Chapter -II

ECOLOGICAL CHANGE AND PLANTATION-A

THEORITICAL APPROACH.

The terms ‘ecological history’ and ‘environmental history’ are often used

synonymously though there is some kind of distinction between the two

words. The term oecologie was coined by the German zooligst Ernst

Haeckel in 1866. According to him the word defined the science of the

relations of living organisms to the external world, their habitat, customs,

energies, parasites, etc. Ecology implied a family of living organisms, each

in close proximity to the other, sharing the same physical space, with

conflicting appetites or complementary needs.(1). In practice ecology has

tended to focus more narrowly upon the study of ‘nature’, ‘the non human

world, the world we have not in any primary sense created’. (2). Man was

seen to be an external factor in shaping the natural environment. But such a

distinction between man and nature would sound inappropriate in the present

perspective where desertification and deforestation are our present concern.

The value and emphasis of ecology within the environmental and ecological

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history was to direct the attention away from an excessively anthropocentric

understanding of the world.

Moving firmly within the parameters of environmental history we find the

study of human engagement over time with the physical environment and its

influence in human history. The different elements of nature like climate,

topography, animal and insect life, vegetation and soils had directly or

indirectly had its effects on the human activity and productivity. They help

to promote or prohibit specific forms of social structure, economic

organization and belief systems. In the same way man can also alters the

landscape, fells trees, erodes soils, dams streams, kills off unwelcome plants

and predatory animals, introducing new species.

Moreover within the bounds of environmental history, there is a history of

the environment as cultural space and ideological artifact, as expressed

through the invocation and representation of nature in art and religion, in

myth, in ethics and the law. (3). The history of environment is also a history

of popular perceptions and experience, of folk traditions and religious belief.

It is said that this kind of environmental history creates a distance with the

ecological sciences and bring us closer to anthropology, art, literature and

religion.

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In other parts of the world like France and United states, environmental

history has been for some time a well established sub-field within history. In

both the countries enough work had been done that can be classified under

environmental history. Environmental history emerged as a distinct field in

United States in 1970’s, in the wake of environmental movement. Historians

of the Americas are divided over the primacy of ecological as opposed to

social factors in accounting for the success of the conquerors of the New

World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The vast majority of books

and articles on American environmental history cluster around two themes.

One was the consequences of European colonization and the development of

capitalism and the other was highlighting the works of individual and

organization that had challenged the environmental destruction unleashed by

colonialism and capitalism. (4).

In contrast to the above very less research work had been done in the field of

environmental history in South Asia. Historians of South Asia have largely

neglected the question of how far the imperial phase saw a qualitative

change in the relationship between people and the natural environment. Two

broad areas of focus have emerged, namely the changes in imperial attitudes

to the natural world and the responses and strategies of underprivileged

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groups to new systems of resource extraction and regulation. In France an

ecological approach to history was fostered not by a contemporary

environmental movement but by (i) a close and longstanding relationship

between history and geography in French intellectual life and (ii) an

appreciation of the fundamental importance of environmental factors to an

understanding of agrarian society.

But the sheer ecological and cultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent

radically and problematically distinguishes its environmental history from

the French or American experience. India like France is a predominantly

agrarian civilization with species diversity. The tropical environments here

has facilitated and sustained a much greater range of livelihood patterns. (5).

The South Asian landscape is dominated by settled villages, the numerous

and widely dispersed communities of hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators,

nomadic pastoralists and fisher folk and they all have contributed to a

cultural and ecological diversity which is surely unparalleled. From the

period 1870-1900 many environmental arenas like forests, fisheries,

irrigation, epidemic disease witnessed high imperialism and confidence in

the capacity of science and technology to rule nature and utilize it to the full.

Both colonial and post colonial states have powerfully influenced

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environmental change by formulating legislations for assuming control over

resources that were more informal and decentralized systems of

management. With the introduction of technologies the physical

environment changed.

Alfred. W. Crosby, one of the leading American scholars in the field has felt

that the ecological impact of colonialism was in fact quite different in the

New World and the Old. In his book, Ecological Imperialism, 900-1900:

The Biological Expansion, he argues that the main reason for the Europeans

success in conquering and colonizing the New World was not their superior

weaponry but rather their ‘portmanteau biota’-the complex of diseases,

plants and animals which accompanied them and which devastated

indigenous cultures and their supportive ecosystems. This ecological

invasion paved the way for the creation of prosperous colonial settlements

founded on European-style agriculture and stock raising in zones which

Crosby describes as ‘neo-Europes’. Thus the imperial success is explained in

terms of the biological advantage which the new arrivals had over

indigenous inhabitants. W. Cronan has a different explanation of why older

systems of resource use gave way to new ones. European settlers introduced

new forms of property, resulting in environmental changes. Ecological

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change is integral to such a history, but human choices and conflicts remain

at the centre. (6)

But Crosby’s viewpoint had been argued by the South Asian historians on

the point that European colonialism had correspondingly little ecological

impact in the Old World, where the tropical environment was inhospitable to

large scale white settlement and where the populations had greater resistance

to diseases such as small pox and measles. But in fact in the regions of South

Asia the Europeans achieved domination over the indigenous population was

not automatic. It was through reshaping the socio-ecological fabric of the

colony and the colonized. The Europeans modified the ecosystems

everywhere by introducing animals and plants, extracting resources,

deforesting many areas, establishing plantations and subjugating or

decimating indigenous populations that had formed their own ways of

interrelating with local environments.(7). The political control was achieved

through their superior military and technological resources and they

established colonial regimes in such a way so that they could manipulate

unfavorable environment to their own advantage and profit. The ecological

consequences of this intervention led to environmental degradation and

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restrictions on access to natural resources which was previously easily

available for use.

The emergence of environmental history as a special area in South Asia was

linked directly to the ongoing process of ecological degradation and to the

growth of a vigorous environmental movement in the region. In the 1970’s

India witnessed a series of country wide protests by the peasants and the

tribals that lead to critique of forest policy in modern India. The forestry

debate in turn led historians to look more closely into the role of forests and

forest products in local economies and to investigate the origins and

outcome of state forestry science and legislation. Thus the visible

deterioration of these resources in the present, and the emergence of bitter

social conflicts over their control and use haves brought them within the

orbit of environmental history.

The imperial forester took an opposed view, they too saw the imperial phase

as watershed, the colonials having saved the forests of South Asia from

certain destruction by indigenous forest users. According to Ribbentrop

scientific forestry under imperial aegis marked the end of a ‘war on the

forests’. The pre-colonial and early colonial phases were seen as a

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destructive period. (8). Stebbing argued that rapacious private interests were

brought under scientific supervision and control in the colonial period. (9).

