Resource Use, Culture and Ecological Change: A case study of the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India

This is a book on the ecological changes in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India. Motivated by concerns for environmental degradation, and the need to understand the mechanisms that drive ecological change, the study is situated in the academic domain of studies on human-nature interactions. The complex nature of interactions between human groups with their environment and their dependence on the situational context, requires that such studies be at a regional and local scale for which sufficient detail is available. This particular study is situated in the Nilgiri hills in the Western Ghats of Southern India for which such detailed information is available. The study reconstructs the ecological history of the Nilgiri area during the last 200 years, and from this laboratory of human-nature interactions, attempts to derive general patterns.

R. Prabhakar is a B.Tech from IIT Madras and did his PhD in Ecological Sciences from The IISc, Bangalore. He is interested in the social and cultural issues of conservation and has a passion for map based visualization. He works at Strand Life Sciences, Bangalore. Madhav Gadgil is a well-known and renowned ecologist.