filling up wetlands. It was blind and reckless urbanisation or development projects (as they are euphemistically called). For them ‘wetlands are real-estate in 217



waiting’. It is the builder-realtor junta’s worldview of wetlands and is a dominant worldview in many parts of the world. Worldviews cannot only be different but also be in contrast to each other and one can only thrive at the expense of the other. Governance, irrespective of shades may not always have a clarity in worldview. It can be biased. Pressure groups have a role to play. A description should include role of pressure groups and their strength, their following and consistency. We now know enough to include ‘Worldview’ as one of the more important concerns in describing ecosystems. Understanding waste

We have discussed the nemesis of extraordinary excess in Chapter 4. Americans make more trash than any one else on the planet throwing away 7.1 pounds (14.5 kg) per person per day, 365 days a year. How much trash a city finally throws away and how much it reuses or recycles is always important to be included in the ecological descriptions of city ecosystems. Quality and quantity of garbage is an expression of citizen habit, lifestyle and status of municipal governance. In many cases the stories of waste reuse remain in the informal sector and not much is known about it (See Chapter 5). Description of such practices hardly get incorporated into the formal management plans of the city corporations. We have become used to blinkered specialisation and implementation of incomplete ideas. A different and ecologically vulgar scenario is increasingly visible in the villages which have taken to agrochemical based farming. 218



Agrochemical farming is in itself wasteful and it drives out the excellent practices of composting of all kinds of organic waste in household pits. It includes the house dusting, vegetable wastes, rejections of fish and chicken, courtyard sweepings, street sweepings in front of the household which will have lots of leaves and many other items particularly cow-dung. Household pits are rare. Easily available chemical fertiliser replaces compost manure. What is the impact of this fundamental change in the rural culture in the farming plots is a different discourse, but that the villages having serious problems of solid waste accumulation is our concern. We want this to be described carefully. These days when visit villages I can find two recent changes in the landscape. We now have lots of tubewells in the villages. Strangely the wastewater flowing out of the rectangular platform that holds the tubewell creates an ugly patch of stagnant pool of water and an unkept streetside drain. The second assault on the landscape is caused by piling of wasted plastic-bags, cans, bottles and such others. This is particularly true for villages where funds arrive in larger amount or land gives three crops per year, and waste is strewn all over. We are learning to tolerate eyesores, as fact accompli, falling short of eradicating. Waste management often tends to hide outstanding ecological knowledge that will require research and upgrading thereafter. These upgrading are likely to be on the public health front. Waste management is the socio-cultural signature of a community. It is one of the vital practices that an ecosystem needs for its sustainability and flourish. Carefully described, it can be the useful 219



portrayal of the behavioural imports. Particularly for the countries in the South.

Taking conversations on board Conversation is the oldest mode of human communication. It happens to be between two people or among a group or amongst groups. Conversation is crucial because only this can bring out people’s knowledge of ecology by whatever name or names they call it. Conversation can cover casual issues as well as serious threats to the life and livelihood of the ecosystem residents. Conversation is the best place where the participants get to know about common prudence, which is important to negotiate non-linearities and uncertainties in ecosystem working. Common sense is recognised as a powerful tool to take decisions while confronting unforeseen eventualities (Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters, 1993). As mathematics for a scientist, is both a tool and a language (a ‘sweet language’ one way argue and the author has nothing to contest), likewise for an ecologist, conversation is both a tool and a language. It is a ‘tool’ to set up relationships and a ‘language’ to describe knowing at the first place and the conception of knowledge of the trajectories at the second place. A learner or a researcher in ecology and ecosystem management will be ill-advised not to take ‘Conversation’ seriously. Ecosystem management should aim at cultural synthesis in place of bringing in invasive models. Conversation, as it has been said, is both a tool and a language for ushering social and cultural synthesis in 220



