Environ. Sci. Technol. 2008, 42, 7552–7554
RHITU CHATTERJEE
Conservation measures that dissociate people from their native landscape can destroy traditional ecological knowledge and hurt the very biodiversity that the conservation policies aim to protect.
RHITU CHATTERJEE
Sitting under a moonless February sky on the outskirts of a wildlife sanctuary in southern India, Acchuge Gowda bemoans the failing health of the forest that was once his home. The tall, gaunt, and silver-haired community elder recalls the time when the grass was plentiful, the animals were content, and the forest had many tubers and medicinal plants. “Now, there is [only] lantana!” The invasive weed Lantana camara is choking out native species to such an extent that sometimes the long, thin, and thorny plants spotted with pretty pink flowers are all that one can see on either side of the narrow winding roads of the Biligiri Rangaswamy Hills (B. R. Hills) wildlife sanctuary. Gowda and the members of his community believe that strict fire suppression, as practiced by the Karnataka Forest Department, is responsible for these changes.
materials on the forest floor burned easily. This cleared the understory and gave the Soligas better access to the forest, making it easier for them to collect nontimber produce, like honey, lichen, gooseberry, and soapberry. These yearly fires also had other effects. They helped new seeds sprout and killed weeds and parasites that could spread under more amenable conditions later in the year. But that yearly cycle of litter fires stopped in 1972, when the government of India passed the Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA) and declared B. R. Hills a wildlife sanctuary, a high-priority conservation area. As a consequence, the forest department of the state of Karnataka evicted the Soligas, who lived in semipermanent settlements inside the forest, and resettled them in government-sponsored settlements on the edges of the sanctuary, limiting their use of the forest and its resources. Not only did this stop the annual fires, but the forest department also imposed a strict regimen of fire suppression that is ongoing. Historically, conservation efforts around the globe that have displaced local communities have often led to unexpected ecological and social changes. The altered fire regime in B. R. Hills and its impacts on the spread of invasive species is one example. Now, “you’ve got a landscape that is both ecologically and socially transformed,” says Nitin Rai, a conservation and livelihood researcher at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), an independent research organization based in Bangalore. RHITU CHATTERJEE
Dissociating People from Nature
The B. R. Hills wildlife sanctuary is part of the Western Ghats, one of India’s most biologically diverse area. Covered with a range of different ecosystems, including grasslands, scrub, and deciduous and evergreen forests, B. R. Hills is part of the Western Ghats, a chain of mountains running parallel to the southwestern coast of India. Rich in the variety of their plant and animal life, the hills are a hot spot of biodiversity and home to an indigenous group called the Soligas, to which Gowda belongs. For years before they were ousted from the forest, the Soligas of B. R. Hills used annual fires to manage the vegetation. Come February of each year, they set fire to the forest floor. The forest at this time of the year is too moist to allow big, destructive fires, but the relatively drier 7552
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This permanent Soliga settlement on the fringes of B. R. Hills is a product of the Soligas’ forced relocation from the forest with the enactment of the 1972 Wildlife Protection Act. The social transformation Rai is referring to is also an outcome of removing people from a landscape that has shaped their lives, languages, and cultures. Conservation measures in many places have led to serious conflicts over land rights. In B. R. Hills, the Soligas’ relationship with the state forest department has been mostly peaceful because the communities have been allowed limited access to the forest and its resources. But even here, social change has 10.1021/es802117b
2008 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 10/13/2008
RHITU CHATTERJEE
been unavoidable, and feelings of alienation and discontent are evident among the community members. Now, researchers and conservationists are increasingly recognizing that a “key element to long-term stewardship of protected areas will depend on local communities playing a critical role,” says Alaka Wali of the Field Museum in Chicago. This has come “after many painful experiences of failed parks, failed efforts at conservation that only ‘fenced off’ areas but didn’t actively engage local people,” she says.
Culture and tradition shape biodiversity 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 centuries. Except for remote regions like the Antarctic, there are no “actual wildernesses,” says Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex (U.K.). “Even the rain forests of Brazil were shaped by local people.” Known as girijana, or the people (jana) of the hills (giri), to those outside their community, the Soligas have lived in B. R. Hills and the neighboring regions for centuries. They sustained themselves with shifting agriculturesclearing a small part of the forest, cultivating it, and then clearing another area while allowing the old one to regrowsand by harvesting nontimber products from the forest. The Soligas’ dependence on the forest and their strong cultural ties with it are reflected in their food, music, poetry, and spiritual practices (they are nature worshippers and manage their religious grounds differently from other areas). While their lives revolved around the forest and its natural history, the forest itself evolved with their management practices. The biodiversity of B. R. Hills is “really a result of... [a] long history of use,” notes Rai. Studies over the past few decades have revealed that hot spots of biodiversity often coincide with hot spots of cultural diversity. This has led to the concept of biocultural diversity, and researchers have been trying to understand how local culture and practices have shaped and maintained biodiversity. Many evolutionary processes, independent of human intervention, lead to diversity of plants and animals, but the impact of human habitation is becoming increasingly clear. In many places where local peoples have lived for a long time, the populations’ strategies for earning their livelihoods have encouraged biological diversification, says Wali. “In other instances, local peoples have developed ways of managing natural resources so that forest ecosystems remain largely intact, thus enabling the maintenance of existing forms of biological diversity.” The practices that have shaped the natural histories of places like B. R. Hills stem from what researchers refer to as traditional ecological knowledge. “Our knowledge about the world comes from doing things in it,” says Pretty. “If you lead a life that involves farming, hunting, and fishing, you are on the land, and you learn the granular detail of place and spaces and how seasons change. That knowledge is part of [the] evolutionary success of humans.” The Soligas’ intimate knowledge of their ecosystem came from being so dependent on the forest for their survival. Researchers who have spent years studying this region are discovering the depth and quality of that knowledge. Siddappa Setty, a researcher and outreach coordinator with ATREE’s livelihood and conservation program, has studied the local ecology for the past 14 years by mapping the sanctuary’s vegetation and investigating the impacts of forest fires, parasites, and resource harvesting on biodiversity. In most cases, his results have corroborated what the community elders told him before he started the project. “The
This sacred champaka (Michelia champaca) tree in B. R. Hills is a testament to the Soligas’ cultural ties with the forest. The champaka tree is also worshipped by other communities in India. scientific method needs more time, and you need more money to do it,” he says. “The techniques used by the community are comparable to the scientific method.”
