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Literary Review
Tracking men and matters
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Inventing Global Ecology makes a valuable contribution to tracing the history of old-style natural history in India and its transformation into modern wildlife management, says K. ULLAS KARANTH.
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MICHAEL LEWIS is an academic historian from the United States, who had some training as a biologist in his early career. Inventing Global Ecology is based on his doctoral work carried out in India a few years ago. Since I had had an occasion to chat with Lewis during his Indian sojourn on some of the issues covered in this book, I found it all the more interesting.
The style of presentation is tailored to convey serious academic research to a popular readership: perhaps for this reason, it combines personal anecdotes, heavily annotated archival material and casual commentaries on issues and individuals. Sometimes this style delighted me, and at others it was an annoyance. For example, Lewis does an excellent job of exploring the intellectual complexities and passion for fieldwork that drive young Indian wildlife researchers like Christy Williams just by describing their field trips. However, listing Madhav Gadgil (who wears his people-friendliness as almost as a badge of honour) as a member of a "rainforest mafia" of biocentric international ecologists is, to say the least, perplexing. Sometimes Lewis almost seems to endorse the outrageous recipe (add one teaspoon of "patriarchal culture" to two table spoons of "corrupted by western science" and bring to boil on a post-modern gas fire) that caricatures ecological scientists as self-centered, self-serving, green missionaries who are unconcerned about human welfare, which is sometime served up as ecological history in India.
The blurb says that the book deals with the tension between those who argue for preservation of "untouched ecosystems" (the bad guys?) and advocates of "restoration of degraded areas" (the good guys?). I would argue that in the context of India this sort of framing of the basic issue itself is flawed, although Lewis is not alone in doing so. The issue is much more complex. The "natural" ecosystems in India (compared to 50,000 years ago when human set foot for the first time, or 10,000 years ago when the last ice-age ended, or even say a couple of centuries ago) are all in various states of decline, with most landscapes having been converted to human uses where the priority is simply not conservation anymore. So the intellectual "tensions" covered in this book revolve really around strategies and tactics for arresting the ongoing degradation in remaining five to10 per cent of the land that' still retains significant components of its natural plant and animal life.
The much reviled ecological scientists are merely pointing out that if our society is serious about conservation, all causal factors including pressures from local communities (not just from mega-projects, official logging or colonial hunters) that drive the process of degradation must be recognised, quantified and addressed: if not, many critical elements of the remaining natural biodiversity will be lost forever. Calling them names for doing so is like shooting the messenger who brings bad news. It will not make the problem go away.
Apart from these quibbles, however, the book certainly makes a valuable contribution to tracing the history, birth and development of old-style natural history in India as well as its gradual attempts at transformation into modern ecology and wildlife management. Lewis documents this history with care and precision, drawing heavily on published sources and personal interviews. He traces the growth of early natural history through the colonial era, establishment and growth of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), emergence of India's pioneer naturalist Salim Ali, and, his long, sometimes troubled, relationships with the Smithsonian Institute. The other two foci of attention in the book are the developments since the 1970s at the Centre for Ecological Sciences led by Madhav Gadgil and at the Government-sponsored Wildlife Institute of India dominated by Indian Forest Service officials after the 1980s. Among these three portrayals, the ones of BNHS and Salim Ali are most richly documented and interesting.
Also exposed here for the first time are some issues not widely known even within the conservation community in India: The past nexus between Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Government's intelligence community that later resulted in the unfair targeting and hindering of BNHS research; The ego-trips of Indian officials that led to India losing a pioneering radio-telemetry study of tigers in the early 1970s to Nepal. The critical role played by PL-480 Rupee funds held by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies in promoting modern ecological research in India.
Going beyond mere historical documentation, Lewis also tries to trace the pedigrees of some modern ecological ideas (animal behaviour studies, theory of island biogeography, population viability analyses) to their origins in intellectual ferment abroad at places like Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute. Lewis makes his central point very well: Indian scientific progress in ecology has not been simply a one-way flow, directed and dominated by western Interests. It has, in equal measure been driven by the passions and perceptions of Indian ecologists like A.J.T. Johnsingh and Raman Sukumar..
Overall, Lewis presents his factual materials dispassionately and carefully. Some minor errors have crept in: tiger footprints are called "pugmarks", not those of elephants. As a student participant, I recall that protests against the imposition of Hindi on the south took place in the 1960s, not 1950s. But these are inconsequential to the main story.
Overall, the book is good source of reference that is nicely produced and sold widely in India. Because everyone seriously interested in ecology and conservation in India should possess a copy of this book, I wish it could have been priced a bit lower.
Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India 1945-1997, Michael Lewis, Orient Longman, 2003, New Perspectives in South Asian History Series, hard cover, p.369, Rs. 675.
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