Asphalt in the Jungle

By Jackie Assayag

In the context of the work site at Coorg (or Kodagu) a 'complete ecological and social unit' -- long recognized as a 'jungle country' in South India, -- this interdisciplinary project aims to study the future of the 'society - environment' complex on the basis of the development of the communications network (roads and railways), which is a good indicator of social transformations. The hiatus between the scientific regimes of sociology and ecology necessitates a double disciplinary approach: historical, enabling the integration of data from numerous sources in the study of the inter-relationships between the environment and human activities; and spatial, establishing a databank using GIS that will serve as a main basis for all analyses and comparison.
This mapping will illustrate the changes in the tropical forest over the past centuries, in its multiple dimensions -- ecological, economic, political, and socio-cultural. On the basis of data on the development of a communication network, contemporaneous with the establishment of the coffee plantations and their commercialization, the eco-socio-economic history of Coorg (jungle-turned commercial centre) will be reconstructed. Simultaneously, research will be carried out on the determined as well as determining factors: the changes in the plant cover; fragmentation of the landscape affecting specific diversity of forest zones; evolution of the high tree stratum of coffee plantations; and variations of soil-carbon-stock caused by the degradation of the tree cover and introduction of non-indigenous and/or exotic species, and also by the human movement and transport of goods.

Transformation
The study of the development of communications which accompanied the extension of plantations enables a long-term reconstruction: the modifications of the primary plant cover; the dwindling of the Mesua ferrea -- Pallaquium ellipticum evergreen forest at medium elevation; the almost disappearing Lagerstroemia macrocarpa -- Tectona grandis - - Dillenia pentagyna moist deciduous forest; and finally, the transformation in the inter- relationships between the silvicultural and agricultural (including food crops) domains, affecting the species diversity of the forest zones. Undeniably, the diversity of the landscape has increased with its fragmentation. In coffee plantations, initially cultivated under forest cover, aging species are gradually being replaced by economically profitable, fast-growing, and easy-to-propagate species thereby imparting the coffee plantations an orchardlike appearance or a resemblance to grove of shade trees. We also observe the evolution of the floristic composition resulting from the enrichment of light-demanding species to the detriment of forest indigenous (sensu stricto) species in the gaps created as a consequence of selective felling as well as of the utility-oriented regeneration of economically important species and elimination of others. This transformation resulting from overexploitation of forest resources by the State government, initially to meet the requirements of the Moloch railway, the encroaching advances of human population on the forest ecosystem and the territorial management policies of both the colonial British regime and the independent Indian state will all be evaluated by an analysis of the specific diversity changes of forest ecosystems, of evolution of the floristic composition of agroforests with a coffee base and of the soil-organic-carbon stock.
The establishment of a forest service by the British was intended to expand the silvicultural areas to protect them, while simultaneously exploiting the forest produce which was finally processed for export (e.g., coffee and cardamom) outside the region. To what extent did the monetary inflow resulting from the coffee trade and the gradual growth of the market economy, enhanced by an increasingly dense road network, considerably change the economic status of the region? The disturbances following the different Forest Acts were accentuated by the enforcement of agrarian reforms that were directed towards the regulation of the population and the collection of tax from sedentary farmers. Of course, for these reasons the British colonizer was strongly averse to every form of shifting cultivation and to nomadic cultures.
Although the regional economy was based mainly on the coffee sector -- dynamic culture and migrant population -- Coorg has never recorded a significant demographic growth, except at intervals, and its population growth rate is one of the lowest when it is compared with the Indian districts. Why?

Cultural identity
The study should indicate that this tendency was undoubtedly altered by the seasonal migrations of the surrounding populations at the harvest. All the same, these migrations modified the different systems of agoraforestry exploitation and thus disturbed the users- maintained-relationships with the environment. These two phenomenons and their consequences are to be studied, because the transformations of the ecosystems and social configuration have modified the definition, function, and articulation of the territories: towns, habitations, gardens, crops, forests, pastures, and plantations. But these transformations have also helped to define the cultural singularity of the local social groups: the politically and economically dominant caste of the Kodavas who always project their mountain-dweller, martial, and native identity and the tribal people who are still considered to be 'forest people'' despite the radical transformation of the regional ecosystem.
It is in the face of the changes of the territorial and social fronts that the question of cultural identity of groups and local agents will be clarified, because their history has obviously evolved in conformity with the restructuring of the environmental aspects. The 'interlocking' of several levels of observations and conceptualization in time and space will show the extent of the diversity of resources of a regional ecosystem in South Asia which is partly linked to interventions, often conflicting, from a diversity of agents. In hundred and fifty years the State government has become the principal controlling authority. It can be said in advance that the dynamics of the disturbances and management of this ecosystem, as much in its reality as in its representations, has taken a conflictual form between its users and exploiters. However despite this conflicting situation, the technical systems of planning and collective choice of managerial coordination have shown their efficiency within a 'niche' or 'network', which will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the French Institute at Pondicherry, with their interdisciplinary know-how in the fields of history, geography, pedology, botany, ecology, cartography, and agroforestry, bearing in mind the significance of the 'non-linearity' of ecological and human phenomena and on the idea that ecological phenomena are sociologically neither accessorial nor fundamental.