When Mr Pranab Choudhury, founder of Landstack and a trained forester, spoke at the University of Minnesota, his aim wasn’t to showcase technical expertise or new climate models. Rather, it was to focus on something that’s just as important now as it has ever been: how communities relate to and care for their landscapes, situated in today’s environmental discourse.

 

“I started my career as a scientist with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research,” he began, “but most of what I’ll talk about today, I didn’t learn from universities.” This candid opening set the tone for a talk shaped as much by experience as by research. Pranab reflected on how Indigenous and local communities across India have long managed forests, through everyday practices rooted in care, observation, and custom.

 

He introduced the idea of community stewardship, defined as the coming together of care, knowledge, and agency. “Why do people protect forests they don’t own?” he asked. “Because they care.” It’s not always rational in the economic sense, but it is consistent and place-based. In several northeastern Indian villages, for example, youth can describe dozens of forest patches by name, use, and history, all knowledge that has been passed down as important and relevant, though often overlooked by conventional forestry.

 

Pranab was careful not to romanticize. “This kind of stewardship isn’t universal or static,” he noted. “In some places it’s fraying, especially where communities face economic pressures or where traditional systems have been displaced.” But he argued that where it still exists, it deserves recognition and support. “We know how much the state spends on forest management. But do we know how much communities contribute?”

 

His team’s work in India tries to bridge this gap through a set of tools that combine ecological assessments, household surveys, and participatory mapping. The idea is to make visible the care and labor that communities invest in their forests to ensure it’s not dismissed or undervalued in planning and policy. “We now have data,” he said, “on unpaid care labor in forestry. Men and women in some villages spend up to 23 days per hectare each year on forest management.”

 

Choudhury also raised concerns about the rapid rise of carbon markets. While acknowledging their intent, he warned that current practices often sideline the very communities they claim to involve. He shared an example of a village where residents had unknowingly signed away their carbon rights for a small share of revenue. “They didn’t know what carbon credits were,” he said. “They were just asked to sign.” The lack of clear, informed consent, especially in Indigenous areas, remains a major gap.

 

Pranab also pointed to examples of community-led approaches informing both conservation and climate action, provided the frameworks are respectful and adaptive. He mentioned efforts to connect local indicators – such as termite mound counts and bird sounds – with scientific monitoring, allowing both systems of knowledge to work together rather than in isolation.

 

One of the takeaways was simple but meaningful: care matters. As an emotional and cultural trait which lends itself better to how forests are managed, conserved, and regenerated. “Even if you don’t pay for it, at least recognize it,” he said. “But if you can, you should.”

 

The talk served a validation of indigenous people’s methods of forest management from someone who has been trained in different methods. It was also an invitation to rethink the role of communities as active and knowledgeable managers of their own landscapes. As Mr pranab Choudhury reminded the audience, “Science has to be human. And that means learning from those who have been doing this all along.”