A new encyclopaedia traces the making of Kerala’s ecological crisis
In 1624, Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle arrived on the Malabar coast to find houses nestled among coconut groves, people farming pepper, jackfruit, mango, tamarind and sugarcane, forests of giant trees, and boats moving down pristine lakes and rivers. It was, by his account, a land where humans and nature had learned to live together. Many European travellers who followed him to Kerala’s shores said much the same.
Those accounts also sowed the seeds of what came next. Western curiosity about the region’s resources slowly gave way to systematic exploitation, first for timber, then for tea, coffee and cardamom plantations as part of green imperialism. Four hundred years later, Kerala’s environmental history reads as a depressing story of that transformation. Forests and wildlife were decimated during the colonial era for commercial crops and game hunting.
After Independence, the destruction continued under the banner of development. Today, technology-driven highways, expressways, tunnels and housing projects are reshaping the landscape at a pace and scale that earlier centuries could not have managed.
Sebastian Joseph, environment historian and external editor of the recently published Encyclopedia of Environment History of Kerala, says that the floods, landslides and biodiversity loss we see today are not merely current-day phenomena. They are the accumulated consequence of historical decisions that got imprinted in the land itself.
Colonial exploitation, Joseph says, began with surveys, maps, botanical classifications, forest boundary demarcations, and tax codes. These scientific and bureaucratic endeavours made land, forest, water, and minerals easy to understand, and therefore controllable. The 12-volume Hortus Malabaricus, published between 1678 and 1693, was among the earliest systematic attempts to document Kerala’s natural resources for this purpose.
“Karl Marx said windmills created aristocrats; steam mills created industrialists. In the same way, railway development in Kerala created modern authorities of nature exploitation. The Kochi forest tramway that was built in 1901-07 and operational until 1963 was designed to carry timber from Parambikulam and Anamala forest to riverside depots and ports.”
In his speech at the Cochin state legislative council, a member named I A Ouseph raised concerns about the pace of forest destruction the tramway was enabling. The Munnar light railway, the Nilambur-Shoranur line, and the Kollam-Sengotta line all played a role in moving timber out of the Western Ghats, according to the encyclopedia.
Teak changed the state’s environmental history. But rubber was not far behind. Rubber monoculture, Joseph notes, drew water from the soil and damaged coconut, pepper and tuber crops in surrounding areas. When food shortages followed, people migrated to Malabar and planted tapioca on forestland. The shift from subsistence paddy farming to commercial crops collapsed wetland farming cultures, reduced the extent of farmland and contributed to the conditions that make floods more frequent and more severe.
The shift was not accidental. Research from Kew Gardens in the mid-18th century reshaped Kerala’s landscape and its relationship with nature. From the first rubber plantation at Thattekad in 1902 to the large-scale changes across Kanjirappally, colonial botany did not merely move plants. It rewired how people lived and worked.
By the early 19th century, coconut cultivation had become more profitable than paddy. The resulting conversion of paddy fields became so widespread that the Travancore govt was forced to intervene. After Independence, land reforms dismantled feudalism but also accelerated a shift towards cash crops that required less labour and generated higher returns. By 1990, Kerala had become a rice-importing state as farmland shrank and paddy cultivation declined.
The current-day human-wildlife conflict tells stories of shrinking habitat and broken ecological corridors. “Environmental history tells us serious lessons about the kind of development models we have borrowed from the colonial modernity that tried to control the forest,” Joseph adds.
The warnings were there, and they were ignored. Edward Green Balfour identified the link between large-scale deforestation and weather change in the mid-19th century. Munnar flooded in 1924. The Gadgil report of 2011 outlined the ecological fragility of the Western Ghats in detail. It was shelved under pressure from politicians, farming lobbies, real estate interests and religious groups. The 2018 floods followed. Then the Wayanad landslide of 2024.
Today, tourists driving up to Munnar pass giant concrete retaining walls built to stop the hillside from sliding onto the road. They admire the green sweep of tea gardens without knowing that those gardens replaced shola forests that no govt has seriously attempted to restore.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
