In 1988, biologist Norman Myers coined the term “biodiversity hotspot” to describe biogeographic regions characterized by both high levels of plant endemism and serious levels of habitat loss. The international nongovern- mental organization (NGO) Conservation International adopted this con- ceptual scheme almost immediately, undertaking a global review in 1996 that identified twenty-five such hotspots and added quantitative thresholds for their designation (Conservation International ). 1 This organization’s definition specified that biodiversity hotspots must contain at least 1,500 species of endemic vascular plants and have lost at least 70 percent of their original habitat. Among these hotspots is the Western Ghat region of south- ern India, a chain of elevated lands running along the southwest coast of the peninsula. The hotspot label, which has been widely used, is thus not a simple marker of biodiversity, as might first be imagined; it also encodes ar- guments both about the “original” state of specific environments and about ongoing threats to them. While we would certainly not argue against the need for environmental protection and conservation, it is worth looking a lile more closely at the problematic way in which humans figure into a concept like that of the biodiversity hotspot, a concept that resonates pow- erfully with both scholarly and popular traditions concerning both forests themselves as well as the forest peoples of southern India. By most estimates, the “pristine” or primary forests of peninsular India are severely restricted in extent. The Greenpeace World Intact Forest Landscapes study (Potapov et al. 2008) classifies India’s forest zone as 19 percent of the national land area, a figure similar to the Forest Survey of India’s 19.4 per- cent estimate. Of that, however, Greenpeace labels only 5.8 percent as intact. Chaturvedi (1992), similarly, defines 45 percent of Indian forests as secondary, a definition that would include all of the dry deciduous forests of the interior. Conversely, much of the forest considered to be “intact” lies within the Ghats where, as we will see, some woodlands may have appeared only recently. In this chapter, we make the case that the upland forests of the Ghats, no less 11  Constructing Nature: Socio-Natural Histories of an Indian Forest kathleen d. morrison and mark t. lycett You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.