Final Ecosystem Book PDF

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ECOSYSTEM
MANAGEMENT
TOWARDS MERGING
THEORY AND PRACTICE
DHRUBAJYOTI GHOSH
Published by
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NIMBY BOOKS
NIMBY BOOKS is an initiative by Civil Society magazine
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D- 26 (Basement), South Extension, Part 2, New Delhi - 110049
Text Dhrubajyoti Ghosh
First published in 2014 by Nimby Books an imprint of

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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.
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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.
iii
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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
iv
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CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
vii
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
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
26
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
57
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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
122
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
157
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
203
POSTSCRIPT
234
BIBLIOGRAPHY
235
vi
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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.
vii
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
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
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.
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 doesnt 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 todays poor species and
of future generations of humans as a concern for todays 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 Mawdsleys 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.
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, dont 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.
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 boats 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 worlds 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 systems 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.
13
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 contextwithout
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
15
Mullah Nasruddin cannot carry out his search where facilities are
inadequate. He knows where he has lost the key. Mullahs 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 Indias 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.
16
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. Navet
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 Marrs informative History of the World, commissioned by the BBC, available in DVD format,
accessed May 2013.
14. European Enlightenment was influenced by thoughts of mans domination over nature.
23
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.
25
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).
26
ECOSYSTEMS AND ECOLOGY OLD THEORIES AND NEW FRONTIERS
Carsons Silent Spring in the 31st May, 2012 issue of Nature3

disclosed that the agrochemical industry spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars to fight the books 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
Carsons 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 Carsons 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 books 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 Childrens 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.
27
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.'
28
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.
29
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 fathers 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). Gopals 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.
32
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.
33
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)
34
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 ones
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?
39
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 Nadasdys
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
42
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
movements 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 isnt a one-stop destination; its 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.
46
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 villagers 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
countrys 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 childrens 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.
50
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.
52
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)
53
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 Batesons 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 Batesons 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 Batesons mode of thinking
56
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. Todays 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 earths 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.
58
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
59
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
60
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 worlds 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
Rolstons 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).
Rolstons 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).
66
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 worlds 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.
67
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 agencies8. 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
68
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 CBNRMs 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
72
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.
73
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 715 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
anybodys private property.
More than anything else Jazeeras 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
75
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.
76
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.
77
governance of water15. The focus here is to explicitly uphold

existing systems of local peoples 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), DSouza (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
78
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
80
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 sholon. Sholon means entire population:
cent per cent participation is what the idea of sholon 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).
83
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 sholon 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 governments 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 McCullys Silenced Rivers (1996).
85
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 auditors
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 sholon 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.
90
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 nave 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 Indias 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 Indias
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 peoples
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.
95
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 Groups
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 Davids 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.
98
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. Indias 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,
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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
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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

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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.
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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 Matthews
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 departments 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.
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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
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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 Chatterjees
unpublished thesis (Midnights 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 Ghoshs 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
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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
112
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
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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
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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 dont 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
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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, Nanhes 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
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compensation Nanhes 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 dont 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.
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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
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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
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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 observers 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:
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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 Peoples 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 McNeills 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. Europes 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 authors) 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 its 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.
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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,
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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 peoples

