ABSTRACT
Pema Ram Divasi, a gray-haired man in his fifties, stands dressed in a distinctively coiled red turban and white dhoti (lower garment) and stares in frustration at the encroaching mesquite trees that blanket the land in front of him. Until recently the land had been useful forest pasture, but now because of the invading plant, the useful grasses and trees are all gone. “That is not a true forest,” he says. “A forest has dhav trees, kair trees, and palas. This place has no name” (from an interview, November 1999). For Pema Ram, like other members of the Raika community, this transformation of the landscape is devastating, and may make impossible the adaptive life they have lived for centuries in the desert regions of northwest India.
