Michael H. Fisher

About the Author

Michael H. Fisher received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago and is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History, Emeritus, at Oberlin College. Dr. Fisher has been traveling to India since 1971 and has published many articles and books on the history of that country, including A Short History of the Mughal Empire, An Environmental History of India, and Across the Three Seas: Travellers Tales from Mughal India. He is the featured lecturer in The Great Course series A History of India. 

Environmental challenges and ways forward

A growing number of people from across the globe are coming to understand how vital it is to protect the environment. The complex forces affecting the environment are especially pressing at this point in the human development. Human, animal, and plant communities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented disruptions and threats. Organizations like the ECOR Foundation and individual activists need to continue to enhance their efforts to alleviate and mitigate the cumulative destructive causes and effects of human‐caused natural resource depletion, expressed in large measure a‘climate change’. Each individual and organization needs to decide how much to be involved in politics. The current U.S. administration and Congress have been moving rapidly to radically limit and roll back environmental protections and policies, both nationally and globally. Simultaneously, various individuals, organizations, and states (from California to Massachusetts) have mobilized to resist such retrograde and destructive acts, with mixed and often temporary successes in judicial courts. At this point, most of the most significant battles remain to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. While I feel confident about my studying India’s environmental history, because I am not an Indian citizen nor do I have Indian ancestry, I should appropriately refrain from discussing the current Indian government’s policies or practices. India’s history of environmental threats and protections have parallels and also important differences from those of the rest of the world. The legacy of the British Raj includes still current legislation about government control over natural resources, including over forests and fresh surface waters like rivers and canals. The British Partition of West and East Pakistan away from the Republic of India in 1947 divided watersheds and some terrestrial animal migration patterns, as well as immediately disrupting the lives of over ten million people. Following Indian Independence, largely Euro‐American and Soviet inspired government policies, including attempting large‐scale water control through big dams and the massive extraction of minerals, timber, and other natural  resources for national industrial development. Yet, there were always popular movements to protect India’s natural resources. Many of these movements continue to evoke Gandhian or left‐political ideologies and methods. Across India, local community groups have organized to resist some of these exploitative policies and projects, for example through the internationally famous Chipko movement in the western Himalayan foothills. When recognized by India’s national government, such local movements have had some successes, as when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi intervened in 1983 to support the local movement headed by a science teachers’ association (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad) to protect the Silent Valley in the Nilgiri mountains in the Western Ghats. Indeed, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the State of Emergency that she had declared (1975‐77) used her virtually unchecked authority to have Parliament pass the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution in 1976 that required the government to ‘endeavour to protect and improve the environment and safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country’. Additionally, it became a fundamental ‘duty of every citizen of India...to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and have compassion for living creatures’. Largely on the basis of this Amendment, the Indian Supreme Court asserted an active role of intervening to protect the environment. From the early 1980s, this Court pioneered its acceptance of Public Interest Litigation [PIL] that allowed any citizen to appeal directly to the Supreme Court on the environment’s behalf against any government agency or private business. Eventually, the Court accepted even an individual’s letter as a legal PIL appeal. Further, the Court began to act suo moto (on its own initiative), for instance based on a newspaper article a judge happened to read. The Supreme Courts of both Pakistan and Bangladesh have often followed this innovative Indian judicial practice. While each of our careers has been developing in distinct ways, my own engagement with the study of environmental history and with conservation activities may be of some small interest. After academic training in India starting in 1971, followed by doctoral research in India about India’s social and cultural history starting in 1977, I began teaching and lecturing about this subject in colleges and universities in the U.S. and occasionally in India. Not until after I joined the History Department at Oberlin College in 1990, however, did I begin to expand my studies and teaching to include India’s environmental history. Indeed, it was my students as Oberlin College who prompted me to expand into this developing field. As you know, many of the formative early studies of India’s environmental history began to emerge in the 1980s, so this was a new field for many of us. In order to understand the long and complex interactions between the natural world and the diverse peoples of India, I began my lectures at the earliest point: as the Indian subcontinent drifted north and collided with the southern edge of the Asian plate. This raised up the Himalayan mountains and in large measure created the monsoon weather pattern. I then surveyed India’s long and complex environmental history up to the present. I also incorporated environmental themes into the other courses that I taught and some of the books that I wrote, as well as a series of 36 video lectures on India’s history that I presented for The Great Courses, designed for a general audience. The fast‐developing field of environmental studies has increasingly been broadened by incorporating the work of researchers in the hard and the social sciences. New techniques of genetic and mineral analysis, for example, are enriching our understanding of various environmental processes. Of the newly emerging social scientific analytic models within environmental studies, three that I personally find especially promising are: intersectionality, inter‐species interactions, and Actor Network Theory. The first analyzes how human gender, class, and ‘race’, among other factors, affect human interactions with natural elements. The second expands beyond scholarship’s conventional anthro‐centric focus to analyze how other species of animals and plants interact with each other, either resulting from or else independent of human actions. The third considers how non‐humans, including the inanimate like water, the animate like animals, plants, and bacteria, and entities as small as viruses each have agency that affects each other as well as humans. Since my own specific historical research has concentrated on other subjects, including extending Indian history beyond India by studying the emigration of diverse people from India to Britain (16th to mid‐19th century), I have always relied for my understanding of environmental studies on the field research and publications of other scholars in various other academic disciplines. Particularly since my retirement from Oberlin College a decade ago, I have not been able to undertake further archival or field research, although I have been able to continue to read, write, and publish about environmental topics, largely synthesizing the work of others. Over the past decade, however, I have been able to contribute to the applied protection and preservation of my local environment. I now live in an especially fragile location: a low, sandy peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean with a sole source aquifer dependent on rainfall. Our small village contains many small freshwater lakes and ponds whose ecosystems are being degraded by human pollution, especially of ground water‐borne phosphorus and nitrogen. There are also very active ocean seashores on both sides of our community, where sea‐level rise is intensifying erosion. In order to help preserve these local ecosystems, I serve as a Trustee of an all‐volunteer non‐profit land‐trust that acquires undeveloped village lands and seeks to preserve them in their natural condition. I am also an elected Conservation Commissioner, part of a panel of volunteers that is legally empowered by the Massachusetts Wetland Protection Act to enforce the regulation of all alterations of land near fresh or saltwater wetlands. Further I serve as a member of the village’s Community Preservation Committee that funds local projects, with a mandatory proportion of the funds going to the preservation of ‘Open Space’ conservation lands. My knowledge about environmental issues in India often informs my understanding of environmental processes in my local community. In closing, I would like to express my respect for the goals and accomplishments of the ECOR Foundation. The coordinated work of such organizations remains vital to the future of India, the globe, and the environment.