[Opinion] For 27 Years, These Ecologists Guarded a Nilgiris Forest by Removing What Was Killing It

For 27 Years, These Ecologists Guarded a Nilgiris Forest by Removing What Was Killing It

What’s the best way to conserve a forest?  In the opinion of KJ Raju, 75, a retired mathematics professor, referring to the Longwood Shola forest (a 116-hectare reserve forest on the northern edge of Kotagiri in the Nilgiris) that he and a handful of other ecologists have been attempting to protect for the last 27 years, you should simply leave it alone.  Well, don’t completely desert it, Raju clarifies.  A forest, he says, needs two things: pro…