Joshua Gray on the importance of protecting The Shola Forest in southern India.
When the British colonized India, they brought with them Pine and Eucalyptus trees to burn as fuel in the cool months. Even in the mountains of southern India, it can get pretty cold. These trees, especially the Eucalyptus, grow pretty quickly, so fuel came sooner.
Eucalyptus also has other uses. Its oil is rubbed into the skin and added to steaming water to help draw out the common cold. It is also a convenient bug repellant, as fleas and mosquitoes don’t care for the smell. But while the Eucalyptus has some positive qualities to it, these qualities are overshadowed by larger negative qualities.
The Eucalyptus is indeed fast growing, which also makes it invasive. Plant a few trees in an area and soon the place is overrun by them. The Shola Forest in southern India is a good example of this. The native trees of the Shola are mostly canopies, trees that block enough sun to prevent the ground from drying out too quickly. This is important when the area has one rainy season a year and is dry for nine months out of twelve. But more importantly, the trees hold water – they collect it and then release it slowly so that the forest gets water throughout the year, even when it hasn’t rained in months.
But then Eucalyptus was planted, and changed everything. These trees are not only invasive, but they require water – a lot of it – and take any amount of moisture they can. Fast forward several centuries later, and they have outnumbered the native trees in number and take all the water the canopies release. The Palani Hills in the Western Ghats of southern India is suffering from a severe water shortage.
A local citizen has been tracking rainfall in the town of Kodaikanal, located 7000 feet up in the Palani Hills, for years now. He has noticed that there no longer seems to be a monsoon season. There is rainfall in the area every month. While the monsoon brings wintry all-day rains with it, in recent years every other month of the year there are thunderstorms. And while Kodaikanal sits just beyond the path of the southwest monsoon, the ecosystem seems to have adjusted: monthly rain is required to keep the Shola forest from drying out.
It is illegal to cut down the Shola trees, yet these are the trees being felled.
Kodaikanal also has a pretty good sized man-made lake, cut in the shape of a star. There is lots of water in the lake, but local businesses, especially hotels, are paying the city to give them water for everything from daily use to operating fountains. Meanwhile, water is only available to the lower-income citizens of Kodaikanal when it rains, and if there isn’t much rain, they don’t get any. It gets rationed out; my domestic worker gets one bucket a week at most. She has gone weeks without water.
It could be classified as an environmental disaster. The Shola should be put through a mass deforestation project, ridding it of Eucalyptus (and Pine) trees, and then a mass planting project to add native canopies back into the ecosystem. Sometimes deforestation is a healthy thing. But India also has a long history of corruption. Government workers get paid off for allowing unethical practices to take place. This is the root of the issue with lake water. Low-income workers have no income to pay someone off.
It will take many years, decades, to turn the ecosystem around for the better. It can’t be a one-man job, but that is what is happening right now. Local NGOs with no financial support are headed and solely operated by a small handful of volunteers who are left trying to make a difference on their own.
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Sources for this piece include an article by Ian Lockwood and interviews with local NGOs and citizens of Kodaikanal.
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–Photo: krayker/Flickr