Academic Blog 1 - Forests, Commons and Agrarian Societies

           This blog summarizes and responds to the lecture of Dr. Ajit Menon of the Madras Institute of Developmental Studies. He focuses on the complexities of shared resources in India, and deciding how to govern and allocate them.

            He begins by explaining that all modern people live in political economies, which, for better or worse, allow politics and power to distort the laws of nature and economics. Instead of just letting people fight over control of things like forests and farmland, policies are constructed to promote use in the best possible manner. This fact is especially important to rapidly growing countries like India and China. Although agriculture’s share of Indian GDP has shrunk considerably in recent years, it still provides 60 percent of the employment in the country. Twenty percent of rural people still derive their livelihoods from forest resources. While progress is converting and depleting such agricultural resources as fields and forests, most people still depend directly on them for livelihood, making management more important than ever.

            Dr. Menon points out that, when structuring sustainable policies, social concerns must receive as much weight as strictly ecological ones. Agrarian resources play a very important role in a nation struggling to address severe poverty, because so many of the rural poor depend exclusively on these places for survival. Such families will often depend on wood gathered from nearby forests to supply fuel for cooking and heating. Complete forest preservation would forbid them such gathering activities and likely push them over the brink to starvation or undesirable, desperate means to prevent it.

            Land management in India started in the 1800’s with British attempts to legitimize resource extraction. The India Forest Act of 1878 officially decreed large swaths of wooded area as state property. Over 80 percent of this land was listed as “reserved,” which allowed for zero individual access. This was the first example of exclusion of native peoples in the interest of management. Dr. Menon didn’t report any rebellion or conflicts from this act, probably because the enforcement would have been lax and alternative areas would have been more readily available than today.

            Then, in 1947, India’s independence afforded it a choice between the somewhat contradictory philosophies of Nehru and Gandhi. The Mahatma focused on rights and self-sufficiency at the village level, while Nehru’s modern leanings drew him more to larger projects and technology. Nehru’s influence was probably stronger on modern India, and that philosophy certainly prevails in the Chinese leadership of late. Even with utilitarian arguments on their side, large infrastructure developments like dam and mine construction face valid opposition from the people they will displace or who depend otherwise on the ruined land. This is even without ecological considerations that oppose them as well.

            Can we do a better job of protecting our environment and the people most directly tied to it without changing the methodology of law creation? Dr. Menon points out the continued failure of state centralization in such policies. He also points to the Joint Forest Management program of 1988 as an example of success through alternative management. Following increased recognition of the failures of top-down resource management, the program was started to include local communities in the process. The setup incorporated the needs and advice of local tribes, and allocated them a percentage of the revenue gained from the implementation of proper forestry and logging. Basically, it recognized their inherent stake in the ownership of the resource. In 2002, this policy was expanded to more forests beyond the few degraded ones it where it was originally launched.

            Although the extension reflects well on Indian policymakers, Dr. Menon is troubled by developments in other sectors. Legislation was recently enacted mandating homogenized government hierarchies from the state to mid to local levels. This system, he argues, doesn’t provide a realistic structure for traditional tribes and villages, whose traditional means of self-governance are completely invalidated by the laws.

            He also spoke about local vs surpalocal conflicts on a more global scale. Just as the nation may need to flood a valley for power, the globe needs that valley to stay green and provide a carbon sink against global warming. Unfortunately, climate change threats seem both too massive and too distant to frequently override local development. Even on the scale of entire nations, much of the third world is pointing fingers at the US and its partners in the industrial revolution for getting us into the problem, while they respond that the third world is responsible for most upcoming growth in emissions. When asked about a global governing body like the UN to settle the bickering, Menon dismisses the solution as unlikely. The UN simply doesn’t have that strength of impartial influence, and isn’t likely to gain it anytime soon.

Instead, he thinks the demands of concerned people need to rise through the democratic process globally to make governments take relatively selfless action on the issue. It’s frankly not an encouraging answer, but, like most developmental solutions, it probably just bothers me because it’s so slow. I guess it makes sense, though, that our actions shouldn’t change without a corresponding shift in the opinions of the majority. Hooray for democracy.