Ramchandra Guha challenges the views of the imperial historians. He argues

that the practices of colonial forestry were largely an outgrowth of the

revenue and strategic needs of empire. The colonial period is seen as an

ecological watershed because it disrupted the relationship of forest based

communities with the land. (10). Customary restraints on the use of trees had

earlier ensured renewal, but colonial land control and commercialization led

to deforestation. The railway construction led to creation of Forest

Department in 1864 to ensure steady supply of wood. (11). As England did

not have a long history of forestry, the German experts were inducted into

India to assist in the management of woodlands. The commercial

exploitation disrupted the older system of land use and also promoted

commercially valuable trees at the expense of species vital for subsistence

economies.

The studies if Guha regarding the character and chronology of colonial

conservation had been questioned by Grove. According to him the

ideological commitment of a section of colonial officials to conservation

was much more significant than materialist concerns. Forest conservancy

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measures for the supply of the ship timber collapsed and were not revived

before 1837. Agrarian prosperity and social stability was much a wider

concern rather than colonial interests.

Thus many of the differences between Guha and Grove are due to the

difference in the chronological focus of their research. Grove is concerned

with the early colonial period while Guha focuses on the late nineteenth

century. There is also a marked contrast in their central concerns. Guha

examines the broad unity of imperial interests while Grove brings out the

division among colonial officials. Material self interest and the ideological

affinities of colonial officials are both inadequate by themselves to explain

the nature of colonial forest policy. Imperial foresters sought to impose an

absolute notion of landed property, and also tried to transform the forest into

a managed landscape where land use would be under imperial supervision

and control. The process of regulation can help to understand the nature and

impact of imperial intrusion into wooded tracts. He felt that one crucial

aspect of historical change that has often been neglected was the ecological

part. That is when, why and how particular human interventions led to major

transformations in the natural world. Ecosystems that had emerged in almost

complete isolation for centuries or millennia, and had evolved unique biotas,

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suddenly began to suffer the invasion of the animals and plants that the

Europeans brought with them, whether deliberately or accidentally. Other

changes followed soon: fire, hunting, cutting of trees and enslaving. (12).

The lives of under privileged groups were deeply affected by the changes

brought about by material and ideological intervention. (13).

EFFECTS OF BRITISH COLONIAL RULE:

India is said to be the natural geographical entity bounded by the great

ranges of the Himalaya, the Thar desert and the Indian ocean. Over centuries

India had witnessed invasions through the passages in the northwest, the

north east and across the seas. This has lead to intense cultural exchanges.

Though India had been a cultural entity for over two millennia, it was

constituted politically as a state under the British colonial regime only about

two hundred years ago.

The reasons for the expansion of the Europeans are complicated, but they

certainly include the desire to integrate new lands, with their natural

resources and cheap labour in to the British economy. The industrialization

that Britain was experiencing changed the patterns of supply and demand

and led to an uneven but inexorable aggrandizement of world markets. (14).

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In this period Europe drew raw materials from the rest of the world and

produced manufactured goods that were sold not only at home, but also back

to the countries that were the source of raw materials. In ecological terms

this meant that Europe and other areas that came to be industrialized were

using and degrading the material and energy capital of ecosystems abroad.

European economic thinkers such as Adam Smith were convinced that the

free market while appearing chaotic and exploitative, was actually guided to

produce the right amount and variety of goods by an “invisible hand” which

was not hindered by so called lassiez-faire doctrine.(15).

Indian forest based on culture has a long history. Until the British colonial

rule (1757-1947), Indian forest had been controlled and used by several

monarchies. The features of forest based livelihoods were also quite

different from one period to another. Before Muslim period, Indian forest

used to be considered as an important source of resource, but exploitation

was quite less compared to total forest cover. However during the Muslim

and the early British period forest was considered only as source of timber.

Considerable forests were destroyed to produce farmland. According to

[Link], during the Mughal period, a few forests had also been

declared as restricted areas to ensure a good hunting environment for

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Mughal emperors. Until the British colonial period in India, a large number

of people, mostly the tribal communities used to live in or around forest

areas depending entirely on forest products as mentioned in ‘The Notion Of

Tribe’ by [Link] published in California, Cummings Publication company.

These people believed themselves to be the actual owners of forest with

rights to use forest products for their subsistence purposes. Ritual, cultural as

well as social celebrations were strongly interrelated with the forest

environment. Thus there was no restriction on forest and forest products

collection for forest people in India apart from forests reserved for hunting

for rulers as found in Schlich’s Manual of Forestry, vol.1, Forest policy in

the British Empire,1906, London, Bradbury.

“In pre-British India the cultivated land was producing a great variety of

crop, and non cultivated land a variety of plant and animal produce largely

for fulfilling the subsistence needs of the local populations. This.. (during

colonial period) had to be changed with cultivated lands focusing on the

production of a few crops like cotton, jute, indigo and tea and the non-

cultivated lands with a few choice of timber species like teak, primarily for

export to Britain.”(16).

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After the handover of the colonial power in 1857, the British government

realized the importance of forests for revenue generation and implemented

several rules and regulations to control the ‘illicit’ timber felling. This type

of forest management continued even after the independence until the Joint

Forest Management system was implemented.

During the colonial period from 1757-1947, Indian forests were used as an

important source of revenue. The British East India Company’s main target

was to strengthen their rule over India and to increase their revenue from

forest products. They were not interested in protecting the Indian forest.

According to Ribbentrop, “our earlier administrators (British East India

Company), occupied with the building of an Empire, probably never thought

of the important part forests have always played, play now, and will forever

play in the household of nature… The people took all that they required for

their simple wants where they found it. Trade in forest produce and wood

consuming industries were in their infancy….. no apprehension was felt that

the supply of forest produce would ever fall short of the demand, and forests

were considered as an obstruction to agriculture…. And consequently a bar

to the prosperity of the empire.” (17).

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Until the end of the colonial era India followed a strategy of expanding

acreage under hoe and plow, at the expense of grassland and forest, rather

than intensifying production on existing acreage. The villagers failed to

maintain their traditional subsistence uses of the forest against the incursions

of the market economy. They instead were successful in expanding

agriculture than in maintaining their forest resources. To administer the

exploitation of the government forest, Indian Forest Service was founded in

1860 with the hope to achieve balance among forest, grassland and tilled

land. (18).

The British government implemented a number of rules and regulations to

control the collection of forest products by native forest dwellers. For the

need of timber for constructing railway tracks, developing ship building

industries for the Royal Navy, making furniture, providing a continous

supply of fire-wood and for the exportation of timber to Britain, heavy

pressure was placed on Indian timber forests during this period. Between

1864-1899, timber imports trebled to ten million tons. (19). Another

additional pressure was the plantation cropping of perennial crops for world

markets also led to depletion of forests. In the nineteenth century coffee and

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tea became India’s dominant export plantation crops and were grown almost

entirely in the northeastern hill region. (20).

