Features Meenakshi Jani Thoughts on Theses

Meenakshi Jani (she/her) is an environmental studies and history major writ- a colonial in India in Conservation: Foresters as State-Builders and Myth-Makers in Colonial India and the Phillipines," looks into the role of forest officers and forest department employees in the larger colonial project in these places.

Philippines.

Q: How does it relate to your lived experience?

Q: Do you find there to be an overlap between Environmental Studies and History?

A: It was [William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Environmental Studies Ted Melillo’s class] 'Environmental Issues of the Nineteenth Century' that really got me thinking about environmental history. I think what blew my mind about it is that we so often think about the environment and environmental issues as really contemporary. People are saying we need to save society from a climate crisis. And now, people are finally talking about environmental justice as a problem. And there’s this sense of urgency and … 'in the now' mentality around environmental stuff. And I think it’s really important to think about how it’s actually not just a 'current' kind of topic. It was really interesting for me to learn how we actually got to this point historically. Not just from a climate perspective, but also from an ideological perspective ... How did people historically think about the environment when the climate crisis was not on their radar? Because people have always been thinking about relationships between people and the environment, just in different ways and with different questions on their mind. For my thesis, I recently went to London to do archival research this past month. And while I was in the archive, I came across this source of British forestry officials talking about how important forests are for regulating so many other aspects of the environment ... This was from the 19th century, so people have been thinking about these questions for a long time.

Q: What is your thesis about?

A: It’s looking at the role that the forester — or a person doing work for Colonial forestry departments — played, and what space they occupied in the colonial project of forest conservation, specifically in India and the Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... But more specifically, I’m focusing on the forester as a figure because there’s a lot of scholarship that talks about how this discipline, of what some people have called Empire Forestry, developed. So essentially, what happened in India, and in the Philippines a little bit later under the U.S. as well as Spain was the [colonizing] empire tried to consolidate state authority over forests ... This was in response to concern about private interests, like logging excessively, and all of that. But it was also very antagonistic towards communities that used forest land and were dependent on forest resources. It was an early form of what you maybe could call environmentalism, but it wasn’t necessarily from a ‘save the trees’ perspective. It was a lot more of, ‘Let’s make sure that we are able to use these resources for Imperial interests for the longest period of time possible’ ... In the Philippines, the U.S. was also doing some similar things in terms of creating this forestry bureau, consolidating forestry in the hands of the state. And what I’m really interested in is how it used people as part of that process. Who did it hire, both from the U.S. or from Britain, but then also from local communities to actually do this work of forest management or conservation? I argue that in both contexts, foresters occupied a liminal space, constantly renegotiating their place within academic institutions, colonial hierarchies, and government bureaucracies. Using India and the Philippines as case studies, I demonstrate how, like the discipline of empire forestry, colonial understandings of the forester as a state-builder and myth-maker developed transnationally ... I feel sometimes I have to give that explanation because I realized that the word ‘forester’ isn’t even one that people necessarily use or think about so I feel like I needed to give that context.

Q: What inspired you to pursue this topic?

A: I’ll reference 'Environmental Issues in the Nineteenth Century' again. In that course, I wrote a paper that was looking at taking scholarly books that we had read for the course about U.S. conservation policy, and seeing how I could apply that to British India in the 19th century ... So that was kind of the initial comparative lens that I started to take. And then, I studied abroad in Spain in the spring semester of my junior year and started thinking more about Spanish imperialism. That’s how the Philippines came into this question.

A: I have an interest in South Asia in general, just from other academic work that I’ve done. That was definitely part of my motive to write the thesis. And I’m Indian American so I have that connection heritage-wise. And actually, I don’t think this is what inspired the thesis topic, per se, but it has been interesting to think about, because my great-great-grandfather was a forester in India ... I was talking to my grandpa about it earlier. And we’ll see if the stories that he’s told me will make their way into my thesis ... So yeah, I do have some personal connections in different places. But I think also just, in terms of my own life, I’m really interested in doing environmental work after college.

Q: How has your thesis journey evolved?

A: My thesis is completely different than what I originally planned. So, I was studying abroad in Spain, which actually was a little weird being abroad while realizing I had to start thinking about my thesis. But at that point, I just started thinking about the Philippines because I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to put this in conversation with Spanish colonialism?’ And I don’t think I actually gave a lot of thought to what it means to take a comparative history perspective in the beginning. And that’s definitely something I’m still learning through the process of writing the thesis. But I think I do generally have an interest in courses and topics that are transnational and span multiple contexts. That is an approach to history that does interest me. And you know, I started out with that. And then I ended up looking more at the U.S. because I was finding more sources about it and seeing some of that consolidation of colonial power over forestry happening more once the U.S. took power. And that seemed a little more parallel to what was happening in British India, or what had happened a few decades before. Then over the course of the thesis, figuring out this thing about the role of the forester, that was not something I had thought about before. And over the course of time, after doing research in the archives, it changes everything. And every time you look at a new document, you’re like, ‘Wait a second, this changes my question.’ So I went from a lot of thinking about ideology, and gender, and lots of different issues, and then I eventually sort of came to a topic that I was like, ‘This is what I want to look at and I feel like I’m able to contribute something different if I focus in this way.’

Q: What conversations do you want your thesis to spark?

A: I think it comes down to the broader question that I mentioned before, of decolonizing conservation; such as the ideas about preserving land, specifically pristine land, and managing land… [for] my senior seminar in environmental studies, [my final paper] looked at contemporary forest management strategies in India and the Philippines today, and specifically how those are gendered. So looking at community-based forest management, where instead of just the state managing everything, letting local communities, who already are stewards of the forest land in many contexts, have authority over the land ... And I think that’s a good example of a contemporary manifestation of my thesis topic, which is that everything that’s happening now in these places is trying to decolonize the practice of forest management.

Read the full interview online at www.amherststudent.com

— Belem Oseguera '24E