The forest & the trees:
Stevens, Douglas
THE FOREST & THE TREES IN INDIA: CONSUMING WHAT MUST BE CONSERVED DOUGLAS STEVENS The heat is infernal. In Delhi, everyone is delighted that temperatures have fallen to one hundred degrees-it has...
...We drive all afternoon to reach a remote plantation...
...By the end of the novel, the family has been destroyed and the life of the tribe badly shaken...
...They tell a different story...
...the author is a development analyst who has written for Commonweal previously on third-world issues...
...There is one child too many now, and the cart loses balance...
...Not everyone finds romance in the cows...
...Even now, desperate people everywhere bypass the guards and chip away at the forest...
...DOUGLAS STEVENS is a pseudonym...
...On a massive stage, dozens of musical groups take turns singing praises of their guru...
...Increasingly, local people also use the political system to support their incursions into the forest...
...Most poignant are the landless (half the families-in many forest villages), who are shut out from land they could use to grow food...
...Any sense of satisfaction ends at the trench line, however...
...Although statistics on deforestation are shaky, even the range of possibilities is scary: since 1952, the area covered by forests has contracted by 20-40 percent, depending on whose estimates you believe...
...I asked for a poster, the guru beneath a tree on the shores of a peaceful lake, around him in perfect peace an audience of tigers, deer, peacocks, monkeys...
...Rumor also has it that a couple of hundred foresters are murdered each year by villagers in need of wood...
...The foresters' instinctive response is to tighten control over the trees...
...Scrubby trees are pruned back, and seedlings are planted to fill up the empty spaces...
...Since I am in India to look at reforestation projects, I have a special interest in how foresters and villagers relate...
...Almost universally, they have come to consider "democracy" a dirty word, a cloak for spineless vote-mongering at the permanent expense of the environment...
...For example, foresters can accept money to look away as people cut trees...
...Over five years, this massive program will rehabilitate just 3.5 percent of the forest land now classified as "degraded...
...The foresters fight back as best they can...
...As deforestation spreads, rainfall becomes erratic...
...Along breathless country roads, the sight of a buffalo lying contemplatively in a mud hole is enough to make you weep for a cold shower...
...When possible, they have areas reclassified from "protected forests" (where villagers have some traditional rights) to "reserve forests" (where villagers have no rights at all...
...The Indians we're with grow silent when he gets like this...
...In the countryside, foresters battle with villagers...
...As in Paraja, many forest villagers are from tribal groups...
...The pressure will grow with the population...
...Perhaps 100 million acres of the remaining forest could be classified as "degraded," and as many as 4 million acres of forest disappear entirely each year...
...The best that could happen is that things might remain in their present, disastrous state...
...guards are posted to send people away...
...Whatever the foresters do, the forests will be pushed back, the environment will deteriorate, and people will suffer...
...India is simply too much: too hot, too vast, too complex...
...Another child joins them, then two more...
...In conversation, they are known simply as "the tribals," as in "Look man, there's a tribal...
...The foresters lashed back at nearby villages, gang-raping one woman, beating people, and arresting bystanders on a variety of false charges...
...it tips" abruptly back onto its bed, children spilling into the dirt...
...We have to cast away all this ju-ju," he says...
...The father and his sons are forced into bondage to a moneylender as the only means of paying the fine...
...In 1945, Gopinath Mohanty wrote Paraja, a tale of tribal life that has become a classic...
...Still, he has a point...
...The problem is compounded as people collect dung to use as fuel, instead of spreading this on their fields for manure...
...Indian foresters may suffer from a lack of control over people, but it is hard to have confidence in what they would do if "democracy" were curtailed and they were granted more power...
...According to press reports, the incident began after tribesmen tried to free a young man who had been beaten and detained by forest guards...
...In Delhi, everyone is delighted that temperatures have fallen to one hundred degrees-it has been much worse in recent weeks...
...As for the well, it was placed in a part of the village where the higher castes are concentrated...
...The same party is happening everywhere...
...I am traveling with a British forester who quickly decides that cows cause degraded forests...
...The image they project is meant to intimidate, not to reassure...
...Each wears a military beret (save the Sikhs, who are turbaned above the khaki...
...For a long, peaceful moment there is silence, and then the most magical sounds begin...
...Possibly, if the foresters could see clearly into the heads they were knocking...
...You must not misuse this poster," they warned me, "he is our god...
...As we alight from our Land Cruisers, the guards greet us with a stamp of the foot find a crisp salute...
...The tiger lies down with the deer...
...Everyone can think of better ways to use the forest: grazing hungry animals there, cutting trees for firewood and building poles...
...Would things work better if heads could be knocked together...
...But empathy is not the foresters' most conspicuous quality...
...The villagers drift away, but not in peace...
...The ex-colonial British forester with whom I'm traveling understands their frustrations: "If these tribals had cut the trees in the old days," he reflects nostalgically, ' 'we'd just have knocked their heads together, eh?'' But you are not supposed to do that now, and the foresters-and the forests-are suffering...
...For a time, I follow the tour prepared for us...
...At present growth rates, population in these areas would expand twenty-fold over 143 years...
...I stumbled into this celebration by following a parade through town: elephants, hand-drawn carts bearing musicians in full song, cows draped in bright cloth and flowers, their horns painted blue...
...When you have nothing to eat, or no fuel for cooking, "conservation'' is an ugly and threatening word...
...Especially at election time, you can find a politician to stand behind you as you cut the forest department's trees and settle on its land...
...Across the dirt track that bisects the village, a two-wheeled bullock cart is tipped forward on its poles, its bed in the air...