After the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British

Government in 1857, the British Government realized that timber supplies

needed to be conserved. They tried to protect the forest areas by converting

them into government property. To achieve the monopoly power over Indian

forest resources the British Government took steps to control local

inhabitants’ rights by implementing strict rules and regulations. Such forest

policies were enacted for the purpose of conserving future supplies of

timber, forest products and wild animals and to increase revenue from such

items, while the thoughts and livelihoods of local forest dwellers were

largely ignored. In the mid nineteenth century, British India was one of the

first countries in the world with a national forest service.

The demarcation and nationalization of Indian forest started from the 1850’s.

The open forest areas were converted into reserved forest areas. The total

forest area and the type i.e reserved or open varied from year to year during

the entire colonial period (1757-1947). After 1860, the British Government

implemented a more commercialized forest management policy in South

Asian countries to increase revenue from forests. In 1864, the Forest

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Department of Bengal was set up and a conservator of Forest was also

recruited. The first Indian Forest Act was issued in 1865. Later this Act was

modified in 1873-74 and again in 1878. Following the Voelcker Resolution

(1894), Indian forests were divided into several categories according to their

importance. These were reserved forests which were entirely under

government control, protected forest where forest dwellers could enter to

collect food and fodder where the government could impose restrictions and

unclassed state forests where the government used to give permission to

forest communities to collect forest products for their household needs. In

1924, a new Indian forest Act was implemented replacing the previous one.

(21)

The British drained their colonies of their natural resources. In order to

accomplish this, the pattern of land use within India was organized in such a

way to maximize the revenue it yielded for the British empire and its

economy. Land was made the private property and was taken away from the

village communities. The privately held land did not escape the eyes of the

British and were put to heavy taxation. In the north and north east the land

were handed over to the feudal landlords where the position of the peasants

were reduced to the status of much exploited tenants and sharecroppers. In

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the south and west India cultivators were assigned lands. But the taxes

imposed upon them was higher. As they were unable to pay the high taxes

they easily became indebted and the lands were lost to the moneylenders.

The peasants were forced to cultivate cash crops such as cotton, jute and

indigo to feed the expanding British textile industry but these not help them

to meet their ends. Though more and more land was brought under

cultivation, the productivity of agriculture remained utterly stagnant under

the colonial regime. This resulted in several disastrous famines under British

rule with millions of death.

Speaking of the tea industry in India, the tea planters held dominant financial

and political leverage, preventing their critics from mounting effective

pressure to mitigate their policies and preventing the state’s Forest

Department, their competitor for control of forest lands, from gaining

control over wide forest areas. The impact of the World War I on forest

lands centered on wartime prosperity and expansion in the tea industry. With

the rise of prices in Europe, acreage under tea extended rapidly.

The global depression of the 1930’s hit the tea industry rapidly. In India the

wholesale price index for tea dropped by 53 percent in four years. The

planters reduced production by firing many plantation workers. This resulted

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in unemployed group of workers. Some returned to their homes in the west

while most of them moved to the adjacent government forest land as

squatters, growing crops in clumsy imitation of local shifting cultivation. In

their desperation they damaged forest and soil cover. By 1933 the industry

created an international system to regulate and, when necessary, limit

production which assured profitability by 1934. The British government

controlled all tea production and consumption from 1940 onward, and the

rising competition of Indonesian tea was ended by the Japanese occupation

of the islands. The tea industry in Assam and northern Bengal expanded

another 20 percent by 1945. (22). Thus the combined interest of the planters,

imported labourers, and immigrant farmers placed heavy and escalating

pressure on the forests.

According to Karlsson, the British ‘scientific forest’ policy forced some

tribal communities like the Rabha’s, a tribal community in the region of

Duars, to change their aboriginal lifestyle and shifting cultivation. To protect

forests and for the collection of forest products some tribal community were

used as permanent forest labourers. To accommodate these labourers a

number of ‘forest villages’ were set up within reserved forests. (23). But the

forceful implementation of scientific forest policy increased illegal

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collection of forest products by the indigenous forest dwellers. Still it

remains a debated matter that whether the British government implemented

rules and regulations to safeguard the forest for future as they claimed or just

to increase revenue from forest products.

Before the coming of the British in India community based management

systems existed. Peasants in India cultivated in tropical soils which lacked

nutrients. This was compensated by maintaining a herd of cattle that could

convert the vegetation on the surrounding non cultivated lands into manure

for crops. Such lands as well as irrigation ponds were managed for the most

part by village communities. But the scenario changed with the coming of

the British. These lands were taken away by the British. They took away the

forest reserved lands for producing timber resulting in overuse and

degradation. In theory the reserved forest lands were supposed to be

managed in a sustainable fashion but their takeover by the state resulted in

confiscation rather than conservation. The thick Indian forest was liquidated

to in the interest of the British to build ships and for building railway lines.

The mixed forests were replaced by single species tree which were known to

be commercially valuable such as teak, sal, deodar. The tribals and the

peasants were thus deprived of the forest products on which they depended.

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Thus the intention of the British was to convert India as supplier of cheap

raw materials and a market for higher priced manufactured goods. Large

quantities of biological produce such as rice, cotton, jute, indigo, tea and

teak and even gold and precious stones began to flow out of India. These

commodities were produced cheaply. The tea plantations in northeastern

India were set up by taking over tribal lands without any compensation. On

them the labour worked under conditions in approximately slavery. The

British people transmitted back home information on India’s landmass, its

plant wealth, its people and their customs. But in return very little technical

information flowed from Britain to India.

Moreover the World War II also brought major changes in forest production.

Between 1939 and 1945 timber production in the reserves more than

doubled, while fuel wood cutting tripled. New emergency rail lines and

motor roads were required to serve the needs of the war. The motorization of

forestry which happened during the war years was a turning point in the

mobility of foresters, bureaucrats, politicians and peasants alike. The scale of

timber exports could be increased to meet the economic demands of

independence. The roads were found to be useful for the peasants searching

for new lands to till. (24).

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Thus the once well organized village level systems of management and self

governance were largely destroyed by a powerful state apparatus system.

The traditional basis of subsistence of a large number of artisan and service

communities also vanished. The weavers were deliberately forced out of

work to ensure a market for British textile mills, the ferrymen went out of

business for building bridges and nomadic traders with the expansion of

roads and railways. This resulted in dependence of large population on

agricultural labour and cultivation for subsistence. Serious famines and

epidemics resulted between the period 1860 and 1920. So the traditional

network of mutual obligations characterizing Indian rural society was

seriously disrupted. There was enough surplus agricultural production before

the coming of the British. This surplus disappeared largely by 1920. This

was mainly because of the increase in the population as well as the depletion

of the forests.

