Disingenuous forests: A historical political ecology of fuelwood collection in South India

Abstract

Much of India contains complex and ambiguous post-colonial environmental histories. Within the international clean cookstove development discourse, it is assumed that fuelwood collection for cooking is a significant factor in the overexploitation of forest biomass. This brand of storytelling is certainly applied in India where a series of programs have long targeted household fuelwood collection activities as a way of reversing rates of deforestation. This essay outlines the enigmatic and peculiar environmental histories of two distinct regions in South India. Based on oral histories, interviews and field surveys our findings indicate that many pressures other than fuel collection have helped alter vegetation and reduce fuel availability, particularly the expansion of commercially cultivated land in recent years. Moreover, a variety of historical contingencies, such as mass displacement from dam construction and the deliberate seeding of an invasive species complicate one-dimensional or reductive explanations of landscape change — a discursive environmental rendering referred to here as a ‘disingenuous nature’. Through retrospective analysis, we describe how this land use narrative, like so many other sustainable development discourses premised on incomplete and misleading information, is the byproduct of a ‘multi-scale narrative repurposing and sector coalescence’ process. This characterization signals how environmental narratives are repurposed and recycled uncritically by actors in distinct yet discursively compatible development sectors.