Conservation, exploitation, and cultural CHANGE IN THE INDIAN FOREST SERVICE, 1875-1927
Although the Indian Forest Service was founded on conservationist principles, by the twentieth century it had become almost exclusively devoted to profitable exploitation of the forests it managed. Quantitative content analysis of the service's primary voice, The Indian Forester, correlates the transition from conservation to extraction to shifts from the dominance of generalists to that of bureaucratic specialists, and from ad-hoc holism to reductionism. Growing emphasis on reductionist science reinforced a mental framework inimical to conservationist arguments based on indirect benefits and appeals to precaution. In the broader culture, these arguments resurfaced in reaction to periodic famines, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, they had lost respectability within the Forest Service.
INDIA TODAY FACES the interrelated problems of Himalayan deforestation, soil erosion and salinity, dam siltation, flash floods, and biodiversity loss. The government agencies responsible for solving these problems-and, as some would argue, for causing them-are the direct descendants of the environmental management agencies that came into being under British rule. Chief among these agencies is the Indian Forest Service. Since most of India's environmental problems are far worse now than they were a century and a half ago, it seems logical to seek the roots of the current crisis in the development of the Forest Service. The history of the Forest Service resonates globally because the forest bureaucracies of the rest of the former British Empire and much of the anglophone world have their roots in India.