The Indian Forest Department, founded during the British rule, became

India’s single largest landlord. They viewed all the needs of the ecosystem

people as a burden, as ‘biotic’ not ‘anthropic’ pressure, as if the people

behind these demands were less than human. Some lands were set aside, as

revenue ‘wastelands’, from which ecosystem people were expected to meet

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their substantial and vital biomass needs. The rights over these lands no

longer existed. So these areas became no man’s lands and were overused

without restraint. The conservationists have argued that commercial forestry

has contributed significantly to the decimation of biological diversity and to

an increase in soil erosion and floods.

MODES OF RESOURCE USE:

European agricultural technology intruded into the rest of the world,

particularly the temperate and sub tropical areas, bringing machines and

crops that cleared and replaced indigenous animal and plant life. Plantation

of crops in demand in Europe, such as coffee and tea, replaced the

biodiversity of tropical forests with monoculture. With the manipulation of

immense amount of energy made possible by technology, the human use of

resources became increasingly exploitative with an accelerating impact of

change on ecosystems around the globe. Industrial process generated

increasing levels of pollution of the air, water and land. (25).

The social scientists have supported the Marxist concept of modes of

production while classifying societies according to the technologies and

relations of production. Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and

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capitalism were derived largely from European experience. But it has been

useful in writing histories of non western culture also. The emergence of

capitalism as a ‘world system’ lead to revival in those far flung corners of

the world where the clash between pre-capitalist relations of production and

the capitalist ethos had gained momentum. But the Marxist felt that there

was a lack of emphasis on political structures and struggles in the theory.

Secondly the theory was much more appropriate in European context than

any where else. Thirdly the non-Marxists felt that the mode of production

may help in explaining differences in economic structure it is of very little

use while interpreting differences in the religious, cultural and ideological

attributes of different societies. Thus the Marxist analyses begins with the

economic ‘infrastructure’ meaning the so called relations of production and

productive forces without investigating the ecological context which

includes the soil, water, animal, mineral, and vegetative bases of society in

which the infrastructure is embedded. Thus the concept of mode of

production needs to be complemented with the concept of modes of resource

use. (26).

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The four distinct modes of production were gathering, nomadic pastoralism,

settled cultivation and industry examined in aspects of technology, economy,

social organization, aspects of ideology and ecological impact.

It is said that large period of human history has been spent within the

gathering mode of resource use, during which the hunting of wild animals

and gathering of food was the basic mode of subsistence. The human power,

wood fuel as main source of energy, available plants, animals and stones to

fulfill their material requirements were the things that the human society

depended on. The economy within this mode of resource use is based on

resources which are acquired within a small area. The society depended on

diverse plants and animals available within the surroundings. The quantities

consumed were restricted within the needs of subsistence. The people in

such society respond to such variations by adapting to the local conditions.

In the harsher and more variable environments the people comprising these

societies subsist as nomadic bands. In the more productive and stable

environment they exist as tribal groups confined to relatively small

territories. The sizes of these social groups are small with very few

transactions outside their own group. The relations with the other group

other than their own were mainly of conflict often over territorial control.

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With the beginnings of cultivation and animal husbandry and later with the

beginning of industrial revolution the people of gathering mode came to be

increasingly disadvantaged people with no access to advanced levels of

technology. (27). Thus the gathering societies with their low population

densities, low resource demands, practices that promote sustainable resource

use had a low level of ecological impact.

The gatherers with the passage of time took to domestication of plants and

animals. It is possible that climatic and vegetation change prompted human

populations to intensify resource base and to initiate agriculture and animal

husbandry. Pastorals utilized the animal power as modes of transport and

source of food. In the pastoral society elements of private property began to

emerge. As they could survive successfully in harsh and variable

environments without attaching themselves in a particular locality they were

considered to be the first societies to perceive human communities as

separate from nature and therefore in a position to dominate it. Thus the

nomadic pastorals contributed to a gradual overgrazing leading to expansion

of dry regions. They also contributed to ecological degradation through the

organization of trade and the diffusion of technology over large distances

and increased the confidence of man’s mastery of nature. (28).

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In a settled cultivation human muscle power supplemented by animal muscle

power plays an important role. In the industrialized world settled cultivation

is dependent on fossil fuel energy. Pre industrial agriculture is dependent on

plant and animal based materials along with controlled irrigation. Pre

industrial agricultural societies viewed nature as being subject to human

control to a very significant extent. There was change in consumption also.

Majority of the agrarian population consumed natural resources largely for

subsistence. Another group of small population was involved in large scale

consumption and use of materials not directly related to subsistence but of

luxury. Settled cultivation also led to large scale exports of materials out of

intensively cultivated patches of lands, both to nearby villages and distant

urban centers. These flow of materials increased with technical

improvements.

With technical improvements and with the concentration of powers of

coercion, village communities lost control over cultivated lands and became

tenant-cultivators. Lands were also lost to powerful landlords or by state.

The state also claimed land usually the uninhabited tracts as hunting

reserves. Imbalance resulted when there was outflow of resources from rural

areas to the urban centers. This became more acute when technological

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advancement, transport and processing created a demand for a larger range

of produce from both cultivated and non cultivated lands. With the increase

of the cultivated lands the social groups lost the bond with the locality that

they had enjoyed before.

The agricultural societies in spite of gaining control over natural process

still became vulnerable to droughts, floods, frost etc. the influence of man to

dominate nature also gained influence. The process of colonizing lands from

the earlier gatherers resulted in exploiting resources as he wished.

Cultivation also imposed demands on natural resources leading to removal

of forest produce, to be used as fuel, fodder, manure, building timber and

implements. This had often resulted in the local extinction of some species

of plants and animals.

Describing the pattern of energy use, in the gatherer mode the pattern of

energy use may be characterized as passive as it was dependent on human

power and wood fuel power. The agricultural mode was described as active

where human power was combined with animal power, wood fuel and water

power. In the industrial mode energy use followed an extractive path, where

natural resources are both harnessed and mined for human consumption. The

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materials produced in the industrial society could be preserved for long

periods and transported for consumption anywhere.

In the industrial society there was steady increase of resource base which

was achieved by the growing knowledge about the working of nature with

the help of science and scientific discoveries to make better use of energy

sources, process materials and transport goods faster more economically and

over long distances. The process of intensification use of resources has led

over use and exhaustion of many resources.

