In India, arguments about nature are often treated as friction in the path of progress. Madhav Gadgil insisted they were arguments about power: who gets to decide what happens to a forest, a river, a hillside, and on what evidence. He made that case as a scientist, and then made it again as a citizen who did not care much whether officials found it convenient. Gadgil, an ecologist associated most closely with the Western Ghats and with a democratic approach to conservation, died on January 7, 2025. He was 83. He was born in Pune and grew up with two unusual advantages: access to books and access to the living world. His father, Dhananjaya Ramchandra Gadgil, bought him binoculars and helped him learn birds “in the pre-pesticide days.” A neighbor, the anthropologist Irawati Karve, shaped his outlook in a different way, encouraging him to grow up without religious, caste, or class prejudices. When Gadgil was nine, he accompanied Karve on fieldwork to Kodagu, where he saw wild elephants and a sacred grove at Talakaveri, near the origin of the Kaveri River. It was an early lesson in how landscapes hold meaning beyond their market price. As a young man he was physically tough and competitive—running, swimming, and playing racket sports—traits that suited a field naturalist who preferred to learn by looking closely. Another early lesson arrived through development. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s India, dams were “temples of modern India.” Gadgil learned at 14 about forest destruction and displacement linked to the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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