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
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(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
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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.
136
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
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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 departments working plans are guides to the
periodic extraction of timber and fuel-wood, and of bamboo. In all
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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 againthe 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 Departments
(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
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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
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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 outsiders 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).
145
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
146
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.
147
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 Des
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.
150
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 childrens 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
clienteles 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.
153
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).
154
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.
155
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.
156
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 Banks 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 (DSouza, 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 development1. 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).
159
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
161
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 else2,3.
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.
162
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
163
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
164
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
165
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
conservationists 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
167
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).
169
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 Cairos 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.
171
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
173
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 Kolkatas 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.
175
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 learners 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) 467479, http://www.bvsde.paho.org/bvsacd/cd43/ali.pdf, accessed 30 November 2013.
177
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
178
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
179
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).
180
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).
181
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 birds 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.
186
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.
187
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 Hagens (2008) Teaching Ecology during the Environmental Age, 1965-1980.
188
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.
189
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 colleagues 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.
190
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 Kings Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911), also read Chapters 7 and 8, and pp 461-469 of Mark
Elvins Retreat of the Elephants (2004). For more on the traditional wisdom of African farmers in the context of
present day technologies, read Stocking (2003).
192
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 dont 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).
193
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.
194
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
laboratoryThe 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 prestigeall 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
agriculturalproduction, as it is being promoted in Bangladesh, encourages individualised decision-making and
atomistic productive activitythe opportunity to overexploit resources is fairly easy and goes largely unchecked.
35.. Louise E Howard (1953), Sir Albert Howard in India.
195
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
196
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 Indias
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).
197
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 couldnt 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--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 Swaminathans 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
Indias Green Revolution. It is beyond the scope of this small chapter to enumerate all of them. But useful
references may be political scientist Francine Frankels (1978) Indias 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--vis the Green Revolution, read Chakrabarti et al eds (1984)
and especially VKRV Raos valedictory address (pp 138-151), in Agrarian Situation in India, Anthropological
Survey of India.
43. For an interesting commentary on the Green Revolution from todays 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 als 2008 study State of Science Review: Nutritional Superiority
of Organic Foods, The Organic Center.
199
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 nave 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. Nenes (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 Jahans eldest son Dara Shikoh, translated by Razia Akbar. Other Indian examples
200
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 persons 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
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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
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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
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(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 observers
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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
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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,
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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. Ehrenfelds 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 communiqus of
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. Ehrenfelds 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
213
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
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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. Hamiltons 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, observers 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
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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 nights 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 Kolkatas waste-water disposal. We have discussed this
earlier in a sub-section of Chapter 4.
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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
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waiting. It is the builder-realtor juntas 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.
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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
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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
peoples 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
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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 nave 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
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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
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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

Ones activity in ecosystems is central to learning ecology. This step
has no substitute or proxy. Knowledge in ecology stems from ones
activities in ecosystems. It may appear to be a time consuming
process. Through ones 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 ones 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.
228
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)
229
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 Earths 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.
233
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.
234
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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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FINAL BOOK bd 10_new layout.

qxd 24/03/14 11:11 AM Page 1

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First published in 2014 by Nimby Books an imprint of

Cover design: Dhrubajyoti Ghosh and Amit Roy

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To my father: Late Sudhendu Kumar Ghosh

FINAL BOOK bd 10_new layout.qxd 24/03/14 11:11 AM Page i

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Ghosh is an engineer by training. He has also worked for the West

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Two common human qualities have never ceased to amaze me

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

About the author

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Setting the pace

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

Yet, people have been managing ecosystems using their cognitive

Where are we stumbling?

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(Siurua, 2006)1. As the name suggests, forests are to become

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

stretch of about 140km. This is a clear case of confrontation where

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

have to tirelessly bring together the components of knowledge,

We are constantly avoiding an elementary question. What will be the

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sure in managing the ecosystem earth and the component ecosystems,

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

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

To be an ecologist you need not be an ecologist

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

innumerable networks of tidal creeks in the Sundarban Biosphere

the system to be studied and managed. The shortsightedness

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resources, although the difficulties may manifest themselves as

Additional scientific studies before taking action to curb human

remedy them. The judgment of scientists is often heavily

exploitation has seldom been sustainable, any new plan

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

addressing the problems of population growth and excessive use

Once we free ourselves from the illusion that science or

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get misguided by reading Paul Ehlrich (Population Bomb, 1978)7.

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ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS MERGING THEORY AND PRACTICE

there inevitably is a role of the mind, which is to exercise reasoned

The bifurcated domains

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suffused in daylight, and seemed to be searching intently for