This paper considers Cherrapunji, a sleep hilltop village in the remote northeastern frontier of India discovered through the colonial search for a cool place for European sensibilities.
Using accounts of man-eating leopards and changing, ungovernable landscape in India’s Central Himalayas, this paper makes sense of the complex and multiple dimensions of the interspecies companionship at the heart of human-wildlife conflict.
Looking at the pastoral Toda people of the Wenlock Downs, this paper considers grassland transformations in the Nilgiris, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
This paper uses the settlement histories of the early Deccan Plateau to highlight how heterogeneity, and a process of continual adjustment, shape historical settlements and lead to unruliness.
This reflection on unruliness refers to all papers in the volume, demonstrating how the concept of unruly environments provides a perspective of human-nature relationships from the vantage point of humans.
Two former photojournalists bring a large format camera to Southeast Asia to portray Asian elephants living in captivity and to record their biographies.
Powerless is a film about India’s energy poverty and the people’s desperate measures to create functioning infrastructure. Electricity “thieves” divert power to homes and small businesses and come head-to-head with electricity supply companies.
National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, Civilizing Nature adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time.
Inspiration for sustainable waste policies and management will likely come from countries in the Global South, where consumerism and discard-oriented production are not yet fully established, where economies are less fixated on growth, and people’s lifestyles are not yet “cocooned in the consumption bubble.” Drawing on examples of informal and cooperative recyclers in Brazil, Gutberlet argues that these workers have developed effective practices and policies supporting circular economy, sufficiency, and solidarity.
This article looks at the history of colonial forest policies in South India to argue that initially British destroyed most the accessible forests and used desiccationist fears to justify the colonial state’s monopolistic control over the forests.
