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Chatterjee's "Dissasociating People from Nature"

October 19, 2008

Rhitu Chatterjee sheds light on a striking aspect of man’s interaction with nature in his article, “Dissociating People from Nature”, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The piece focuses on the Soligas, an indigenous group living on the outskirts of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills (B.R. Hills) wildlife refuge in southern India since 1972. Prior to that year the group lived directly within the B.R. Hills but they were abruptly evicted after the Indian government “passed the Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA) and declared” the region “a high-priority conservation area”. The move, an effort to protect unique biodiversity from human interference, had unintended consequences that would reshape the ecosystem.

In discussing the B.R. Hills, Chatterjee quotes University of Essex professor Jules Pretty who invokes the same ideas used by Stephen Meyer and others declaring the end of the wild.

“For most people, the words ‘forests’ and ‘protected areas’ conjure up images of pristine regions that are free of human beings. But in the B.R. Hills and numerous other places around the world, forests and other landscapes are inhabited by people and have been for a number of centuries. Except for remote regions like the Antarctic, there are no ‘actual wildernesses’”

According to Chatterjee, the Soligas “have lived in the B.R. Hills and the neighboring regions for centuries”. They employed shifting cultivation and relied on the forest’s nontimber produce like “honey, lichen, gooseberry, and soapberry”. A critical aspect of the Soligas survival was the setting of annual fires that cleared the forest floor of debris, allowed easier access to resources, killed weeds and parasites, and sprouted seeds. The timing and execution of the fires was based on tremendous “traditional ecological knowledge”, and the result was sufficient to clear the understory without burning large swaths of the wider forest.

When the Soligas were relegated to the periphery of the B.R. Hills in 1972, the annual fires were a thing of the past. In an attempt to shelter local plant and animal populations, the Indian forest department would additionally impose “a strict regimen of fire suppression that is ongoing”. Rather than preserve the ecosystem, however, these measures facilitated the rapid growth of the “invasive weed Lantana camara” which is “choking out native species”. Without the annual fires to control their population, parasites are also threatening the forest fruits that provide sustenance for the B.R. Hills herbivores, “driving the animals to raid the crop fields on the forest fringes”.

The experience of the B.R. Hills conservation effort raises some important issues. Chatterjee quotes Alaka Wali of the Field Museum in Chicago who states that a “key element to long-term stewardship of protected areas will depend on local communities playing a critical role”. In accepting the end of the wild it will be imperative to acknowledge the fact that any conservation efforts will be intertwined with human encroachment. Whether we’re alien or not, our species is a part of the ecosystems that we encounter, and habitat management begins with us.

Filed under: Perspectives on the Environment