ecosystem management. Ecosystem managers, as well as outsiders, are not likely to invade the ecosystem residents but learn from them about their worldview and enrich the populace with relevant information regarding new threats and opportunities, expose them to sustainable options and thereby bring cultural synthesis. There has to be a note of caution. Ecologists should learn to trust the ecosystem residents, but this does not mean that they will not be critical. Ecosystem residents can not only be naïve but also opportunistic and sometimes work as agents of local or global business interest. Such negative attitudes are surreptitiously invoked in their minds by fatal projects of resource manipulation. These are the traps laid for ecologists to negotiate, encounter and overcome through a series of conversations. Conversations are enciphered in descriptions. Therefore a description needs to be authentic. Lacking authenticity, a description will become a misleading matrix. An authentic description has potential to change or transform an ecosystem. A proper description includes discourses on practice as well as theory. If it is too much on practice it becomes an ‘activists document’. Whereas, if it is too little about practice, the theory becomes stunted, loses vitality. Conversations can be manipulated. In fact, such manipulations take place fairly regularly in conferences at the highest fora. Such pressures and counter-pressures keep the media intensely active during the time of such conferences where authenticity becomes a possible casualty. Today, we know the role of media in influencing 221



the minds of the readers and how much of that is paid for. Reverberation chamber syndrome is palpable. Conversations are inputs for the making of the description but not the description itself. Description will include the opinion of the descriptor to give it the shape of an ecological document that will inspire the future readers to save the ecosystem, save the earth. The task of the description writer is to convert the perceived ecological consciousness to potential social consciousness, with an expressed intention to implement. Conversation is thus a social process of knowing and learning which ecologists can conveniently use in the course of their encounters with ecosystems and ecosystem people. It is not merely about completing a task, but also includes and involves a process of theorising as an outcome of the experience of conversation. Understanding, for ecologists, unlike most other disciplines, is rooted in their lived experience. This also gets reflected in the design of conversation. Continuous practice and commitment transforms them into competent conversationists. Those who are carrying out conversation should also be careful not to miss out the unfamiliar areas of politics, organisation and history behind the experiences and identities involved in the discourse. It may be good to recall our use of conversation as a process of knowing and learning. About a decade ago, we were searching for the missing areas of rural healthcare. It was a project initiated and sponsored by the state government in West Bengal health 222



department. As it happens most of the time, an important clue comes up just by chance. During our conversation with an elderly lady, she asked if I knew about the fatal distress due to absence of menstrual hygiene among village women. We gathered an incomplete, if not a vague idea of distress but could not ever have imagined the tormenting impact of a blind healthcare system along with a loathsome taboo upon South Asian women living in villages and urban slums. The last thing a woman will discuss with a man is this state of despair. After a few years of our field work, it was possible to break this age old taboo which was a torture of misconceived culture. As a result our conversation with the village women became frank, meaningful and productive. As we look back to this work of improvisation, we can mark a few step-up gears. We recall the curiosity we had about the elements of conversation we wanted to trigger. This curiosity was the groundwork to transform conversation as a process of learning and knowing. Secondly, we were immensely helped by our openness to discuss the theoretical areas of hygiene and public health. The theory-practice duality helped us to construct and carry out conversation. Finally, I may learnt that conversations evolve better in a holistic rather than reductionist spade work. Ecologists, I may repeat, will have to learn to conduct conversation as a social process of knowing and learning and acting accordingly. Ecosystems are the tutorials for the training where theory-practice-theory dialogic paves the route map.

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On ecological practice and securing an ethical anchor One’s activity in ecosystems is central to learning ecology. This step has no substitute or proxy. Knowledge in ecology stems from one’s activities in ecosystems. It may appear to be a time consuming process. Through one’s practice in the ecosystems one gets to recognise inter alia the patterns in the diverse ecosystem units, relations that bind these units, dissipative structures, how a set of patterns and relations may become sustainable, leading to innovation of a new pattern. Also included in this process, the role of ethics and such elements collectively construct the knowledge of ecology and ecosystem management. So called packaged dispensation of knowledge in ecology, ecosystem, environment, sustainable development and related ‘icons’ may appear to be smart but at best superficial. Setting up such time-bound ‘courses’ or ‘educational packages’ can be a good career option for upwardly moving fortune seekers but they fail even to visualise the ground realities of the immensely complex, unpredictable, if not seemingly deceptive expressions of the ecological descriptions. It can only be through one’s activity in ecosystem conservation, improvisation and upgrading that the person begins to understand the patterns and relations that describe the units and events. Such things happen in reality. In a sustainable and flourishing ecosystem the rules of business of living is largely non-hierarchical and transparent. There are examples of such transparent ensembles of human behaviour which we have discussed earlier (Morichjhanpi case study is a recent example). Particularly important are the kinds of relationships the participants 224