...What can come of a situation like this...
...My tribal informants don't feel welcome there, so they go to the river for their water, as they've always done...
...It is the forty-fourth anniversary of the death of Shri Vijaya Shanti, a Hindu holy man with followers throughout India...
...In a semi-circle behind them are ranged the officers of the temple, prominent people of the city-and me...
...Once the foresters are finished, the head of the village council is brought on to testify to the revolution in living standards that these things represent...
...At such a pace, it would take 143 years to rehabilitate today's degraded areas...
...It is almost as hypnotic as the music...
...At each site we visit, the forest guards are drawn up on display...
...Then, I shed my escort and head into the forest, walking among the teak trees...
...Instead, every day, terrorists kill police somewhere, police kill terrorists, police beat demonstrators or shoot them, activists blow up people...
...In the home, women are burned alive for not providing their husbands with sufficient dowry: in Delhi alone, there is a "dowry death" every twelve hours...
...There is little empathy at work here...
...As India's "Indians," people from tribal groups are viewed with varying degrees of contempt...
...Bloody cows, they should all be killed and eaten...
...But new areas are becoming degraded all the time, at least as fast as this program could rehabilitate old ones...
...We are visiting a village where the forest department is assisting a national scheme for "tribal development.'' As the villagers cluster around to watch, we are told (by the foresters) about what has been provided during the past several years: a well for drinking water, an irrigation system, firewood and fodder plantations on the village land, a community center...
...Reminded that Hindus consider cows sacred, he waves his arms...
...Yes, there is a community center, but the head of the council keeps the key, and only his friends are allowed to use the place...
...Empathy is called for, in order to set a course for forest management that people can respect...
...At the beginning of Mohanty's novel, the Paraja tribesmen are living in a state of harmony with each other and their environment...
...Persistent rumor has it that to become a forester requires a bribe equal to a year's salary, money that is quickly recovered...
...And they try to restore degraded areas, as in the projects we have been seeing...
...They are dressed in military khaki, a cascade of braid and stars and epaulets on their shoulders...
...This makes the foresters angry and bitter...
...At the edge of the stage, though, is a Sinclair computer programmed by one of my newly-found friends to flash messages through the evening: Jai Guru Dev (Hail Our Guru and Saint), Shri Vijaya Shanti, then the town from which comes the current group of singers, and once more Jai Guru Dev, over and over...
...the cow coexists with the computer...
...Along the way, I talked with a group of young men selling souvenirs of the day...
...Such things really did happen-and are happening today...
...For days after this, as we drive across India, we pass cows now stripped of their garlands and drapery, their horns a steadily fading shade of blue...
...The tension over the forests is resolved in standard ways...
...Rebuffed, the guard brings a false case against the girl's father for cutting trees from the forest...
...Soils lose texture and fertility in the absence of the root systems and leafy humus that trees used to supply...
...Outside the perimeter, people know only that they are being kept from things they desperately need...
...At this point, one of the foresters catches up with us.,From now on, when I ask the villagers a question, the forester answers for them...
...But more and more, it seems to them a losing battle...
...But the best cannot happen...
...Too many children for such a precariously-balanced cart: that's what I keep seeing here, and I fear what it could mean for India...
...The threat is made all too visible...
...In one Indian state, $100 million is about to be spent on degraded forests...
...The music being played could be from India anytime, drums and harmoniums and pulsing voices...
...For decades, the forests have been under great pressure from foraging livestock, as well as from commercial timber interests and land-hungry peasants...
...Trenches are dug to keep livestock out of the forest...
...There are 800,000,000 people here, fourteen main languages and perhaps 200 dialects, desert and rain forest and Himalayan peaks, every possible religion...
...Given time and a little help, the forest creates itself anew...
...The foresters share this language, and the villagers know it...
...A couple of curious children climb into the cart to watch us talk...
...Mere coercion cannot keep hundreds of millions of people out of the forest...
...Little by little, the scheme starts making sense again...
...There, the mystery is explained: passing down the road is a herd of cows, their bells thunking as they head for home...
...As the speeches continue, I wander off down the road with a couple of villagers, members of the local tribe...
...This is a day to savor, since much of India is not like this at all...
...As a result, firewood and building materials become painfully scarce...
...When the rains do fall, they wash quickly off the dead, compacted soils...
...Then they brought me as their guest to the temple...
...Blowing among the trees are little percussions of air, like wind chimes, or drops of water falling into a pool...
...While I was in India, foresters clashed with villagers in a tribal area in the center of the country...
...Alternatively, foresters who refuse to look away can simply be eliminated...
...The violence was more direct and extreme than in the fictional Paraja, but it reflected the same, longstanding sense of strain between tribal people and foresters...
...I talk with a group of fanners about their use of forest produce...
...They're like locusts," he says, "sweeping through the forest in search of food...
...In the great courtyard of the temple must be a thousand people, men on one side of the central aisle, women on the other...
...They've heard nothing about an irrigation scheme, nothing about firewood and fodder...
...Drawn to the sounds, I find myself out of the forest and back at the roadside...
...This equilibrium is destroyed through the agency of the local forest guard, who tries to seduce a young village girl...
...Some of the tribes were here long before the dominant Caucasians began to arrive from Central Asia, perhaps eight thousand years ago...
...In part, this stems from a simple racism...
...These groups have a long, unhappy history of conflict...
...It cannot really come to that, but there will inevitably be a great increase in the numbers of people and animals in need of the forest...
Vol. 115 • October 1988 • No. 17
