Modernizing Nature contributes to the debate regarding the origins,
institutionalization, and politics of the sciences and systems of
knowledge underlying colonial frameworks of environmental
management. It departs from the widely prevalent scholarly
perspective that colonial science can be understood predominantly
as a handmaiden of imperialism. Instead, it argues that the myriad
colonial sciences had ideological and interventionist traditions
distinct from each other and from the colonial bureaucracy and that
these tensions better explain environmental politics and policy
dilemmas in the post-colonial era. Professor Rajan argues that
tropical forestry in the nineteenth century consisted of at least
two distinct approaches towards nature, resource, and people; and
what won out in the end was the Continental European forestry
paradigm. Rajan also shows that science and scientists were
relatively marginal until the First World War. It was the acute
scientific and resource crisis felt during the War, along with the
rise of experts and expertise in Britain during that period and the
lobby-politics of an organized empire-wide scientific community,
that resulted in resource management regimes such as forestry
beginning to get serious state backing. Over time, considerable
differences in approach and outlook towards policy emerged between
different colonial scientific communities, such as foresters and
agriculturists. These different colonial sciences represented
different situated knowledges, with different visions of nature,
people, and empire, and in different configurations of power.
Finally, in a panoramic overview of post-colonial developments,
Rajan argues that the hegemony of these state-scientific regimes of
resource-management during the period 1950-1990 engendered not just
social revolt, as recent historical work has shown, but also
intellectual protest. Consequently, the discipline of forestry
became systematically re-conceptualized, with newapproaches to
sylviculture, economics, law, and crucially, with new visions of
modernity. This disciplinary change constitutes nothing short of a
cognitive revolution, one that has been brought about by a clearly
articulated political perspective on the orientation of the
discipline of forestry by its practitioners.
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