of such ecosystems enter into. Without profound ethical exchange and moral determination there will remain chances of collapse. Unsustainable greed under the guise of security, personal or social, will take over the collective governance and split it into competing groups with unequal rights and privileges. Relationships are important and patterns which display qualities of flourish and sustainability are to be carefully understood and preserved. Relationships which bind those patterns become matters of conservation. All three steps of epistemology – knowing, thinking and deciding are locked within this trajectory of ecological practice. We learn ecology and ecosystem management like this and continuously upgrade the pedagogy of experimental learning en route. We are not discussing anything that we did not know as a part of the activity of human mind. There is no short cut to discover truth other than through practice. And the truth becomes unstable unless immediately verified by subsequent regions of practice. After all ‘to accept anything as true means to incur the risk of error’ (Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, 1977). Let us take a pit stop. We have said that truth is transient. In that case knowledge in ecology will not be a static collection either. For example, in a democracy countrymen in billions are allowed to verify their experience of governance, their choice of the ruling paradigm, every five years (normally). Irrespective of how good or how effective the democracy as a system of governance performs, from the standpoint of philosophy of knowledge, it has been a step ahead of dynastic rule where the chances of verifying the ruling paradigm were not at the disposal of the ruled. Sometimes at the 225



moments of crisis, the five year thinking and observing time is reduced to five weeks or even five days or even the inept democracy is thrown away by a coup de etat. We are observing such historic events in some parts of the world in recent times. It is in the moments of serious challenge, when an ecosystem becomes critically unstable, the knowledge in ecosystem management or maybe ecology in general mutates rapidly. In fact many places of the earth today, are approaching towards such moments of rapid change in ecosystem where billions will invariably become vulnerable. Theory- practice circularity will also require intelligent scholars and outstanding improvisers. The combine shall work as an inseparable whole to meet the challenge. Are we ready? The continuous circularity between theory and practice is the prime-mover of ecology as a knowledge system. Every passing day, if we individually and collectively fail to appreciate the overarching role of ecology and ecosystem management, the battle becomes more difficult. A vigorous and smart work is the demand of battlefield ecology. As a note of caution, in this battlefield ecology contemporary fantasies should be recognised and carefully avoided. We have a lot of them in our life. The promise to keep resources for the coming generation is the most widely circulated fantasy. ‘Sanitation for all’ is another good example. Fantasies confuse the human mind, particularly the vulnerable. Three remarkably well designed software, fear, fantasy and falsehoods (Ghosh, 2005) are stronger than the strongest military hardware ever designed and unfailingly drain out the ability to think rationally and takes away the stock of resources of the poorer majority during their operative period. 226



These ‘three outstanding softwares’ can be understood or recognised as one of the most lethal bane on mind of the ordinary to think ecologically. This is nothing less than a crisis for humanity. Take for example the pop show that takes place around smoking. Smoking can lead to cancer, a very powerful campaign spearheaded by World Health Organisation (WHO) fell flat on the confused and affected mind of the ordinary. The software works at the root. People fail to know what to know about the environment and ecosystem in which they are sustained. This is a critical moment of our time and unless cognitive rethinking can be triggered among the ordinary and they get to know about the battlefield ecology, ecology as a discipline and ecosystem management as its constituency, will have to struggle hard for even a feeble foothold in the history of knowledge for human existence. As a learner, when we know that the task of knowing will be difficult, we can arm ourselves with available safety devices to avoid pitfalls. Ethical anchor is one such and should also be the most dependable one. It is only a profound commitment to ethics and morality that can combat ‘three outstanding softwares’. In a different context, ecologist Robert T Lackey (1998) pointed out: Without major social jolts such as war, economic collapse, the return of plagues, or natural disasters, the movement of social preferences toward values and priorities of the affluent will probably continue. Such values and priorities operate in the seemingly paradoxical world of intensive use and alteration of nearly all ecosystems, while at the same time, high value is given to the non-consumptive elements of ecosystems 227



such as pristineness. We may want the benefits and affluence of a “developed” economy, but we do not want its factories, foundries, and freeways in our back yard.

