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.
The Western Tragopan and its protectors had another enemy as well—the development lobby. In 1999 it was decided that a part of the park, jeeva Nallah, would be set aside for the construction of the runof-river Parvati hydroelectric project. This required the construction of diversion weirs and underground tunnels in precisely the area that is frequented by the Western Tragopan. With a part of the park now reserved for the power project, the rest of it was officially closed off. Local communities, in order to survive, had now to use clandestine methods to gain access to the park and its resources of food and fodder. They also resorted to local political processes to retrieve their age-old rights. Through a combination of electoral clout, everyday defiance and moral argument, the populace persuaded their leaders to bring pressure to bear on the park authorities, essentially to wink at their clandestine activities. By late 2000, the conservationists' nightmare had come true. One part of GHNP was taken over by Parvati Project while the rest was taken over by the villagers. The Western Tragopan was out of the picture.
Conservationists of all hues of red and green were unanimous in castigating the use of park land for power generation. But their unanimity broke down on the question of how best to deal with local humans and their usufruct claims within the park. Many officials of the forest department and a majority of the conservationists and scientists associated with the park maintained that the exclusion of all human activity is imperative for the effective conservation of GHNP's biological diversity. Villagers, on the other hand, argued that such exclusion is neither politically feasible, given the electoral dynamics of the region, nor ecologically necessary, given the nature of resource use. However, almost all of them overlooked one significant factor: if the area has such a wide representation of western Himalayan biodiversity, could this not, in some measure, be attributed to prevalent customs and traditions of resource-use? And if so, then could the ends of conservation be achieved by a complete exclusion of people?