The expansion of the resource base was only possible with the access of new

lands and natural resources with the process of colonialism. The Europeans

colonialists established an firm hold on the resource of the colonial world for

meeting the purpose of their own people. Like India became the exporter of

teak, cotton, jute, tea, indigo and precious metal. These unprocessed

resources were purchased at very low prices and exported small volumes of

processed resources at much higher rates. The wastes produced in the

industrial societies were either disposed in the oceans and the atmosphere or

sold it to the Third world countries. The number of humans involved in such

society also increased with system of division of labour.

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In modern industrial societies this division largely depended on skills in

processing, transporting and exchanging materials and information. The

continual expansion of the resource base either by extractive techniques or

by drawing into new lands the mobility of the social groups increased. There

was also rise of individualism with the expansion of trade as the individual

transactions were regulated. The modern industrial society did not legitimize

the community based systems of access and control.

Forest management provided a good illustration of how the industrial mode

admitted the polarity of the individual and the state control. In the process of

industrialization in Western Europe and the United States, an early phase of

anarchic capitalist exploitation was followed by the assertion of the state

control. The government took over the responsibility for forest protection

and production. The state withdrew control over certain forest areas with the

handing over of areas to private industry. With the expansion of market and

trade planting of commercially valued trees by individual farmers were

encouraged. Thus in industrial mode of society the forests were primarily

state owned. The victims in this process were the village based systems of

community forests and pasture management.

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The industrial society was no longer dependent on the natural resources of

their immediate vicinity. Moreover with the development of scientific

knowledge the scale of deforestation of the forest also increased.

In reference to the different modes of resources discussed above there were

possibilities of social strife between the different modes when they came

into contact with each other. The results were sometimes violent and

genocidal conflict. Ecological bases of conflict resulted in the extermination

of the native population and traumatization of certain segment. One of the

best documented of such conflicts is the clash between the indigenous hunter

gatherer/ shifting cultivator populations of the New World on the one hand

and the advance guard of European colonists practicing an altogether

different system of agriculture on the other. (29). The rise of industrial

capitalism radically altered relations not merely in land and the workplace

but also around the utilization of nature. With the control of the forest by the

state resulted in increase of forest crimes. The peasants resorted to poaching

and the theft of forest produce.

India also underwent the same experience that is the encounter between

peasant and the industrial modes mediated by colonialism resulted in

intensification of social conflicts over forest produce. The take over of

113
forest land for strategic and commercial purpose resulted in clash over

forests, lands and water in colonial societies as it happened when land was

taken away from traditional peasants for the purpose of large scale cash crop

plantations. The other was the restrictions on subsistence hunting-gathering

and grazing for the use of colonists.

It is said that the social conflicts within different modes of resource use was

not so visible as the struggles between the modes. The intra-modal conflicts

were more complex as one passed to more advanced modes of resource use.

The situation became more acute when the typical characteristics of the

mode were distorted to meet the ends of a particular social group. It had

been seen in different periods that the shift from the peasant to the industrial

mode the conflict within the peasant mode intensify when one class within

the agrarian society had adapted to the socio ecological orientation of the

coming mode. On the other hand in the industrial mode there are continous

struggle of individual capitalists with each other and against the state for the

control over the non cultivated areas and other resources. Moreover the

industrialization created a group of new working class whose interests were

not always in harmony with those of capitalists.

114
A discrepancy is required between property relations is required in the stable

functioning of the industrial capitalist mode. Private ownership

predominates in the industrial society while forests to a much greater extent

were owned and controlled by the state. The stability of the industrial mode

could be acquired depending on the rationality of the government and its

intervention to harmonize the conflicts between individual capitalists.

Thus the human societies move temporally from hunting and gathering

through pastoralism, agriculture and finally into industrialization. The

process though distinct are closely interrelated. Firstly there was an

increasing intensity of resource use and exploitation. Secondly there was a

secular increase in the level of resource flows across different geographical

regions and across different levels of any economic and political system.

Thirdly there was an integration of larger areas into the domain of any

economic and political system. Fourthly at the global level there was a

secular increase in the population densities and in the extent of stratification

and inequality with respect to the access, control and use of different natural

resources. Finally these resulted in intensification of rates of ecological

change and ecological disturbance. The different modes of resource use had

115
been classified according to the technology, pattern of resource flows, social

structure, dominant ideologies and systems of conservation.

It had been noticed that the tradition of Indian history witnessed an

integrated agrarian system with highly sophisticated artisanal system of

production for local consumption and for trade. There was enough space

between the industry and agriculture, state and peasant to work smoothly.

But this equation changed wit the coming of the Europeans. Europe in the

wake of industrial revolution was experiencing economic, political and

social changes which had its impact on the mode of resource use. With the

technological advances the resources were easily transformed from one form

to another. There was increase in demand for some commodities. Wood in a

subsistence economy was used on a limited scale which was now converted

into paper or burnt as fuel for the steam engines of trains and ships. Thus

this conversion of commodities also radically transformed the flow of

energy and materials also leading to outflow of different resources from

cultivated lands, forests and water bodies. The control over these resources

were more confirmed by the technological advances made in the sphere of

transport, transformation and coercion. (30). This was done by converting

the forest and water bodies into private or state property. All this resulted in

116
breaking down of cohesive local communities with individuals acting on

their own. Now the individuals could have unlimited access to the resources.

The industrial mode of resource use helped in understanding the ecological

conflict between India and Britain.

EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL MODE IN THE ECOSYSTEM OF

THE COLONIES: RISE OF SCIENTIFIC SOCITIES.

The western capitalism brought about a disruption in the ecosystems through

trade and colonialism. Colonialism led to global control over resources.

Such interventions lead to reshaping the social, ecological and demographic

characteristics of the particular land. According to Alfred Crosby,’ the

extermination of native ecosystems and populations paved the way for the

creation of Neo-Europes’. The complex of weeds, animals and diseases the

Europeans brought devastated the flora, fauna and human societies of the

new world. Though Crosby suggest that European colonialism had an

insignificant impact on ecosystems Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil

felt that the Europeans in India failed to create neo-europes by breaking the

indigenous populations and their natural base. But certainly their

intervention radically changed their existing food production systems and

their ecological basis.

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According to [Link] in ‘The Silent Spring’, man has contaminated the

environment in many ways through air, earth, river and seas with dangerous

and even lethal materials. The pollution is for the most part irrecoverable

which initiates a chain of evil not only in the world but also in the living

tissues. Chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lying long in

the soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a

chain of poisoning and death. The chemicals also pass through the

underground streams until they emerge and through the alchemy of air and

sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle and do

unknown harm.

The life forms that inhabits the earth now had reached a state of adjustment

and balance with its surroundings after thousands of years. But after the

industrial revolution, the different type of new chemicals that were produced

were the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in

laboratories, and had no counter parts in nature. To make adjustments to

these chemicals would require a long time involving long generations. Since

the 1940’s over two hundred chemicals were created for killing insects,

weeds, rodents and other organisms described as pests. These chemicals

were found to have lingering effect on the soil. But according to the

118
Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest, the insects had evolved into

super races immune to the particular insecticide used, leading to the

development of more deadlier insecticide.