We can and will have to turn around. We still have enough strength to fall back upon. More than forty years ago I was coming back from a village meeting. It was raining. I had to wait by the edge of a decrepit mud and bamboo hut with a thatched roof made of leaf and hay, nothing unusual about it. Understanding someone waiting outside, a gentleman came out and greeted me. He requested me to wait inside. Under the leaky roof, I was hesitant. It was well into the night and there was no electric light within miles. The family of two, the gentleman and his wife, both of them on the other side of fifties, had two rotis5 for them. That was their usual dinner with intermittent fasting, as we punctuate a text. I must eat one, else it will be considered a bad omen by the husband and wife, (a firm belief even that was found in the poorest of households in rural India). I had to oblige. All three of us were happy. For sometime poverty line calculations were rendered meaningless to me. I cannot forget the experience. Neither was it anything unheard of at thing of that time for those working in the villages to learn about them. That was how some of our faceless millions, living in villages used to connect with a person in distress6. Villages at that time were essentially independent of any urban influence. They could retain 5. Thin and spread out, like pancakes made of wheat, it is a staple food in many households in India. 6. Of course, this does not mean that villages were idyllic havens of simplicity and goodness that one could take refuge in. But they had not turned into places of unmitigated complexity and widespread moral corrosion.

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a culture essentially of their own built through time and unspoilt by any television, mobile or agro-chemical dealer. The village people have reconstructed or have been baited to reconstruct their ethics and that has not been good. Togetherness has been in many cases paved the way to competitiveness and closely followed by opportunism and aberration of mind. An ethic, commented Aldo Leopold “ecologically, is a limitation or freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing”. Leopold emphasised on land ethic. His book ‘A Sand County Almanac’ is a seminal piece. It was written more than sixty years ago and still has many things of import in the present time7. It is also true that in the realm of environment and ecology things have changed phenomenally and a few assumptions made by Leopold deserves to be rehearsed. Leopold consolidated his ideas as the basis of land ethic. He did include or enlarge the boundaries of the community to ‘include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land’. Perhaps it was alright when Leopold wrote this but as of now water has emerged as a discourse that cannot anymore be discussed as an extension of land. Equally importantly, ‘air’ has become an outstanding component of nature having seen as an infinite receptacle of pollutants. Therefore we now have an ecological ethic comprising land, water and air instead of land alone. 7. For other critical views, read Guha and Martinez Alier (1998) and Nadasdy (2007)

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At times Leopold made it look too simple. In his summary of content for environmental education he said ‘obey the law, vote right, join some organisation and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land, the government will do the rest’. Today, even the government knows that it does not do the rest. It invites business or corporate house to enter programme of environmental education in India. It has been a dubious project. Many more things the government does are doubted even within the ambit of government itself. How do we construct an ecological ethic? Can that be the route along which Leopold condensed the land ethic? Very much of it but, perhaps not entirely. This is because the global ecological challenge has shifted its latitudes away from the time of the first half of the last century. Yet we are in deeper crisis in understanding our ethical anchor as ‘in our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial,’ Leopold said. Erosion of ethical anchor in one sense is a deliberate and an epistemological shortfall. Ethical compromise leads to incomplete and misleading description and vitiates the process of knowing. Such imperfect knowing leads to incomplete or disjointed thinking and this error in thinking inevitably leads to decisional errors. Therefore I think erosion in the ethical anchor is an epistemological shortfall. From the standpoint of intellectual ethics a number of disturbing things are happening in the field of ecology and ecosystem management. We shall discuss a few of them here and introduce 230



