Ecology conservation primer

A Walk up the Hill: Living with People & Nature Madhav Gadgil Penguin Random House Rs.582 Pages 424 This autobiography is not restricted to environment degradation. It also addresses equitable resources distribution & sustainable livelihoods One of India’s pioneer ecologists, author, academic and founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, a research forum of the top-ranked (NIRF 2024) Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Madhav Gadgil is invested with a rare combination of a field researcher’s curiosity mixed with intuition and a deep philosophical insight into environmental issues. In this compelling autobiography, Gadgil shares vivid memories as a young boy exploring the slopes of the Vetal Hills of Pune with his father, learning to identify birds and becoming “passionately interested in the diversity of the natural world, of the landscapes and the life they supported”. The importance of non-institutionalised learning through close interaction with scholars and researchers such as ornithologist Salim Ali and social anthropologist Irawati Karve, is highlighted in this engaging memoir. His father, Dhananjaya Ramchandra Gadgil’s guidance and his compassionate, non-traditional mother who overruled religion, ritual and caste demarcations, remained a lifelong inspiration. Gadgil’s formal education at Fergusson College, Pune and the Institute of Science in Mumbai may have facilitated his entry as a biology student at the blue-chip Harvard U, but he was critical of the rigidness of the university syllabus and the imitative mould of research dissertations in India. He pursued excellence and wanted to genuinely understand how centres of first-rate research in North America and Europe applied advanced technologies to scientific exploration. His eagerness to acquire these skills and lessons and to implement them in newly independent India were foremost in his mind when he and his wife decided to return to India after being awarded their research degrees. Post-independent India was confronted with a development dilemma and Gadgil soon became aware of the environment and development conundrum. As a student in Harvard, he was intrigued that ecology courses were focused on living organisms and their natural environment, while neglecting the role and interference of human beings in ecosystems. The complexities of homo sapiens as a significant constituent of ecosystems convinced him that experimental research needed to be expanded beyond conventional molecular biology. As a first, he incorporated mathematical modelling in ecology, experimented with ideas of genetic variability, developed the concepts of ecological niche and prudence. In particular, the heterogeneous environment of the hills of the Western Ghats in India interested Gadgil who believed that indigenous tribal people and their traditional knowledge systems were primary preservers of ecological balance. He became critical of white Europeans and North Americans who “discovered the charms of the wilderness… after destroying it” and the World Wildlife Fund (now Worldwide Fund for Nature) “for preaching Nature conservation to Asians and Africans”. Yet this scholar-seer’s concern about environment degradation is not restricted to forest conservation and depleting biodiversity, it is also about the human concern of equitable distribution of resources and sustainable livelihoods. It has made him sceptical of bureaucracy and reckless…