The millions of species of insects have come into conflict with the human

welfare in two ways:

1) as competitors of food supply

2) as carriers of human disease

The disease carrying insects are found especially in areas where human

beings are crowded together, especially under conditions where saitation is

poor, in time of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty

and deprivation.

According to British ecologist, Dr Charles Elton in, ‘The Ecology of

Invasions,’ with a life and death need not just to find new technological

means of suppressing this plant or that animal; instead we need the basic

knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings

119
that will promote an even balance and damp down the explosive power of

outbreaks and new invasions’.

After the Second World War there was a marked change by turning away

from inorganic chemicals as pesticides into production of man made or

synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. Every human being is

subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of

conception until death. The problem of water pollution by pesticides resulted

in pollution of the total environment of mankind. Ever since the chemists

began to manufacture substances that nature never invented, the problems of

water purification have become complex and the dangers to users of water

has increased.

The tide of chemicals born of the Industrial Age had a drastic change on the

environment leading to most serious health problems. The major concern is

no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent, sanitation,

better living condition and new drugs have given us a high degree of control

over infectious disease. The concern is about the different kinds of hazard

that exist in the environment introduced by us into this world for modern

way of living. Probably no person is immune to contact with this spreading

contamination. (31). Thus with the dawn of the industrial era the world

120
became a place of continuous, ever accelerating change. The natural

environment was rapidly substituted by an artificial one composed of new

chemical and physical agents, many of them possessing powerful capacities

for inducing biological change.

By the end of the eighteenth century an awareness developed globally

arising out of shortage for timber resources. Large areas of the continental

tropics that were colonized underwent extensive ecological change. The ease

of access permitted to both British and Indian entrepreneurs under the East

India Company as a consequence of the political demise of the old

princedoms was a critical factor in accelerating deforestation. Political

division and traditional controls had the effect of cushioning Indian forests

from the increasing pressures imposed by external markets and small private

enterprise. As a single political and colonial entity, India became more

vulnerable to both externally and internally generated economic and

ecological pressures. Environmentalism achieved institutional diffusion

through the wide development of professional science in the colonial context

and through the further diffusion of climatic and medical environmentalism

among intellectuals and in the government. (32). Global environmental

consciousness which emerged in the context of European colonial expansion

121
occurred between 1660 and 1860. The trade and territorial expansion of the

Venetian, Dutch, English and French maritime powers were characterized by

a connected and coherent intellectual evolution of ideas and concepts with

the drastic ecological consequences of colonial rule and capitalist

penetration. The rapid ecological deterioration led to the process of

counteraction.

The European companies trading in India were threatened economically and

also the security for the supply of ships declined due to environmental

deterioration. Moreover the intellectual and scientific developments also

proved a stimulus in valuing the environment in literary, scientific and

economic terms. The establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal marked

the beginnings of a long association between British aggrandizement in

India and the flowering of Oriental and scientific scholarship in the early

nineteenth century. The association helped to promote the flow of ideas

between scientists in India and those outside the country. The development

of colonial botanical garden also formed the basis for new kind of learning,

information collecting and networking in the tropical environment. The

colonial botanical garden provided the basis for the institutional emergence

of environmentalist ideas. (33). During the 1770’s a realization developed

122
among a limited group of company servants in Bengal that the onset of

British rule might have serious consequences for the incidence of drought

and the frequency of famine. Some of the scientists sent out to the colonies

recognized that the activities fostered by the empire were doing

environmental damage. British rule felt the responsibility to assess and

respond to the growing evidence of artificial influences on the rainfall levels.

(34). Captain Robert Kyd, superintendent of the East India Company’s

botanical garden at Sibpur was a principal exponent of this view. According

to him a company botanical garden would ‘greatly facilitate the production

and dispatch of the plants wanted as well as other useful or rare plants. (35).

The East India Company authorities in London and Calcutta had become

increasingly aware of the advantages that might be gained from playing an

active role in promoting and investigating in crop experimentation and from

efforts to transfer new crops and centralize them in botanical gardens in

company territories.

The scientific societies also expedited the more rapid, large scale and regular

transfer of intellectual ideas, innovation and exchange. The economic and

social changes brought by the rule of the East India Company, the ecological

consequences of western penetration and the development of state responses

123
to such changes became topics of considerable interest of the historians.

Deforestation and the colonial response towards it had a direct and far

reaching effect on agricultural production and population movements. The

development of a distinctive group of professional scientists as

environmental commentators took place canvassing new scientific insights

and sympathetic attitudes to nature. The identification between moral or

reformist sympathies and environmental concern became a characteristic

among scientist in India. It is said that the indigenous knowledge,

management and afforestation methods were more important to the

evolution of company environmental policy than any set of ideas imported

from outside India. Local resistance to state forestry and conservation policy

became far more developed after the end of the company rule. (36).

It had been noticed that the earlier colonial conservation policies were

perceived as being the legitimate concern of the state rather than of the

individual. The government also restricted the involvement of the private

capital keeping in eye for long term interest. The motivations of those

specialists who were critical of the ecological degradation and proposed

controls were always not identical with the state. On the contrary they were

taken to be anti colonial. (37).

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The sheer speed of ecological change implicit in the activities of capital in

the context of colonial expansion made environmentalist ideas and

conservation policies inevitable simply to protect European capital or settler

investments. However this argument had been countered. The rates of

ecological change were not significant in eliciting intervention until they

could be noticed and quantified. The scientist only could evaluate this

process. This is why the colonial state became so much dependent on the

observations and predictions of the scientists. Far more significant was the

way in which the very nature if the colonial state and its privileged network

of connections for the diffusion of information effectively promoted a

sophisticated environmental critique which was effective in encouraging the

colonial state to enlarge its role far beyond that states known to Europe. A

growing interest in long term environmental security ensured both continuity

in policy and the evolution of an apparently contradictory role in land

management for the colonial state. The botanical gardens served a crucial

purpose as symbolic texts, centers for calculation and repositories of

information and expertise. (38).

Those who criticized colonial laissez-faire policies pertaining to

deforestation, soil erosion and species extinctions tended also to those who

125
deprecated colonial exacerbation of famine and disease patterns and the

treatment meted out to the peoples. In this respect colonial scientists such as

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre on Mauritius, Balfour in India are all good

exemplars of the close connections between nascent environmentalism and

the social reformism of physiocracy and the Enlightenment. (39).

