Nitin Rai
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)
Bio
Nitin Rai is a Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, India. He is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to enable decentralized governance of biodiversity. His research incorporates ecological science, history of landscape transformation, cultural ecology and local knowledge. Such integration might challenge current narratives that view nature as static and human presence in forests as being inimical to biodiversity. These ideas are being explored in association with the indigenous Soliga community in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary, India.
About ATREE
ATREE's mission is to promote socially just environmental conservation and sustainable development by generating rigorous interdisciplinary knowledge that engages actively with academia, policy makers, practitioners, activists, students and wider public audiences.
ATREE's notion of socially just is grounded in the following values:
- that both material and non-material quality of life are important
- that this quality of life needs to be sustained across future generations as well as distributed equitably within current generations
- that the rights and needs of people also need to be balanced with those of all other life forms
- that societal decisions about socio-environmental issues must be taken in a democratic manner
- ATREE envisions a society committed to environmental conservation and sustainable and socially just development, in which ATREE plays the role of a model knowledge-generating organization for catalyzing the transition to such a society.
