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 18th
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-Ã -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 This is often treated as outdated, and a new idea,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-Ã -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.
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