Grey Rainforest, Concrete Jungle

Walking along the dirt footpath, I watched a family of white spotted deer feeding on the leaves of a rosewood tree. A pair of rhesus macaques quietly dart between their toes leaping onto a nearby branch and quickly darting up a neem tree. A trio of Hanuman langurs rests on a pile of hay picking through their fur, their jet-black faces opaque against their bushy beige and grey bodies. As I looked off into the distance, I saw twelve-, fifteen-, and eighteen-story high rises nearby, disappearing in and out of the smog. The grey, heavy fog drifted through the rainforest over the eight-foot-tall concrete gated wall. The metal rooftops of slum settlements peeked over the divide, the thick forest brushing against the haphazard assemblages, covered with lightly torn blue tarp. 

On one side of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) is Mumbai, a bustling metropolis eighteen million people strong with a population density of 73,000 per square mile. On the other side, less than five miles away, is a similarly dense suburb, Thane, with a population of over two million. Within the park, nearly three thousand indigenous people, Adivasis, call the rainforest their home and lack access to electricity, schools, and hospitals in the city next door. Also living in and around the park are twenty five lions, twenty one leopards, two to three tigers, over 1000 plant species, 251 species of birds, and 5,000 species of insects. As I described my first visit to SGNP to my uncle, he described the park more as a “zoo” rather than a truly “natural forest.” My father who had lived in this city for over twenty years had never been until our own vacation. Is this park a pristine natural forest, a lightly managed expansive zoo, an urban greenspace, or a reservation?  

While SGNP will never neatly fit into any of these categories, its existence is a feat in itself. It challenges ideas of American exceptionalism surrounding the norms of conserving urban biodiversity, protecting unique ecosystems, and protecting the rights of indigenous people. In both, the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 and Wilderness Act of 1964, the fallacy of “un-peopled wilderness” became the legal standard for American conservation efforts, which led to the systemic dispossession of American Indian peoples from their land. Not all American national parks have removed Indians from their land, and particularly many Alaskan national parks allow tribes to live within them and use the park’s natural resources for their own survival. But the vast majority of American national parks erase the history of Indian peoples who once occupied their territories and force them to move to designated reservations on much smaller territories that are far away from American cities. 

While the local government and the indigenous people have come into conflict over how much infrastructure the adivasis require to survive in the forest, a substantial number of indigenous people remain in the national park, even as the second largest metropolitan area in India pushes precariously into the park’s territory. Looking at a satellite image of the park demonstrates its unique location; a deep green patch is cut off on three sides by a dense cluster of grey and brown dots, a river cutting through the top edge of the park. The park and the city have thus had a variety of fierce conflicts. Leopards have been an active threat in the nearby suburb and were responsible for over twenty human deaths in one week in 2004. There have been multiple efforts to improve traffic from Mumbai to Thane including a recent proposal to build a series of six underground tunnels sixty meters below the park. Adivasis in the park understandably want consistent transportation access to Mumbai schools and hospitals so that they do not have to build their own inside the park. To prevent indigenous people from immersing Ganesh idols in the park’s Dahisar River during the Hindu ceremony, Ganesh Chathurthi, three artificial ponds were created just outside the park for immersion ceremonies. 

Is this park a pristine natural forest, a lightly managed expansive zoo, an urban greenspace, or a reservation?

There are many stakeholders involved in the maintenance of the park from grassroots conservationists to the upper class of Indian society to the developers to the indigenous people to India’s Forest Department. Often there is no right answer when considering whether to develop or conserve, but the park continues to support a biodiverse set of flora and fauna, houses many people, and is still a great resource for the city next door for both tourism and leisurely use. The closest American equivalents like Chugach State Park (Anchorage), McDowell Sonoran Preserve (Scottsdale) , Franklin Mountains State Park (El Paso), and the Bayou Savage National Wildlife Refuge (New Orleans) are similarly sized to SGNP, but they do not allow indigenous people to live within these parks, nor are they located near America’s largest, centrally-located cities. In contrast, in SGNP, many of the indigenous people also work for the Forest Department to help with park conservation, profit from tourism off the park, and continue to live in relatively accessible villages that most tourists and Mumbai residents are likely to see on a trip to the park. Furthermore, working for the park is not a requirement for adivasis to remain within SGNP unlike in Yosemite, for example, where rights of Indian peoples who had been living in the park for centuries were slowly eroded until only families of employees could live in the park in employee housing after 1953.

While wild urban ecosystems are becoming more important to American cities, none are as ambitious, large (34 sq mi), and respectful to indigenous people as SGNP. The majority of urban greenspace in cities is in privately owned gardens and yards, a consequence of grotesque abuse of the concept of suburbia in America and beyond. While it is possible to manage urban biodiversity through coordination of thousands of tiny privately owned patches, it is also possible for Americans to give up their expansive yards in favor of a more centrally managed urban wild that also allows indigenous people to continue living in the area and better supports urban biodiversity. Americans in the past have worked to address greenspace management issues by dividing land between separate stakeholders (indigenous people, conservationists, private landowners, urban citizens), but SGNP demonstrates that greenspace management can successfully support biodiversity and appease multiple parties within a mixed-use framework. 

It is essential to embrace conceptions of wilderness, which include people within them, if we want to live in harmony with what we call nature. The separation of people from nature reinforces stereotypes we have about nature which leave them “un-peopled,” allowing us to exploit their natural resources indirectly without observing and learning about the historical, aesthetic, and social value of biodiversity and the natural world. Globally, and especially in urban areas, we are experiencing intergenerational environmental amnesia, the progressive erasure of what we think of as nature because of the human development of our surroundings. Human development has replaced the ponds, streams, and woodlands of our surroundings with fountains, pools, and urban parks, carefully trimmed and maintained by an extensive landscaping management team. Fewer and fewer children today spend time in nature with unstructured time to explore the outside world. The surveillance of children by parents and other adult chaperones has dramatically increased with the simultaneous rise of stricter regulation of appropriate use of natural landscapes. Today’s children and adults live in a world which restricts people’s interaction with greenery and also un-peoples the greenery itself when interaction is allowed. 

On one hand, the preservation of SGNP and the restoration of indigenous people to American national parks is essential to preserve the memory of human interactions with nature as both residents and visitors. On the other hand, SGNP’s proximity to Mumbai itself “urbanizes” its perception, forcing humans to directly perceive the impacts of human development on the park. The low-lying smog blanketed over the high rises of Mumbai’s suburban skyline wiggle through the park, visibly making the park seem less “natural.” The plastic and paper waste scattered at the edges of the park’s gates interrupts the underbrush, distracting us from the pristine hundred-year old trees rising above the garbage. Are our own national parks clean? Or are we hiding behind the slow violence of climate change whose changes we can only perceive over a timescale of years rather than hours? At its worst and at its best, SGNP is deeply honest about the conflict between human development and nature and the forces by which humans pollute, litter, and choke the natural environment around us. American national parks hide behind a veneer of cleanliness even as many of America’s most iconic wild animals (red wolf, sea turtle, giant sea bass, condor, etc.) are threatened by anthropogenic climate change, overconsumption, and pollution. SGNP is not untouched, but neither is any American national park nor any part of our planet due to the transnational impact of anthropogenic climate change. To pretend that we are somehow separate from the natural world around us is worse than acting like it doesn’t exist.