Recomposing an Urban Forest in Mumbai

Abstract

What happens to urban landscapes when a species disappears? This paper explores how an urban forest with a long legacy as sacred territory was recomposed – that is, imbued with new narratives of purpose, meaning and value – in the aftermath of the near-extinction of Gyps vultures across India. Its focus is the social processes that galvanised in response to catastrophic vulture loss, and emergent environmental alliances whose mission served to re-narrate an urban forest and the scale and scope of urban environmental stewardship. By attending to the social process of recomposition, the paper points to ethical, political and territorial claims through which social agents redefined and renarrated the form, content and value of nonhuman life in the city – dynamics constitutive of moral ecologies of urban landscape. I suggest that recomposition is fundamental to the coproduction of ecological change: as social groups realign their relationships to transforming urban environments, they also transform the contours of their own claims to territory, belonging and stewardship of the greater urban good. Through the dynamics of recomposition, the paper shows how human-non-human relations are remade in the face of fundamental ecological transformation, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Keywords

• moral ecology
• urban forests
• recomposition
• vultures
• urban ecology
• south asia