Ecological fallouts “When people are torn from their lands or when their environments are destroyed, it is harder to hold on to knowledge systems,” says Wali. In the case of the Soligas, some of the traditional ecological knowledge still exists within the community but is no longer used to manage the forest. In this case, the forest department imposed a “completely foreign system of management [that] is having some incredible consequences,” says Rai. Studies by researchers at ATREE show that over the past few decades, the biomass of the forest has increased. Although Setty and Rai are conducting their own studies of the various impacts of changes in fire regimes on the forest ecology, the researchers believe the Soligas’ conclusion that fire suppression has facilitated the lantana explosion in the sanctuary. Today, a fire can destroy the forest because of excessive fuel loading from the lantana, says Rai; this echoes the Soligas’ predictions. Gnarled and charred remains of trees that burned down in a massive fire in 2006 bear witness to the wisdom of those predictions. In addition to increasing risks of large-scale fires, the lantana invasion has reduced the food supply for many of the forest’s herbivores, according to the Soligas. And that is increasingly driving the animals to raid the crop fields on the forest fringes. One study by Setty and his colleagues shows that a certain hemiparasite (Taxillus tomentosus) of the gooseberry tree (Phyllanthus emblica) increases in number VOL. 42, NO. 20, 2008 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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positive outcomes is greater when different knowledge bases are combined toward a single goal, he explains.
A startled gaur, or Indian bison (Bos gaurus), stands by a water hole in B. R. Hills. The forest understory behind the gaur is mostly filled with the invasive Lantana camara. when fires are suppressed and that the trees subsequently bear less fruit and have shorter life spans. Researchers at ATREE are convinced that the biodiversity of the hills is no longer as great as it was when the area was first declared a sanctuary. Pretty describes the dissociation of local peoples from conservation efforts as “ecologically daft,” but this is by no means the only threat to local cultures, knowledge, and biodiversity. “The biggest challenge is the threat posed by the fast and accelerating pace of environmental destruction fueled by increased and unsustainable consumption of natural resources and commodities in the industrialized and emerging industrialized nations,” says Wali. Such situations also create conflict and erode culture and the ecological knowledge base. In a paper published earlier this year in ES&T, Sarah Pilgrim, Pretty, and their colleagues show how ecological knowledge fades as people move from developing economies to developed, more industrialized ones. As societies industrialize, contact with and knowledge of nature becomes “peripheral,” says Pretty. This makes conserving biodiversity harder, because people no longer understand the significance of sustainable use of natural resources.
Looking ahead Local movements to reclaim ancestral lands and maintain cultural identities are making researchers and conservationists recognize issues of land rights related to conservation. In India, the recognition of these issues is reflected in the recent enactment of the Recognition of Forest Rights Act of 2006, which mandates that people who have been displaced from conservation areas be given land rights within those areas. The legislation is controversial, because it might further endanger the survival of threatened and endangered species like the Royal Bengal tiger. However, the act is expected to ease land-related conflicts in conservation areas throughout the country, including B. R. Hills. Conservation measures during the past century have indeed had some positive outcomes, says Pretty. For example, restricting people’s access to some critical tiger habitats in India is thought to have kept the animal from becoming locally extinct. But if you exclude people, “in the end it doesn’t work,” he says. “You make people the enemy of conservation... because they’ve been excluded from their homes, their land, their culture, and then you miss the knowledge that they have.” To be successful in the long run, biodiversity conservation approaches have to be mindful of land rights and local cultures and try to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge, he says. “Traditional knowledge isn’t inherently better than other knowledge,” he notes. But the potential for 7554
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Researchers at ATREE and members of the Soliga community in B. R. Hills are building a seed bank to conserve the diversity of local agricultural crops. Not everyone agrees with this philosophy. Kent Redford of the WildlifeConservationSocietyInstituteacknowledgesthelegitimate issues of land and intellectual property rights that surround the extraction of natural resources. “And it is clear that the sustainable use of natural resources is something that is much more tightly linked, in my view of these things, to traditional ecological knowledge,” he says. “But I do not equate that with [the] modern version of conservation.” Still, people’s awareness of the importance of incorporating local cultures and their needs into conservation measures is growing, says Pilgrim. “You see more and more of community-based conservation schemes.” BackinB.R.Hills,ATREEanditsSoligapartnersaremonitoring the availability of forest resources and the extent of their use by the community. So far, the harvesting of nontimber products appears to be sustainable, says Setty. He, Rai, and colleagues are working with community members to understand the history of this ecosystem by learning the rules and patterns by which the community used the forest. Such projects are “quite small-scale,” notes Pilgrim, and there is still a long way to go. Wali agrees. With few exceptions, conservationists and international policy makers have not fully caught on to how to support local initiatives and fight for cultural identity and land rights, she says. “But increasingly, this is what will be necessary.” Rhitu Chatterjee is an associate editor of ES&T.
ES802117B
