1 Human well-being in conservation landscapes
Siddhartha Krishnan
The human subject in conservation landscapes
Europe deforested and afforested its colonies. An institutionalized process, tree felling and plantation afforestation occurred under a famed but fraught structure of scientific forestry. Decolonization increased deforestation and afforestation in ex-colonies. In independent India tree felling and forest logging continued as a commercial and industrial enterprise. âDeforestationâ did not so much convey ecological impact, as it did of environmental impact. The âcrisisâ discipline of conservation biology that emerged in the early 1980s conveyed the ecological consequences since the mid-1980s and early 1990s through the idea of biological diversity (biodiversity) and its loss. Biodiversity included genetic, species and ecosystem diversity and this diversityâs significance for human well-being has never been understated since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Well-being lay implicit in the CBDâs mission of conserving biodiversity, the sustainable use of its components and fair sharing of genetic use benefits. A philosophy of ethics is involved in conserving biodiversity. The act of conserving is an ethical one. Conservation, sustainability and equity are all âconsequentialistâ â such actions are assumed to result in or have well-being consequences. But well-being can also involve a âde-ontologicalâ ethic, that is these actions are right by themselves and need not involve any calculation of consequences. Conservation has remained more of a consequentialist field inasmuch as human well-being is concerned. While deep-ecological ideologies that insist on preserving faunal species for their intrinsic worth has de-ontological implications, the conservation field has remained consequential for humans in material and philosophical ways.
The conservation landscapes of the volume are Protected Areas (PA). These include National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries in the Darjeeling Himalayas. We assessed well-being and ecosystem services in two Protected Areas, Singalila National Park and Senchal Wildlife Sanctuary. Humans dwelling in or near forests and dependent on them have been state, research and human rights subjects. As state subjects, forest dwellers have been less of a development constituency than a conservation constituency. The latter involves subjection to conservation laws that regulate or restrict resource access. Forest and wildlife laws thwart generation of agricultural, grazing or minor forest income. Income-spending opportunities and choices are usually curtailed by physical inaccessibility to markets. Earning and spending can be interpreted as freedoms under the right to life enshrined in the Constitution. Forest dwellers may well value allopathic treatment in hospitals and want to spend part of any income they manage to earn. However, absence of roads curtails such crucial expenditure. Roads are a subject matter of the Constitutionâs 11th Schedule. Many development components of this schedule and the delivery institution of the Panchayat stop at the fortress or forest gates of PAs. Their fates as subjects of the conservation state since independence has made them subjects of human rights activism and critical conservation scholarship since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dignity and justice were the foundations of off-line and online protests and lobbying for entitlement in the early years of the new century. The legislation of the Recognition of Forests Rights Act (FRA) in 2006 was an entitling watershed. The preâ and postâforests rights discourse has been just but limiting for a well-being philosophy. This is because, residing in forests along with people and wildlife, is Jeremy Benthamâs ghost. His utilitarianism haunts conservation policy and practice. The haunting is in two acts, one as public good, and two as good taken for granted.
PAs have been seen as a greater common albeit biologically diverse good. âThe greatest happiness of the greatest numberâ is a âgoodâ maximizing philosophy of Protected Area policy. This includes any bio-centric or deep-ecology strain of animal happiness. In this aggregation or sum-totalling of happiness, the distribution of pleasure is ignored. Forest dependents and dwellers suffer restriction, regulation and possible dispossession. They are a happiness collateral â they must be happy for others; othersâ happiness is theirs. Injustice here is not just a matter of collateral damage. Injustice or an unjust society for utilitarianism is a state of affairs where there is a loss of aggregate utility or happiness. However, injustice lies not just in an unfortunate state of affairs where a minority suffer for the majority. It also lies in people taking pleasure in othersâ pain. Powerful conservation elites promoting wildlife protection for their pleasure and also ostensibly the pleasure of animals actively seek to thwart the well-being prospects of forest dwellers. Structurally, by opposing the Forest Rights Act, and more specifically by lobbying for, say, the restricting of roads or fuelwood collection. Or besides this âin-situ displacementâ, the active lobbying for eviction and displacement.