The intellectual history of environmental consciousness in the context of

European colonial expansion appears to exhibit several important kinds of

elements. The environmentalist discourses related to physical well being and

bodily survival. This is the element developed principally as part of a

medical critique of environmental change, leading to concerns about climate,

disease, the hydrological state and famine. The second set of notions was

stimulated by literary evocations of Eden, Paradise, Utopia and New

Cytheria by Romantic images of the ‘sublime’ and ‘wilderness’. Such

notions were connected to the ideas of a moral economy or utilitarian ideals

about the desirability of new state structures or roles. Both the physical and

mental realms ultimately could deal with anxieties about the survival, nature

and integrity of human individual and human society. Historically a growing

awareness of extinction process served to unite this concerns towards the

end of eighteenth century. Literature and environmentalist texts stimulated

126
the thinking about the dynamics of species change and human origins. The

writings of Alexander Anderson, [Link] and Charles Darwin are

indicators of long evolving connection between insular discourses and

dynamics of species formation and extinction process. The publication of

Darwin’s theory of natural selection by 1859 made Europe about the dangers

of extinction leading to threatening of the social order questioning the whole

fabric of traditional beliefs and structures justifying and explaining man’s

place in the world and in time.

The colonial conservation lobby played an important role by appealing to the

credibility of evidence of a global threat to the environment from human

activity. Initially this was undertaken through the publication of international

scientific literature. International and inter-colonial contacts among

scientists reinforced the growth of a sense of a global environmental crisis.

Scientific meetings such as those of the British Association for the

advancement of Science in 1851 and the Royal Geographical Society in1865

and 1866, reinforced the strength of the colonial scientists and gave them a

new source of authority which no single colonial state could ignore.

Thus colonial environmental policies arose between 1650 and 1850 as a

product of tensions existing between colonial periphery and metropolitan

127
centre and between colonial state and environmentalism. Modern

environmentalism emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and

ecological conditions of colonial rule other than being a product of European

predicaments and philosophies.

In India there were serious droughts in 1835-39, the early 1860’s, and 1877-

8. This led to initiation or renewal of state programmes designed to

strengthen forest protection with the specific aim of preventing subsequent

droughts. But such legislations instead increased the state control over land

and timber supplies. The expansion in state forest control almost always

took place at the expense of traditional rights and customs over forests and

grazing. While the desire to control rebellious minority tribal groups and to

secure a sustained supply of cheap timber encouraged this expansion, the

fear of climatic change remained an important motive.

The debate about climatic change gained importance in international sphere

by the mid 1860’s. It was reinforced by more detailed research that raised

the possibility that the very constitution of the atmosphere might be

changing. Such views, the beginnings of the current ‘greenhouse’ debate,

had found early advocacy in the writings of [Link] Wilson in 1858.

The spectre of human extinction as a consequence of climatic change

128
became an issue of thought and awareness. This was consistent with the

fears that had been developing among the emerging world scientific

community for a considerable period. By the early 1860’s therefore, long

established anxieties about artificially induced climatic change and species

extinctions had reached a climax. The penetration of western style economic

development spread initially through colonial expansion, was increasingly

seen by more perceptive scientists as threatening the survival of man

himself.

A REVIEW: TOWARDS A TRULY GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Scholars often debate that whether the environmental history is truly global

in sense. They generally do not address the fact that landscape changes in

core areas were recursively interconnected with the peripheral areas.

National and local case studies had been referred focusing more on the

environmental records of individual nations and groups rather than on the

global historical process and material flows that have generated their

problems as well as their options. Most of the global narratives treat

different regions in terms of ‘comparisons’ rather than ‘connections’. The

narratives had failed to consider world as a system in which environmental

129
transformations in two geographically distant countries or regions may be

closely intertwined in terms of causal connections.

It has been observed that technologies designed to solve one kind of

problem, ironically generated more serious problems of another kind, often

for other groups of people. Economic expansion in one area often implied to

environmental load displacement to other areas.

According to Alf Hornborg, “the expansive trans-disciplinary project of

environmental history has united historians, geographers, archeologists,

anthropologists, sociologists, economists, ecologists, agronomists, foresters,

and a host of other academic professions in tracing environmental

transformations over time.” The theoretical assumptions, according to him,

had a recurrent inclination towards Eurocentrism or European

exceptionalism.

Donald Hughes in his ‘An Environmental History of the World’, visualizes

environmental history as a world history that adopts ecological process as its

organizing principle. (40). Like most of the historians narrating global

environmental change, Hughes does not consider societies themselves as

globally organized. The recurrent sources of environmental change are

130
presented in the fragmented terms of factors such as population growth, new

technologies, inadequate ideas and ethics, lack of foresight and greed. But

whether global social organization over the long term can be reduced to

ecology had been questioned.

Joachim Radkau in his book ‘Nature and Power: A Global History of the

Environment’ illustrates how the concerns with sustainable human-

environmental relations have been central to European consciousness many

centuries before the colonization of the New World. He had discussed how

local populations and central administrators have dealt with recurrent

problems of soil degradation, deforestation, irrigation, and the pollution of

water and air. But Alf Hornborg had argued that Radkau’s environmental

history was not global in true sense and shows only how environmental

changes in the different parts of the world were interconnected. Radkau had

seen European expansionism as sign of stability and success. (41). He had

been occasionally critical of the ‘concentration of capital’ and the ‘quest for

private profit’(42). He suggested that environmental protection was

‘dependent on cooperation with economic forces’(43) and that to draw

adversarial ‘battle lines’ between ecology and economy was ‘absurd’. (44).

131
[Link] in his ‘Something New Under the Sun’ focuses on the

environmental history of the twentieth century. According to him there was

abundance of cheap energy, economic growth, population growth,

urbanization, industrialization, air and water pollution, soil erosion,

deforestation and biodiversity loss. In addressing the driving forces behind

these well known changes, he refers very briefly to ‘human ingenuity’ and

‘luck’ (45) or to ‘the attractions of higher living standards, or at least more

consumption, for masses of people; of profit for hundreds of firms engaged

in mining, metallurgy, electric power generation, and other polluting

enterprises; and of political power for states, bureaucracies, and politicians’.

(46). According to Alf Hornborg the theoretical insight of McNeil’s is that

the technologies designed to solve one kind of problem tend to generate

other and even more serious problems of another kind. This had stood for

repeatedly proven use of energy, new transport technologies, the

industrialization of agriculture and fishing, refrigeration, irrigation, the

introduction of new species and mass production for mass consumption.

Kenneth Pomeranz in his ‘The Great Divergence’, argued that the unique

economic and technological developments in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century Europe should not be explained with reference to some features

specific to Europe, but to its special combination of fossil fuels and access to

132
New World resources. According to him the circumstances that favoured

Europe were not internal to Europe, but the result of external global

conjunctures, such as its access to silver and plantations in the New World.

