ABSTRACT
Earthworms are the key to ‘living soil’-the subject of Darwin’s last research and book. Displacement of human communities is closely interwoven with a variety of assaults on the fabric of natural life known as the ecosystem. Mainstream economists have long described small-scale farmers, whose main focus is subsistence farming, as ‘uneconomic’. Coal mines have been another particularly controversial issue, with Jairam attempting to classify nine major coal blocks as ‘no-go areas’ due to the extensive forest above them. Communities and cultures are destroyed when villagers are removed from the land. Statistics on the Human Development Index do not necessarily capture either the drastic drop in people’s quality of life, or the extinction of cultures and communities. One of the most painful aspects of displacement is the delinking of people’s economy from an all-round embedding in ecology. Perhaps real development should be conceived in terms of restoring people to their villages, and an economy linked firmly to ecology.
