Philosophy
India’s Bastar forest policies displaced Adivasi communities under the guise of climate action, privileging carbon credits over centuries of Indigenous stewardship. Wisdom traditions like Ubuntu, Buddhism, and the Upanishads reveal the ethical failures of such top-down conservation.
State Violence and Climate Policy
In 2019, Chhattisgarh announced plans to increase Bastar district’s forest cover as part of India’s commitment to create additional carbon sinks. But for Adivasi communities, this climate solution became state violence.
Under forest conservation banners, the state evicted Adivasi families from lands they had cultivated for generations, criminalised traditional practices like shifting cultivation as “forest destruction,” and established monoculture plantations. The same communities that maintained Bastar’s biodiversity for centuries were labelled “encroachers” on ancestral lands.
This is state-scale lifeboat ethics: India maintains its position in global climate negotiations by displacing environmental costs onto marginalised citizens. Urban India continues high-emission lifestyles while rural Adivasis lose access to forests providing food security, medicine and cultural identity.
The twisted logic: communities that preserved forests are removed so the state can claim conservation credit. Their traditional ecological knowledge, which includes centuries of sustainable forest management, is dismissed as “unscientific,” while Forest Department monocultures are celebrated as climate action.
Philosophical Responses
Ubuntu: India’s climate commitments sever relationships between Adivasi communities and the forests they co-created. If people and forest health are interdependent, displacing forest communities undermines both.
Buddhism: The state reflects three poisons: greed for carbon credits, hatred toward labelled obstacles, and delusion that forests can be conserved by breaking creative relationships. True protection addresses root causes: industrial mining, urban overconsumption.
Upanishads: The carbon forest policy concentrates territorial control in the state’s hands while denying Adivasi traditional rights, violating the principle that each life form should enjoy the earth’s benefits without encroaching on others.
The Bastar case reveals climate policy as epistemic violence, systematically discrediting Indigenous knowledge systems. Adivasi communities developed sophisticated forest ecology understanding through millennia of landscape intimacy, but this doesn’t count as “science” to Forest Departments imposing uniform plantations.
Investigate: Research one “forest conservation” project in your region. Who was moved off the land? What traditional practices were stopped? Who benefits from carbon credits? Does this align with the philosophical traditions’ vision of justice?