Full Description
The ecological crisis at a planetary scale has heightened our awareness of the geological impact of human activities and the possibility of human species extinction. Within the heightened consciousness of hubris and vulnerability encoded in the Anthropocene discourse, how do we comprehend the human place in nature and analyse the multiple scales of time, space, and capital movements that characterize specific socio-natures?Addressing the methodological challenge of studying metabolic relations, flows, and processes across these multiple scales, Environmental Studies from India brings together distinguished scholars who explore such questions from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Empirical studies grounded in specific contexts are employed to develop a perspective suited to a society saturated with Anthropocene discourses.
The volume is structured around five interwoven themes: reframing space, rethinking the region; commons and commodification; environmental subjectivities and socio-natures; metabolic social ecologies and infrastructural labour; and the Anthropocene as everyday experience. Each section comprises essays that approach the theme from different angles, encouraging conversations rather than coherence across disciplinary boundaries. From rivers and marshes to forests, grasslands, orchards, fields, cities, and industries, contributors draw from diverse landscapes in India to develop pathways for Environmental Studies that can effectively engage with the contemporary planetary crisis.
Contents
Introduction
Sudha Vasan: Environmental Studies in the Time of Planetary Crisis
Part I. Reframing Space, Rethinking the Region
1: Arupjyoti Saikia: Monsoon Geographies, Assam, and Making of an Eco-Region
2: Mukul Sharma: Castescapes, Dalit Labour, and Environmental Inequality
3: Purendra Prasad: Region as a Contested Socio-ecological Space: India's East Coast in the Capitalocene?
Part II. Commons and Commodification
4: Deepak K. Mishra: The Complexities of Commodification: State, Market, and Community Institutions in Arunachal Pradesh
5: Kh Neil Young: Property in Fluid Nature: Legal Regimes and Chapories on the Brahmaputra in Majuli Island, Assam
6: Heather Plumridge Bedi: Solar Futures and Persistent Injustices in Kerala
Part III. Environmental Subjectivities and Socio-Natures
7: Budhaditya Das: Territorialization and Interlocking Environmentalities: Political Ecology of Forest Governance in Satpura Hills, Madhya Pradesh, 1990-2015
8: Manisha Rao: Forest Gardens of Malnad: Agrarian Ecology and the Afterlives of Appiko Chaluvali
9: Prama Mukhopadhyay: Weaving the Threads of Entanglement: From the Lens of the Fishers in the Indian Sundarban Deltas
10: Asmita Kabra: Fortress Conservation of Charismatic Carnivores in a Political Forest of Central India
Part IV. Metabolic Social Ecologies and Infrastructural Labour
11: Daniel Münster,Ursula M. Frank, and T.R. Suma: Frontiers, Encounters, Metabolism: A Material-semiotic Approach to Fields and Forests in the Western Ghats
12: Tanya Matthan: The Seed and the Well: Navigating Agrarian Risk in the Anthropocene
13: Harsha Anantharaman and Vinay Gidwani: Metabolic Lives: Labour-grabbing under Formal Waste Management Regimes
Part V. The Anthropocene as Everyday Experience
14: Mayank Kumar: Markers of Anthropocene? Revisiting Early-modern South Asia
15: Nandan Nawn: Public Policy in Response to Planetary Crises: Scale Matters in Augmenting Biodiversity and Improving Resilience of Financial Ecosystems
16: Savyasaachi: Water and Climate Change: Lived Experience of Untimely Weather, Dehydrated Earth, and Weathered Labour
