30 http://www.earthislandjournal.org
outcompete acacia, and Bosco believes
he’s come up with a mix of native
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their much taller adversaries. These
grasses are big, by grass standards,
and their roots take up a lot of space,
crowding out acacia seedlings.
Years of restoration attempts on
privately owned land in the Nilgiris
have shown that beating back acacia is
possible with, as Steward says, “a lot
of labor” and time. Restorationists start
by ripping out acacia from a patch of
ground, plucking the tree’s seedlings,
and replacing them with native grasses,
a strategy Bosco echoed. Then come
years of visiting the site several times
a week to collect any new acacia
seeds that have found their way to the
designated plot, though Bosco said the
amount of landscape intervention after
the initial acacia-clearing “does taper
down drastically over the years.” By
year six, Stewart found that the restored
patch needed to be checked only once
a week to make sure the invasive tree
wasn’t sprouting fresh roots.
Of course, six years is about three
times longer than the forest department
ever spends on physically maintaining
the roughly 9 percent of the Nilgiris
that is state-owned — yet another gap
between policy and what science shows
is necessary to eliminate acacia and
clear space for grassland.
Frustrated by these bureaucratic
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working independently, but started
advising the forest department last year
through a court-appointed team tasked
with halting the spread of invasive
species in the Nilgiris. (Tamil Nadu’s
high court set up the expert team to
advise the state on how to tackle invasive
species in the Western Ghats in January
2019 following a series of lawsuits
by environmental groups seeking to
restrain the cultivation of eucalyptus
and acacia for commercial purposes.)
Bosco now plans to work with foresters
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and eucalyptus from the Nilgiris and
the nearby Palani Hills, and replace
these trees with grasslands and shola
forests. The project will be undertaken
in phases, roughly 250 acres at a time.
“This scale and this type of work hasn’t
been done,” Bosco says.Nobody can guarantee that this
plan will work. More than 20 district
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Nilgiris over the next two decades, and
there will certainly be some who are less
dedicated to the project than others.
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every election season, and so will the
projects those governments believe are
important. Even if the work remains
a priority, over the past half century,
much of the Nilgiris has morphed into
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-^MV_Q\PLMLQKI\MLZM[\WZI\QWVMٺWZ\[
in the coming years, it is unlikely that
this landscape will ever return to its
pre-colonial state.
Still, looking out over the rivers
of grass that even now seem to run
endlessly around islands of bunched
shola forest, it’s clear that this kind of
public-private partnership is vital to
the survival of not just the Nilgiris, but
all threatened landscapes. Fusing the
expertise of conservationists like Bosco
and Stewart with the state’s resources
and manpower could help transform
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department into a vast and purposeful
machine.
Given the immense terrain of the
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that will prove successful are the ones
that take the long view — plotted over
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governments, researchers, stakeholder
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seen problems make it easy to shelve
such projects for a later day. If anything
about environmental restoration in the
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be that the only way forward is to try
things that have little precedent.Colin Daileda is a journalist living
in Bengaluru, India, who often writes
about climate change and environmental
degradation.Years of grassland restoration efforts on privately owned land in the Nilgiris have shown that
beating back invasive trees like acacia is possible.
PHOTO:^ARJUN^ CHEYYUR