Earth_Island_Journal_-_Spring_2020

EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL • SPRING 2020 29

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for four months. He says the forest

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to an unknown destination in another

four. That leaves him just enough

time to simply continue with the

acacia-clearing that the department

has practiced since the 1970s, and no

opportunity to test or implement any

new landscape restoration programs.

Government foresters focus on a

few acacia-overrun zones at a time

on state-owned land in the Nilgiris,

and treat the trees like an army would

treat enemy soldiers. The department

cuts them down, then stamps out any

new acacia in these parts for two years,

while attempting to establish native

grasslands in its place. When asked

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acacia from those patches, Dabbala

grimaces and shakes his head.

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is again coming up,” he says.

That’s probably because the

foresters’ plan is incomplete. Ripping

out acacia is a start, but Dabbala says

they don’t go after the plant’s seedbeds

or try to establish a blend of native

grasses hearty enough to outcompete

the acacia.

Government attempts to replant

shola forests have also failed because

foresters lacked basic knowledge

about the ecosystem they were trying

to revitalize. According to Godwin

Vasanth Bosco, a Nilgiris restoration

expert and founder of the ecosystem

revitalization group Upstream Ecology,

foresters tried to plant shola trees in

areas that had long been grassland,

where the already-established grasses

gave trees little chance to survive. Bosco

says he has propagated around 4,000

shola trees, though various factors

including frost and prolonged dryness

make it hard for these natives to thrive.

For both him and the government,

grassland restoration is a greater

priority than shola reforestation in the

Nilgiris.

Ecologists have tried to reorient the

government’s acacia-tackling policies

for years, but it’s hard to establish new

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are always rotating. “Anyone trying

to work in grassland restoration is

going to have to work with the forest

department, and it depends on if the

authorities are friendly or not,” says

Bob Stewart, a grassland restoration

expert who has worked in the Nilgiris

for years. “They’re not really used to

working with grasses. They’re all tree

people.”

Grassland restoration is much more

complex than bringing back a crop

of trees, say Stewart and Bosco. First,

it requires a lot more plants. Bosco

says he uses 5,000 to 8,000 plants per

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of forest would require maybe half

that many trees. Nilgiri grasslands also

contain roughly 110 types of grass,

according to Bosco, whereas shola

forests comprise around 90 species of

trees.

“To try and recreate the complexity

of grassland is almost impossible from

scratch,” Stewart says. Doing so might

not be much use in the Nilgiris either,

given that the region’s combination of

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the creep of acacia. Still, there are

several hardier grass species that can

As the Nilgiris have lost grasslands, they have also lost animals that depend on this unique habitat, including the endangered Nilgiri tahr.