Grove and Guha use archival sources from the time such as colonial government records, the forest department’s records, and missionary writings. They both also incorporated oral accounts from select officials, but it wasn’ as common as the others. I think both of them would agree that the forests of India are places of conflict. Primarily they are places of conflict over the ownership of resources. Something that one party must fully control, while the other has to bear the consequences of not controlling it. This could be either losing out of profit and business, or having ecosystems destroyed.
Barton highlights the ways in which colonial forestry practices continue to show their lingering effects on India’s politics. These practices show their most effect on those who are unable to combat the change that is placed onto them such as indigenous communities. Sivaramakrishnan uses more varied archives which is evident in his information on aspects of forestry. He argues that forestry was not just about extraction of resources from the forest, but a new kind of relationship between the state, science, and the environment. I think both would agree that the institutionalization of forestry allows for a more complex relationship between what the state wants and what the people want. Where government bodies are a part of one group and the individuals living in affected areas are another group.
From the questions one example that was constantly brought up in my mind was David Brandt. David was an American farmer who promoted soil conservation by using no-tilling and crop cover farming. I feel that even though farms and forestry are instinctively different, one is a forest and the other produces crops, I believe that they are essentially the same. Up until recently, like the early 1980s, tilling and a lot of pesticides were used to kill unwanted plants on farmland. Tilling breaks up the soil and is very damaging to the soil since it encourages erosion and disrupts the microbiome of the soil. David would share some of the same views as the first two readings, where the line between profit and environmental destruction is very thin. Where farmers don’t want to adapt to newer no-tilling or crop cover farming since it takes time for it to become profitable and when it is profitable it isn’t nearly as profitable as traditional farming. Although, he would also agree on the ideas of Barton and Sivaramakrishnan. The only reason he was forced to switch to no-tilling farming was because he was offered money (which he desperately needed after the vietnam war) by the US government to try it. The gap between government bodies and the people on the ground (or in the ground) and how they contribute to the environment is different. Where both want profit, but only one has to bear any major consequences.