SECTION A
Essay
125 marks
Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.
WRITE IN
90 min
1,000–1,200 words
Reading the topic
The topic says that civilisations grow where forests provide water, soil and resources, and that when they over-exploit those forests they leave degraded land and deserts behind. The examiner expects the essay to use history and ecology to show this cycle, apply it to India's land degradation and urbanisation, and ask whether modern civilisation can break it.
ThesisCivilisations have repeatedly consumed the forests that made them possible, and modern societies survive only if they treat ecological capital as the foundation, not the fuel, of development.
Dimensions to cover
- 1History: early settlements arose in forested river valleys, and several declined as deforestation eroded soil and water
- 2Ecology: forests regulate rainfall, groundwater and soil fertility, so their loss turns fertile land into degraded land
- 3Economy: short-term gains from timber, mining and farming expansion create long-term costs of erosion and drought
- 4India: land degradation and desertification affect large parts of the country, threatening farming and livelihoods
- 5Communities: forest-dwelling communities have often protected forests better than distant states and markets
- 6Hope: restoration projects show that the direction can be reversed when policy and people act together
Counter-view
- Some argue that modern technology, irrigation and trade free civilisations from dependence on local forests. The essay should answer that technology has delayed rather than removed this dependence, as climate change and groundwater depletion now show at a global scale
Open and close
- Open: Open with an image of Easter Island's giant stone statues standing on a bare, treeless landscape that once held dense palm forest
- Close: Conclude that the next chapter of civilisation must reverse the old sequence, so that forests follow civilisation instead of deserts
Where marks usually go
- Writing a GS-3 note on forest cover statistics without the historical sweep the topic invites
- Treating the line as a fixed law of history and ignoring successful restoration
- Limiting 'desert' to sand and missing degraded farmland, dead rivers and urban heat islands
Examples that fit
- HistoryJared Diamond argues that Easter Island's society declined after its forests were cleared, leaving islanders without timber for canoes and with eroded soil.Collapse (2005), Jared Diamond
- HistoryIn the 1930s, ploughing up native grasslands on the American plains combined with drought to create the Dust Bowl, turning farms into blowing dust.The Worst Hard Time (2006), Timothy Egan
- DataIndia's forest and tree cover was 25.17% of its geographical area, still short of the national goal of one-third set in forest policy.India State of Forest Report 2023, Forest Survey of India; National Forest Policy 1988
- HistoryThe Chipko movement that began in the Uttarakhand hills in 1973 saw villagers, many of them women, hug trees to stop commercial felling.Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods (1989)
- CurrentThe Aravalli Green Wall Project aims to restore degraded land along the Aravalli range to check the eastward spread of the Thar desert.Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Aravalli Green Wall Project (2023)