The Age of Neo-Conservationism in India

 

A Backhoe Loader (a capitalist arm) feeding a Cattle Egret?
As this JCB reclaimed a coastal floodplain for development, the egret waited to snack on disturbed insects.

It is cliché when we say the only constant in the world is change. It is a paradoxical fact, always at the back of our minds when talking about what was, what is, and what will be. That history influences the present is as much a part of this phrase as the present influencing the future. When we talk about environment preservation, biodiversity conservation, and wildlife protection – all a part of the broader environmentalism – we often look back to find reasons for the present and make predictions for the future. Even a walk in the wilderness makes us wonder what it was like in the past but also what it would be in the future.

Environmentalism is as much a science as it is a movement. Some mark the dawn in the west, with the Silent Spring published in 1962. In India, one of the most well-known grassroots movements goes back to the 18^th Century, when the Bishnoi community members, led by women, were murdered by the king for opposing felling of trees. Both vastly different movements but with capitalist underpinnings. The relatively recent work of Rachel Carson and the near-300-year-old movement led by Amrita Devi continues to inspire local and global movements highlighting the issues of rampant destruction of nature, from regional issues it seeks to address, such as the Chipkoo Andolan in Uttarakhand, the Kodaikanal movement, the Niyamgiri, the Vadhvan, to the global movements against oil.

Curiously, environmentalism is treated as something stuck between tree-hugging and books. It is said that despite advances in science vis-à-vis progress, environmentalism is stuck to the past, the classical or grassroots environmentalism. This is often treated as outdated, and a new idea, or neo-environmentalism, was proposed in the discourse of a changing economy. Neo-environmentalism is environmentalism in a neoliberal world – a philosophy many consider is largely responsible for today’s climate change effects. Also called neoliberal environmentalism, it is, simply put, the decentralization of the onus of mitigation, adaptation, response, and halting of environmental degradation, such as climate change. One of the outcomes of neoliberal environmentalism is the Environment Impact Assessment notification, popularly called EIA, a mandatory requisition to assess and propose measures to the potential effects to the environment (including people) before setting up an enterprise. There is plenty criticism of neoliberalism itself as well as its derivatives – much is debated about it, for and against.

One of the least explored, at least in the Indian context, aspect of grassroots environmentalism is paradigm of nature-culture interaction I call ethicality environmentalism. I describe it as a movement against greenwashing, against negative-sum solutions, and against exclusionist nature protection, driven by the ethics and morals, not merely the legal, scientific, and economic theory – the capitalist outlook – of the modern world.

Before I come to discuss neo-conservationism, it is important to put ethicality environmentalism in a perspective. It weighs the cost of protecting environment vis-à-vis the proposed solutions. In doing so, it asks whether the pro-environment solutions – usually global in nature – have consequences – a place, a people, a species, a home or habitat. It offers a look at the forest for the trees. It asks whether the end justifies the means. Movements have been a part of environmentalism in the neo-liberal world for years now. Large-scale solar farms in non-forest ecosystems, such as grasslands and arid ecosystems and wind turbines in fly paths of birds are some of the projects that have been rejected – by providing alternatives – by environmentalists on ethicality grounds backed by science. Advocating and actively resisting exclusionist conservation policies aiming to displace people are ethical in nature, backed by historical and legal accounts, and socio-ecological evidences.

It seems counterintuitive at first: why would anyone want to protest, advocate, and resist pro-environmental actions? Isn’t protecting nature the bigger picture, so what if we have to sacrifice something for the bigger goal? Never in the history, since the world became aware of the consequences of the cost of human development, has this happened. Environmentalism has always been about protecting nature and culture against destructive practices – mining, damming, pollution, things considered bad in its obvious sense, that they did irreversible damage to the environment, local or global. While grassroots environmentalism is also driven by ethics, morals, science, using legal frameworks, ethicality environmentalism is a step within this movement – to call attention to the little pieces that add up to the big picture: that interventions not only need to be ecologically sound but socially just.

It is obvious that what remains is far less than what is destroyed. In a way, this offers a way to reconcile with our present – to reconnect, rebuild, restore, rewild. The science of it is not new anymore, but it is still experimental. I say this because, without getting into the nuances (including politics) of the methods, we have mastered large-scale population monitoring, rescue and rehabilitation, species reintroduction and translocation, and we are getting there for habitat restoration. Just as traditional conservation practices – largely led by a belief system – replaced modern conservation practices – largely developed in western occupied colonies – we are witnessing new practices, new methods of biodiversity conservation, some of it bold, audacious even, but here to stay. This is the dawn of neo-conservation practices I call neo-conservationism.

It defers from grassroots environmentalism in that it aligns with neoliberalism: it is privatized, marketized, and monetized, and is an interplay, or collaboration, of centralized and private bodies. In India, this form of environmentalism is not spoken about despite being in the middle of the era, save for project-specific criticisms, but collectively, the trend as we move increasingly into it remains acknowledged. I explain this with five, seemingly unrelated, events of the last year or two, pointing at the shift in the movement from modern to neo-conservation.

