GREEN IMPERIALISM AND AFTER
By Mahesh Rangarajan | 30 August 2020
This talk by historian Mahesh Rangarajan explored scholar Richard Grove’s legacy and the challenges of environmental history.
The demise of Richard Grove in June 2020 leaves both a void that will be hard to fill and legacy that will challenge scholars and thinkers on our environmental dilemmas in this still young century. His doctoral thesis from Cambridge revised and published under the intellectually original and provocative title Green Imperialism in 1995 opened new windows on our shared pasts. In later years, his work on El Nino set the stage for connected histories of climate change and human endeavour. His legacy as a scholar will reach out to many who were not privileged enough to study or work with him. His ideas will challenge, stimulate and push us to new horizons.
Most of all, he was among those who took us to new ways of looking at the origins of environmental concern and action. Island territories of the European colonial powers such as St Vincent and St Helena, Mauritius were where the impact of rapid economic changes on the land and vegetation and the relation to soil and water caught the attention of observers. Men like Pierre Poivre in Mauritius, John Crombie Brown in Cape Colony and the surgeon botanists in the service of the East India Company advanced a powerful case for public action to avert ecological disaster.
Grove did more than write and research and his early co-edited collections, Conservation in Africa in 1987 and Nature and the Orient on South and South EAsia just over a decade later provided platform to younger scholars and new voices. The journal Environment and History set up by him a quarter century ago with White Horse Press is a major publication.
Grove’s work continues to be a beacon to go beyond established categories and think afresh and anew. A slew of recent works shows deep promise in connected histories and also placing events and changes of the recent past in context of a much longer history of human interactions with the environment. To comprehend our present needs us to keep asking where we are and how we got here and why. In this small way his dream will live on and the fire stay aglow.
The session began with a closing note by Ralf Lopian, the Chairperson of the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s International Steering Committee for the International Year of Plant Health. Following this, Mahesh Rangarajan spoke about Richard Grove's legacy and the Challenges to Environmental History.
About the Speaker
Mahesh Rangarajan teaches History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana, India. He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at the universities of Cornell, Jadavpur and Delhi and headed the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Fencing the Forest( 1996) was his first book and Nature and Nation (2015) the most recent. Co edited works include India's Environmental History (2012) , Nature without Borders (2014) and At Nature's Edge (2018).
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