the readers about the decline of ethics for sheer greed and lack of human dignity on the part of those who compromised the basics. We begin with a story of an absentee researcher. Nature, in its 488th Volume, dated 16th August 2012 came up with a stunning observation. Stefan Kroplelin, who has spent his life in Sahara, revealed how Sahara transformed from Savannah more than 5000 years ago to the desert it is today. ‘Researches had previously thought that the transition happened abruptly – within little more than a century – when a cyclical shift in Earth’s orbit reduced the amount of sunlight in the tropics and weakened the African monsoon. This was championed by Peter de Menocal of Columbia University in New York.’ Difficult to assimilate was the fact ‘that Menocal reached his conclusion without even setting foot in the desert, and used a single marine record to make generalisations about the entire Sahara.’ Kroplelin commented that “the idea of catastrophically fast climate change is untenable – it can only come from someone who does not know the Sahara”. Kroplelin, a geologist and climate researcher in Germany, is ‘one of the most devoted Sahara explorers of our time’. Falsehoods have become frequent by using satellite imageries to draw maps. Manipulation of images was reported during Mundra port impact assessment studies by ‘Perspectives’, a non-funded independent research group comprising of students and teachers from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in one of their reports published in January 2012. In 2003, Mathew Sebastian, programme advisor of the International Collective in support of fish workers explained how the West Bengal Forest 231



Department represented the status of mangrove differently in and around Jambudwip in their satellite images to prove mangrove destruction by the fishermen. Let us go to the next explosion. The 23 March 2011 issue of the Times of India came up with the comment from Mr Jairam Ramesh, erstwhile, Minister of Environment and Forests, Government of India, “Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) reports are bit of a joke, I admit it publicly”. There are reasonable number of counter-reports exposing the impossibility of the list of plants and animals included in the EIA reports. These deceptions help clear the project as an environmentally benign setup. Subsequent reality is that it does not tally with the comments of the ecologists. Ecosystems suffer. These are examples of unfaithfulness to nature surrendered in lieu for personal benefits. Would the ecologist agree to some kind of a professional ethics and not allow themselves to be sold out. Before I end up, I propose an initial and elementary charter of ecological ethics which will forbid a professional ecologist from: (i)

Writing, describing or commenting about an ecosystem without having worked on that for sufficient time and in the full knowledge of the ecosystem residents, and without looking at the broader perspective, in a way we have discussed in this book.

(ii) Agreeing to carry out Rapid Assessments of ecosystems. This will avert incomplete and misleading descriptions. 232



(iii) Agreeing to prepare any list of plants and/or animals within a proposed project impacted area unless allowed to study at least for two consecutive years and all observations described contextually. (iv) Agreeing to carry out planning for the displacement of the people embedded in ecosystems that sustain them unless essential. Even when it becomes unavoidable the eviction should be minimum and conditions of displacement will not be inferior to their original ecosystems and habitat pattern they lived in. This section on ecological ethics is a small beginning and is far from being exhaustive. But it can be collectively taken up and vigorously pursued so as to avid the futility of policy prescriptions even if they are good and in place. This may go a long way to attract public trust for ecologists of which we do not have much.

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Postscript For majority of the humankind including the ‘excluded’, Ecology is a compulsory paper for learning in their laboratories of survival so as to muster the skills of living, livelihood activities and negotiating uncertainties. No matter how they describe this knowledge, a little alertness on the part of an observer along with a mental training to recognise inter-relationships (the intrinsic descriptor of the discipline of ecology) will enable him to visualise a wonderland of human dexterity paraded by natural ecologists. In this book the author has been steadfast in introducing the readers to such artefacts of ecological knowledge. Alongside, theoretical studies in ecology have also been making continuous strides, new generation ecology is distancing itself from Cartesian deadlocks. Patterns, uncertainties, non-linearities and inter-connectedness are becoming the building blocks of emerging ecology. Hereinafter, we can look forward to the confluence of these two flows of knowledge and move this crucial discipline out of the current state of precipitous infirmity. To sustain this fusion we shall need simultaneous development and merger with institutions of the people, the likes of those who host the knowledge of ecology in their own way and for many years, not lacking in profundity though. These institutions will help carry forward the march towards an inclusive paradigm leading to a contained state of maturity. Ecology will then become a guide to live creatively with nature.

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Acknowledgement A large part of the expenses for writing this book have been met by a grant from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (Grant no HR/UR/ 48/2010). I am happy to acknowledge this help. It has been a privilege to be in touch with such a large number of outstanding people, many of them being faceless, who helped me to look beyond the fences and construct the understanding of what I have written. Sadly, my memory is proverbially weak and because the time spans more than four decades, and not having kept notes, I do not remember all those names. Not to be misunderstood by them, whose names I have forgotten and therefore cannot include here, I refrain from individually naming anyone. I seek forgiveness for my default.

Dhrubajyoti Ghosh March 2014

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