A land and its people

How true environmental protection also involves native communities

- REENA SINGH

now policing it. The book focuses on multiple voices, an elder recalling how the forest provided everything from fodder to medicinal plants, children dreaming of a future where a teacher comes to them, and a woman speaking of how relocation has brought rising violence against women, growing dowry demands and increased alcoholism and drug use. Their knowledge isn't abstract; they know which leaves heal wounds, how to guide water through channels that even deer and elephants seek out in the summer, how to lop branches without harming the tree.

So when they are relocated, it's not just geography that changes; it's their whole ecosystem of survival.