Reframing the Environment: Resources, Risk and Resistance in Neoliberal Indiaedited by Manisha Rao, London and New York: Routledge, 2021; pp xix + 220, `995 (hardcover
The attempts by economists in India to estimate the economic value of tiger reserves must be seen in a context in which inviolate tiger reserves have imposed enormous social costs on local people. There is relative silence around the question of why one should value tiger reserves when they are already protected and who might benefit from such valuations. We call on scholars and activists working in conservation and development to question valuation approaches, given their problematic outcomes.
Several wildlife groups have opposed the Forest Rights Act as being anti-conservation. However, field experience indicates that the act can and is being used by local communities for arresting biodiversity decline by opposing the diversion of forests to mega-development projects and by using situated knowledge and values to bring about conservation.
Although widely used as a tool in forest management across the world, causing fires is illegal in Indian forests. This article points out that the present understanding of fire as essentially disruptive has its antecedents in a colonial perspective that came from seeing the forest primarily as a source of timber. However, the practices of indigenous communities as well as the insights of ecological studies point to the importance of using fire in controlled ways to manage dry and deciduous forest ecosystems.
