Subject(s): Ecology -- Human History -- Forest -- Theory of ecological history : Habitats in human history, production and modes of resources use, settled cultivation, industrial mode, intra modal conflict, recapitulation -- Towards a cultural ecology of pre-modern India : Forest and fire, river valley civilization, caste and conservation, eclectic belief system -- Ecological change and social conflict in modern India : Conquest and control, colonialism as an ecological watershed, forest, early environment debate, forest policy upto 1947, balance sheet of colonial forestry, fight for forest, problems of shifting cultivation, settled cultivators and state, case of Jaunsar Bawar, decline of artisanal industry, social idiom of protest, mechanisms of protest -- Biomass for business : two versions of progress- Gandhi and modernizers, forest and industrialization, balance sheet of industrial forestry, profligacy of scientific forestry -- Competing claims on commons : Changing ecology of settled agriculture, wildlife conservation