Nature in Indian and Western traditions

I lived in the Nilgiri hills of western Tamil Nadu for over two decades, and as a beautiful tropical rainforest—a Shola, as it is called—was getting ruthlessly destroyed at our doorstep, I could not help getting dragged into forest conservation. The unrelenting sound of machetes and axes chopping down young trees while the appointed ‘guards’ were busy collecting bribes was not something I was capable of putting up with. As a result, in the early 1980s I launched into a sustained campaign, first applying considerable pressure on a Forest Department unwilling to act, unwilling even to acknowledge that the situation was serious. The pressure grew to such heights that when a sincere officer happened to be in charge of our area—a white sheep among the black—a lot could be achieved in a short time, including the creation of a ‘watchdog committee’ made up of local citizens, to whom the charge of protecting the forest was promptly devolved.

Our motivation made up for our lack of resources, and in a few years we had spread awareness among the local communities to an extent we could only have dreamed of earlier. This success story, which no official organ ever highlighted, as it sprang from a severe critique of the Forest Department’s disabilities and blind policies, got diluted when newer officials silently resisted our work, forcing me to resign in protest—a classic tale in India’s official mythology. Shortly afterwards, in 2003, I left the Nilgiris to settle near Coimbatore, and the watchdog committee survived in name only.

While it was active, we used to be sent high officials so we would show them around the forest and explain our work to them. I invariably observed how most of them were unaware of what constitutes a forest, even though they were supposed to have some academic learning and a considerable field experience; if they saw tall standing trees and some greenery around, they decided that the forest was in good shape. No one noticed the wide gaps in the canopy, the missing generations of younger adult trees, or the rapid spread of exotic weeds in the undergrowth. This inability to grasp reality is probably the privilege of every bureaucracy on the planet, but it is particularly acute in India.

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