Sustainable Forestry : People Culture and Economics
Contents: Preface. Introduction. 1. Forests biodiversity and sustainable development/Ramprasad Sengupta. 2. Status of access rights of civil society to forest resources in India/Ajit Banerjee. 3. Property rights and access to forest resources/Anurag Modi. 4. Property rights and decentralised forest Governance: how far the objectives have been achieved/S.R. Balabantaray. 5. Joint forest management in Bengal: a human nature cooperation/N.C. Bahuguna. 6. Contribution of human interventions towards the sustainability of the joint forest management programme in South West Bengal/R. Mukhopadhyay and S.B. Roy. 7. Sustainable management of minor forest produce through joint forest management in Orissa: a case study of Lamtaput/R.K. Khosla. 8. Economics of forest dependence: evidences from Nagarhole National Park, Western Ghats of Karnataka/K. Raj. 9. Natural resource management goal: role of community based organisation/A. Mazumdar and S. Das. 10. Custodians of culture sustain forest biodiversity through participatory planning and management in the Himalayas/R. Nusrat.
The concept of sustainable forestry for the first time in the history of forest management was described in 1713 by Hans Carl von Carlowitz. The word sustainability has been used in different dimensions in the forestry sector. This may be in terms of forest ecology management forest products harvesting or in terms of forest livelihoods generations.
The book includes different contexts in terms of forest and forest products management on a sustainable basis for future preservation. Contributors including eminent forest researchers forest department staff academics environmentalists economists and from NGOs shared their outlooks and understandings related to the theme of the book.
Until the mid 1980s people from different sectors used to consider the forest as a source of timber only however latter it has become clear that the meaning of forest in our lives is beyond that. Those who are living within or at the fringe of forest covers not only depend for their day-to-day socio-economic lives but also those who are living geographically far away are also dependent on forest significantly.
Forest not only play an important role in maintaining atmospheric balance, surface soil conservation and preserving natural settings of biodiversity but also can enhance the advancement of nature based human civilisation in a sustainable manner. However for the best possible forest uses precise and extended public policy addressing forest and forest products based socio economic life is absolutely necessary.
Since the mid 1980s through Joint Forest Management (JFM) an effort has been taken by the central as well as state Forest Departments to involve local residents to preserve and manage existing forest covers and to increase the green covers in India. However behind the incredible success in terms of improvement of forest covers and forest based livelihoods numbers of malfunctions are also quite noticeable.