A typical case is of carbon credits. When the mandate towards curbing carbon emissions was put forth, carbon credits was hailed as one of the solutions to mitigate emissions. Much is spoken about it, here, I show that carbon credit program is neo-conservationist in approach – if you have read its criticisms (there are hardly any investigations that speak for it), you will have seen that it is a cloak over traditional conservation practices and modern conservation in a new dress. As it is integrated into more and more grassroots efforts in the name of conservation, states are opening up state-owned lands deemed degraded (but not without local use and possibly user rights for local communities) for private players to ‘develop’ and reap the benefits of the new leaf as carbon credits. This decision is unprecedented, and people are rightly pointing fingers at how this takes precedence over rights of communities over ancestral lands. There is no long-term roadmap to such a venture which was to lease the land for 60 years. In a state where plantation sites under the Green India Mission are fenced off, where people have rights for forest produce harvest, how a private player would utilize the lease is a worry. The reason why I call this typical is that its form is heavily capitalist, and if you are aware of the commentary of neoliberal environmentalism, look at this case from the ethicality environmentalism lens to realise this as a capitalist overhand of government (in other words public) lands. At the writing of this, the draft policy has been taken back owing to pushback – ethicality environmentalism in motion.

Neo-conservationism is seeping into mainstream conservation in various other forms, the most obvious being the popping up of zoos. While the CZA reports that the number of registered zoos has reduced over the years, the number of registered large zoos has increased from three in 2011-12 to 17 in 2021-22. This might be because of consolidation of smaller ones. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, it is evident for the last few years that ex-situ conservation has gained significant momentum, from the breeding centres for vultures to the Great Indian Bustard, both in dire need of such interventions, to housing of exotic and native species in zoos, many of which are up for display even though many are rescues in need of rehabilitation.

One rare example of rewilding grabs attention. The history of cheetah reintroduction is well-known, from the botched displacement of people to preparing the protected area, Kuno National Park, as a suitable habitat for the cheetah of the African savannah into large enclosures (soft release) by removing the leopard from it. Two schools of thoughts dominate the narrative, one that this is rewilding of the same species, if not the subspecies, making this ecologically sensible, and the other that there were better representatives of extant grassland species in India which would do well with this kind of attention – the Indian wolf and the Great Indian Bustard. The ‘return of cheetah’ is a case of neo-conservationism because of its inherent nature when looked at from the ethicality environmentalism lens. Even if the means justify the end, at what cost, given that Indian wolf population is declining, hybridizing with domestic dogs, and the bustard which, of all the birds of India probably fares the worst, goes unheeded.

In the age of neo-conservationism, the most exploited methods are of restoration and rehabilitation. The Great Nicobar Island Development Project, deemed strategic in nature, is razing a vast patch of a biodiverse tropical rainforest, a home for many endemic species, to build a shipment port and to turn it into a tourism destination on the lines of Singapore, itself a country that has greenwashed the entire world about its ‘living in harmony with nature’ persona. Even as the project is greenlit, it is in limelight for several things; the denotification of Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, around where the port is proposed, is one of the only places, all of them on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where the leatherback turtles nest in India. The nesting sites are purported to be ‘relocated’ to another area. The vast denudation of the tropical rainforests – over a crore trees as per one estimation – of Great Nicobar are going to be compensated for by afforestation in the dry and scrub Aravalli in Haryana. There is no doubt in my mind, that this dry forest replacing the wet forest would be up for grabs for corporates to sell green credits. Like the relocation of the nesting site (an idiocy to even utter the sentence), the tropical coral reefs are supposedly being considered for relocation – a feat barely seeing success even in experimental conditions. If there is a way to replace one ecosystem with another or cut-and-paste it at another location, it sits right in the realm of neoliberalism.

Nothing of this sort has ever happened in India, and the introduction of the African cheetah seems to pale in front of the boldness of such supposed propositions, begging the question: are we gambling with our natural heritage or deceiving ourselves by even considering these ideas? Neo-conservationism is an ideology that anything is possible, quite ignorantly, just like the phrase ‘everything is business.’

The silent stirring of neo-conservationism is the technocratization of biodiversity management. Technology to monitor wildlife is being used to monitor people in the name of monitoring poachers, leading to harassment of women, as a study in Uttarakhand exposed. AI Cameras – essentially cameras which, with the help of machine learning, identify animals and provide real-time information instead of manually downloading the images – are being deployed along village-forest interface, or put up on tall posts, to monitor wildlife and to track animals in real-time supposedly to avoid negative interactions. While some states boast of reduced poachers using the tech, it cannot replace feet on the ground, a plague that affects every state agency monitoring wildlife. An Uttarakhand audit showed ₹ 13.86 crore expenditure on ‘tech’ between 2019-22, and a measly ₹ 2.5 crore on grassroots works to mitigate human-wildlife conflict in 2019-20. Tech is replacing grassroots work, instead of assisting it. Not all tech is in vain. For example, elephant monitoring along railway tracks, using thermal drones to keep a virtual eye on elephants at night as they come close to villages, are helping mitigate potential conflict, but largely, we have lost sight for the holistic picture and the harsh reality – that technology solely will not protect planet or a single species (such as the tiger). It goes without saying that much of this tech is owned by private players, making it, indeed, a subject of neoliberal environmentalism: even if the hardware is owned by the state, the backend, the data, and the controls, largely remain, at least collaboratively, with private players. What happens to the surveillance information of people, a blatant invasion of privacy? How is the data for rare poached species stored or disposed? It’s all a blackhole, but it is likely that there is no plan as such, it appears to be as amateurish an attempt as it is experimental.

Whether neo-conservationism fairs worse or does good in the long-term remains to be seen. If the bottom line of the neoliberal policy is good business, the bottom line of neoliberal environmentalism sustainable-but-good business – with both ideologies having strong, grounded in fact, critics – the bottom line of neo-conservationism is the business of conservation. In an increasingly materialistic world, maybe this is what keeps people engaged – visiting zoos, counting carbon for trees, marvelling at the mastery of fellow humans reviving dead nature. I see no poetry in this, only capitalism parodying as the great saviour.