These circumstances made it possible for an ‘otherwise largely

unexceptional’ Europe to transcend (47) the land constraints that it shared

with East Asia by using labour and capital to ‘exchange an ever- growing

volume of land-intensive products’ (48), mainly from the Americas. He

calculates the ‘ ecological relief’ also known as environmental displacement,

gained by Britain in 1830 through imports of cotton, sugar and timber from

overseas at between 25 and 30 million ‘ghost acres’ (49), i.e. much more

than the nation’s total arable land (17 million acres). The global

environmental impacts of these interconnected and asymmetric material

flows, geared to capital accumulation in core areas, are today being assessed

in terms of ‘ecological footprints’. According to Hornborg, Worster’s early

visions of global environmental history seemed to anticipate the focus on

connections that organized the Pomeranz’s world-system approach. (50).

According to Hornborg central to the world-system perspective is the

concern with accumulation, i.e. the strategies of different groups to enrich

themselves through various kind of exchange. The concept of accumulation

as opposed to the notion of growth was generally taken to presuppose some

133
kind of unequal exchange, and unequal exchange in turn tends to be defined

in terms of asymmetric transfers of some kind of ‘value’. For Karl Marx and

his followers, the notion of ‘surplus value’ accumulated by capitalists was

thus founded on a theory of labour value, while for the earliest proponents of

a theory of ecologically unequal exchange, accumulation is tantamount to a

net transfer of energy or ‘natural values’.

It had been witnessed that trade had been driven by aspirations of various

groups to enrich themselves, i.e. to accumulate. Long distance traders saw

opportunities to profit from geographical discrepancies between different

cultural valuations of commodities. In the regions of the world-system where

these imports originated, local producers were encouraged to invest labour

and transform landscapes to increase their income in response to such distant

demand. The social and environmental impacts of such export production,

particularly over the last five centuries, had no doubt affected most of the

land surface of the Earth. Trade in cotton, silk, sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco,

silver and furs had its impacts. It had been found that the environmental

impacts of global, long distance exchange were not as immediately obvious

as those of local or regional exchange.

Thus a truly global environmental history systematically needs to examine

134
1) how particular constellations of cultural demand had encouraged specific

strategies of accumulation and export production.

2) how such interconnected strategies of accumulation have entailed net

transfers of energy, embodied land and labour.

3) how these process of extraction, production and transport have affected

societies and environments in different parts of the world-system.

It would also need to distinguish between environmental problems derived

from biophysical impoverishment versus biophysical overload. While the

extractive zones experienced the loss of biodiversity, topsoil. Fish stocks and

other vital assets, world system centers had suffered from smog,

acidification, eutrophication, accumulation of heavy metals, and problems

with the disposal of solid waste. Whereas the former problems result

removal of resources, the latter are associated with a concentration of the use

of matter and energy. The climatic change can be understood within this

theoretical framework.

135
 END NOTES

1. Donald Worster, ‘Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas’,

1977; republished Cambridge, 1985, p.192.

2. Donald Worster, edtd. ‘Doing Environmental History, The ends of

the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History’,

Cambridge 1988, p.292.

3. David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha, edtd. ‘Nature, Culture and

Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History in South Asia’,

Oxford University Press, 1998, p.3.

4. Richard White, ‘American Environmental History: the Development

of a New Field’, Pacific Historical Review, 54:4, 1985, pp.297-335.

5. Arnold and Guha, [Link]., p.9.

6. [Link], ‘Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the ecology

of New England’, New York,1983

7. J Donald Hughes, ‘An environmental history of the world:

Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community Life’, Routledge,

2001, p.116.

136
8. B. Ribbentrop, ‘Forestry in British India’, Office of the

Superintendent of Government Printing Calcutta, 1900. pp.37,61.

9. [Link], ‘The Forests of India’, London 1921, vol-1, p.532.

10. Ramchandra Guha, ‘Forestry in British and Post British India: A

Historical analysis’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1983, vol xvii,

pp.82-96.

11. R. Guha and M. Gadgil, ‘State Forestry and Social Conflict in British

India, Past and Present’, Vol cxxiii, 1989, p.145.

12. Hughes, [Link]., p.116.

13. Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Fencing the Forest: Conservation and

Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860-1914’, Oxford

University Press, 1999, pp.7,8.

14. Hughes, [Link]., p.138.

15. Ibid. p.117.

16. Madhav Gadgil, ‘Deforestation: Problems and Prospects’, in

[Link] ed., ‘History of Forestry in Indi’, New Delhi, Indus

Publishing Company,1991, p.27.

17. Ribbentrop, [Link]., p.59.

137
18. Worster, edtd, [Link]., p.119.

19. Hughes, [Link]., p.137.

20. Worster edtd, [Link]., p.121.

21. Somnath Ghosal, ‘Pre-Colonial and Colonial Forest Culture in the

Presidency of Bengal’, Centre for studies in Social Sciences,

Calcutta, India, 2011, pp.109-112.

22. Worster edtd, [Link].,p.124.

23. B.G. Karlsson, ‘Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s

Struggle For Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal’, Bulletin

of the school of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,

2001,vol. 64(3), pp.425-426.

24. Worster edtd, [Link]., p.127.

25. Hughes, [Link]., pp.116-117.

26. Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha, ‘This Fissured Land: An

Ecological History of india’, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp.11-

13.

27. Ibid. pp.14, 15, 16.

28. Ibid. pp.29, 30.

138
29. Ibid. p.53.

30. Ibid.p.115.

31. [Link], ‘The Silent Spring’, Houghton Mifflin, Sept 1962, p.106.

32. R.H,Grove, ‘Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical

Island, Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600-1800’,

Cambridge, 1995,p.309.

33. Ibid. p.475.

34. Ibid.p.332.

35. Letter Kyd to Cornwallis, Sept 1786, Banks letters, letter 4, p.511.

36. Grove, [Link]., p.382.

37. Ibid.p.479.

38. Ibid.p.480.

39. Ibid.p.481.

40. Hughes, [Link]., pp.6,8. J.D 2001.

41. [Link], ‘Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment’,

Cambridge University Press, 2008, p.204.

42. Ibid. p.299.

43. Ibid.p.280.

139
44. [Link].305,315.

45. [Link], ‘Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental

History of the Twentieth- Century World’, [Link] & Co, 2000,

pp.16-17

46. Ibid. p.116.

47. [Link], ‘The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making

of the Modern World Economy, Princeton University Press, 2000,

p.297.

48. [Link].20.269.

49. Ibid.p.276.

50. Alf Hornborg, ‘Towards a Truly Global Environmental History: A

Review Article’, Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center

xxxiii:2, 2010, pp.2,7-9.

140