Utilitarianism also unfortunately haunts conservation activism and scholarship critical of forest citizens becoming collateral to the greater public good principle. Theirs is a well-intended but inadequate belief that entitlement with individual and community rights leads to satisfaction or pleasure. Rights mitigate the status of forest dwellers as a precariat. It can also attenuate income generation deprivations. Essential as these public goods are, that is dignity, income and liberty, they do not epitomize or exhaust well-being. That is as an end in themselves. This is a welfarist position that evaluates a state of affairs, in this case the entitlement, on the basis of utilities of that particular state. As much as these public goods, especially dignity and liberty, are also a well-being end by themselves, they also need to be evaluated in terms of choices and opportunities that a forest dweller can afford to pursue ways of living, including non-forest. Alternatively, they can be evaluated within the âtraditionalâ community confines of a forest village and pursue modern ways of thinking and living. Utilitarianism may not attribute any intrinsic significance to rights and liberties. These gain value in the calculus only to the extent they influence utilities or usefulness. Community activists and academics may differ on this count and actually attribute intrinsic value to rights and freedoms. However, freedoms have inherent worth by themselves (being free is a well-being constituent) and for the choices and opportunities they offer people to be and do things they value. The freedom to develop is important. After that, development as freedom is an idea that must be entertained democratically. This book seeks to release Himalayan forest dwellers and dependents from being subjects of an inadequate discourse of well-being. It makes a case for how the capabilities approach, or substantive freedoms and opportunities to be and do different valuable things, is a conversation starter in the conservation arena.
This edited volume is a critique of conservation strictly tethered to utilitarianism. By utilitarianism we mean âthe claim that all choices (of actions, rules, institutions, and so on) must be judged by their consequences, that is, by the results they generateâ. We need distinguish âbetween âculmination outcomesâ (that is, only final outcomes without taking any note of the process of getting there, including the exercise of freedom) and âcomprehensive outcomesâ (taking note of the processes through which the culmination outcomes come about)â (Sen, 1999, p. 29). Attempting and achieving sustainable conservation by fiat or heavy regulation is one thing, and doing so with free choice and opportunity is quite another important thing. Well-being is not about generating and spending forest incomes in restricted or regulated ways. It is about the forest dweller having and exercising opportunities and choices democratically and valuably. Further, virtues like cooperation or sustainability, and services like regulating soil erosion or provisioning leaf litter, are not instantly and constantly âmeansâ to well-being. They characterize and constitute well-being itself. In these ways, the volume reconfigures and reinvigorates well-being in conservation landscapes.
The volume also rescues well-being from a taken-for-granted end state that it suffers in conservation discourses, however well-intended they are. The material or well-being consequences of âfortressâ conservation are well known (Brockington, 2002). Forest and pastoral communities suffer resource and income deprivations. But there are philosophical implications of conservation discourses, including of progressive human rights variants. A certain well-intended presumptuousness prevails. Namely, entitling communities or discussing their âserviceabilityâ by ecosystems processes and function has inevitable well-being benefits. Here, well-being is defined away as a mere utilitarian matter of income generation and satisfaction or ecosystem serviceability and satisfaction. Rights and services will generate income, and income will generate pleasure is the consequential sequence professed in conservation and livelihoods discourses. Natural resources, ecosystem services and income are of material and instrumental significance to human well-being. But well-being suffers relegation as a general âsatisfactoryâ end. Conservation discourses appear to close off any philosophical conversation on well-being that has practical and policy purchase. Not letting an indigene perish in a forest is just and good. But enabling the indigene to flourish in valuable ways is as just and fair.
Human well-being or flourishing was a moral question that engaged Aristotelian philosophers. Purposeful pursuit of happiness by cultivating virtues was an individualâs craft. However, happiness became a matter of statecraft. Since World War II, welfare stood in for well-being. The care-needing citizen replaced the virtuous agent. The decolonized nation as body sovereign became grand political narrative. The human agentâs body as sovereign remained a philosophical footnote. Along with citizenâs legal rights, legal obligations dominated moral obligations. Citizen welfare became t...
