Commonwealth Forestry Review Volume 73(2), 1994

73

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

NEWS FROM INDIA Dear Sir, Two important developments have taken place in the India Unit of the Commonwealth Forestry Association. Mr Kamalnath, Minister for Environment and Forests, Government of India, has acceded to the request to be the Patron of the CFA India Unit. This will be by designation. The Patron has desired that he should be kept informed of the achievements (and struggles) of the unit. The other development, on which the decision was taken in consultation with Mr. Anupam Mukherjee, Inspector General of Forests, Government of India, is that the IGF, by designation, should be the Chairman of the India Unit of the CFA. I have hence handed over the Chairmanship of the India UnittoMr Mukherjee (retaining,for the time being, Chairmanship of the CFA, Indian Subcontinent which is in an embryonic stage). Mr Mukherjee has already set up an office of the CFA Unit in Paryavaram Bhavan, on the premises of the IGF with Mr Dipak Sharma, DIG, as Joint Secretary. The other office bearers continue to be in Bangalore. A tail piece of forestry interest. Tanjore District is the rice bowl of India, irrigated by the river Cauvery. The late Mr V.S. Krishnaswamy, who was the Chief Conservator of Forests in Madras State in 1956, when all the good forest areas of the State were transferred to Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra due to reorganization of the States, initiated a plantation programme of teak on the flood banks of the Cauvery. There is no natural teak inTanjore district, which receives about 750mm of rainfall from the winter rains. The project was viewed pessimistically by many. Today, the teak trees average about 150 - 18Ocmgbh with heights of 20 - 25m. In some of the better sites, trees planted in 1970 have already attained these sizes. The high subsoil moisture for about 9 months in the year and the free draining sandy loam soil have produced these results. The sad part has been the heavy toll taken by the severe cyclone of November 1993. Over 100,000 sentinels amidst the vast stretches of paddy fields were uprooted. But the trees had attained the size when fanners who have taken to planting teak in the district normally harvest it. It fetches around Rs500 - 600 percubic foot (US$l =Rs3 l), while teakfrom the nearest natural forests (in Kerala State) fetches around Rs750. Information on Tanjore teak has mostly remained confined to Tanjore district, maybe because after three years of planting, the plantations are handed over to the Public Works Department (for maintenance or otherwise) as the land is vested in that department. The potential of teak with irrigation, as seen in the Tanjore district, has prompted 102 companies to come up in India which, with investors' money, propose not only to irrigate but also provide the plants with fertilizer. As against an investment of Rs10,OOO per hectare in the case of departmental plantations, some private companies have provided for an investment of Rs300,OOO. Why not? PARADIGMS Dear Sir Having spent most of the last ten years seeking to practise 'crosscultural' community forestry among the animistic mountain peoples of Asia, I was deeply troubled by D.J. Danbury's comments on paradigms (Vol. 72(3)). I am unsure, though, if the nature of his complaint is semantic or conceptual. I had always understood a paradigm to mean 'a set of domain assumptions' and to be a 'sub-set' of a 'worldview'. (A worldview being 'the basic ideas and values shared by members of a particular society, by which they order all their life experiences'.) I had always understood a paradigm shift to be 'the transfer from one set of domain assumptions to another'. Seemingly we are being asked to believe that the western worldview somehow 'transcends' all others and that a scientific forestry paradigm can be universally applied irrespective of its socio-cultural context?? I have found both the concept of aparadigm and a worldview to be an essential analytical tool to both understand and practise community forestry among the mountain peoples of Asia. In fact two 'low-tech' interventions - a smokeless stove programme and a check-dam programme - very nearly failed because we did not recognize the implications of the local worldview. (The benefits of smokeless stoves and check-dams were readily understood, but it was feared the intervention would upset their gods or they could not afford the sacrifice necessary to placate them.) The mountain peoples ofAsia have not been influenced by aworldview predicated on enlightenment philosophy (with its reductionism, functionalism, dualism and materialism). For them, the world is more integrated: every effect has its causation in the spiritual world: people are inseparable from nature; community, culture. religious belief and locale all help to define one people from another. Up until the late seventies the domain assumptions of foresters on a global basis were seemingly influenced by 14th century Germanic silvicultural systems andpractices. Seemingly this paradigm could be applied universally. With increasing pressure on natural resources, classical forest management began to become inoperable and as a result FAO and the World Bank embraced community forestry and encouraged foresters to do likewise. They also encouraged us to focus more on local beneficiaries than on the requirements of industry and suggested further training courses for foresters. Unfortunately, few took the next step in the analysis to explain why new training was needed. Implicit in this 'sea-change' was arequirement not only for a new set of forestry domain assumptions but for an attempt to interface with, and understand, a people with a very different worldview from their own. Some did take the analysis further. Westoby (1987) for example, stated that 'communityforesters needed to know as much aboutpeasants as trees', but very little empirical study has been done on either forester or peasant beliefs. To the best of my knowledge the first time 'paradigm' and 'paradigm shift' were applied to forestry was in a paper by Gilmour and King (1989). The conceptual basis for the term was drawn from Gilmour's many years' experience working in what is considered by many to be the most successful community forestry programme in Nepal. It was repeated in Gilmour and Fisher (1991), where they do define paradigm as 'a set of domain

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15 March 1994