Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern

Abstract

The effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the landscape are myriad and contradictory. The unforeseen environmental consequences resulting from modern planning create new geographies far beyond those of the planner’s design. This article explores the land-cover effects of state-sponsored modernization efforts in the semiarid Godwar region of Rajasthan, India. Using satellite imagery, historical data, household production information, and the discourse of state planners, the research described here explores the land covers that result from agricultural intensification, biodiversity preservation, and resource conservation in postindependence development. The study demonstrates that through these efforts, state planners have attempted to physically partition those land uses seen as “social” from those seen as “natural” and thereby enforce a modernist purification of land covers. Despite these efforts—indeed, because of them—hybrid and “impure” land covers, which mix social and natural characteristics and combine exogenous and indigenous species, have proliferated across the landscape. Moreover, these quasiforests have proven impossible to control or quarantine. The results of analysis, therefore, suggest that these sorts of unexpected land-cover changes necessarily grow out of the very attempts to halt them through modernization, and that, despite our best efforts, following Bruno Latour, our landscapes have never been modern.