Missing the forest for the timber

There’s a gulmohur tree outside my window, along with a bunch of other flowering plants, most of which I have managed to kill. Each time my mother leaves town, she tells me I must remember to water the plants. Each time, a few plants die. But the gulmohar survived both my negligence and a parasitical attack.

It wasn’t easy keeping that tree alive. My mother fought hard to save its life. She tried home remedies. She chased down a friend of my brother’s since he happened to have a degree in botany. She went to distant suburbs to find the right medicine and applied it diligently.

I used to get a daily commentary on the gulmohur’s health over breakfast. This wasn’t something I understood - mom going to such trouble for the sake of a tree that wasn’t even going to give us any fruit. Until last summer when she begged me over the phone to water her plants. I grumbled but I did it twice a week. And, to my extreme embarrassment, I found myself doing what batty old ladies do in ‘language cinema’ - I talked to the plants. I said “Good Morning”; I whispered to the fragile ones: “Don’t die, okay?”

A real attachment to trees is only comprehensible to those who invest something in them. People like my mother, maybe. But can you imagine what a tree means to someone who doesn’t know how to live without them?

Last year, I travelled through Mandla, a southern district in Madhya Pradesh. I spent a few days living in tribal villages to try and understand displacement and what it does to local populations. I did learn a great many things on that trip, but I’ll save those for later. Today, let me just tell about the one discovery that helped me understand why tribals refuse to relocate and why the state fails to see their point of view. Predictably, I didn’t understand until I began to pay attention to the words different sets of people used.

Talk to any forest-dwelling tribal and ask him (or her) what a tree is worth. He will not be able to tell you.  He may know the physical location of each tree, its name, its uses, its frailties, but he will not be able to put a price on it. The state, however, can and does.

According to the 2009 State of Forests report, India has a ‘growing stock’ of 6098.23 million cubic meters. Madhya Pradesh also measures its forests in the form of ‘growing timber’ - 500 lakh cubic meters of it, valued at Rs 2.5 lakh crore. And when a tree grows to its full (timber) potential, the forest department cuts it down and auctions it off.

However, for people who live beside this ‘growing stock’, trees aren’t about cubic meters or crores of rupees. They don’t see a forest as the sum of its saleable parts. And therein lies the rub. There is a vast gulf between the government’s approach and that of tribals.

Now we are about to witness another attitude - that of the United Nations Environment Programme, which has chosen India to play global host for World Environment Day. Apparently, this year’s theme is: ‘Forests: Nature at Your Service’.

Except, it isn’t. Nature isn’t at our service. At least, no more than we are at her service. We must water the plants. We must save the gulmohur. And remember that it exists only so that more gulmohurs may bloom and grow. It doesn’t exist for your convenience or your profit. Not even if you’re the government of India.

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)