Disparate narratives

"Is environmental history merely the recording of loss and decline, a narrative about the sinking of the Titanic as it were?" asked Richard Grove at the concluding session of the 'conference on the environmental history of Asia', held in the sylvan surroundings of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (jnu) campus, New Delhi (December 4-7, 2002).

Saraswati underground

November 15

In search of East India Company

The City of London is full of monuments, but none record the East India Company's existence. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. This being Britain, however, what remains is a pub - the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Popular with office workers, it stands at the centre of the Company's former commercial universe. Westwards lies Philpott Street, where it was originally based in its founding governor Thomas Smythe's mansion.

Roman retreat

BENEATH the streets of London lie the remains of Londinium, an outpost of the only empire to run Britain from abroad, say archaeologists from the Museum of London. The course of a long-disappeared river and the truncated foundations of a massive arch, which straddled a Roman road, have been unearthed beneath what is now known as Newgate Street.

A Himalayan plunder

"LARGE parts of Uttarakhand now lie denuded ... the whole region is turning into a desert. If this trend continues for another 50 years, it will become impossible to save the Himalaya from total collapse," environmental activist Chandi Prasad Batt had said at a public rally in 1980. One could trace the origin of such prophecies to the '70s with the emergence of the 'theory of Himalayan forest degradation

Then and now

"IF EVER there were to be a paradise in this land of Indians, this" Frary Pedro Simon, a 16th century chronicler, had 1i At a dizzying 5,775 metres (in) above sea level, the fd stiountains in Sierra Nevada, Colombia, make up the rs highest coastline range. just 300 years ago, some " Tayrano Indians lived off these mountains in citystates Isorrounded by lush crop-fields. Today, a mere 2,000 settles bottle erosion, meagre supplies of water and poor soil

Tantrums of the "Christ Child"

Not a blade of grass

QUESTION: What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? ANSWER: Stand up

The return of Mowgli's mother

A court ruling in the US in January 1995 cleared the way for an ambitious plan to reintroduce the gray wolf (Canis lupus) to parts of its former range. One of the 2 sites selected is the famous Yellowstone National Park, which was established in 1872 and is well known as the world's 1st national park. What is not so widely known is that for a long time after its creation, the park's rangers used baits, poisons and snares, in addition to the ubiquitous gun, to exterminate predators.

Nuclear nemesis

SECRETS spills of radioactive nuclear waste in Russia are creeping insidiously into the seas and may plague the world for the next 300 years. For more than 3 decades during the Cold War, billions of gallons of atomic waste had been secretly pumped directly into the earth at 3 sites near major rivers.