The Predicaments of conservation

Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a liv-ing?" Visitors to the northwestern United States routinely encounter this query on bumper stickers. The region, popularly called the Pacific Northwest, is renowned for both its beautifully forested landscapes and its prolific timber output. The slogan captures the response of the local population to the celebrated controversy that pitted the logging industry in the region against the Spotted Owl, emblem of the US environmental movement, whose last habitat the logging industry was said to be destroying. Through the 1980s, environmentalists lobbied hard to put a stop to logging activities in the Pacific Northwest. Local people dependent on logging for their livelihoods, on the other hand, contested this fiercely.

This conflict, between conservation and livelihood, between larger and local interests, and, obliquely, between science and politics, seems to characterise modernising civilisations worldwide. In one of the many re-enactments of the Spotted Owl drama, the endangered Western Tragopan, a brilliantly coloured pheasant endemic to the western Himalaya, has been pitted against the grazing and plant collection activities of local populations in the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in Himachal Pradesh. The preservation of the Western Tragopan, by removing human pressure on its habitat, undermines local livelihoods that are almost entirely dependent on the same resources.