- Ethnobotanist and activist Pavel Partha says Bangladesh’s environmental policies overlook the critical relationship between plants and humans; despite an emphasis on conservation, there is no ecological justice.
- Partha says development decisions should account for both ecological and social impacts, arguing that the two are inseparable.
- He also warns that ongoing environmental destruction erases languages, cultural practices and traditional ecological knowledge alongside ecosystems.
- Partha spoke with Mongabay about his activism and how scientific research can support Indigenous communities facing environmental destruction.
Pavel Partha and I first crossed paths almost two years ago at a 2024 sit-in protest against the destruction of Panthakunja Park in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital. In a makeshift tent that housed a few activists, his eccentricity stood out as the researcher made a detailed list of the plants, birds and species affected by the felling of trees. When I asked him why such documentation was necessary for a protest, he said the plants, trees and species that make up the ecosystem deserve recognition and justice too.
Partha is a trained botanist. For almost two decades, he has researched Bangladesh’s plant diversity alongside the knowledge of Indigenous and local communities through ethnobotanical research (the study of human-plant relationships). But he is just as likely to be found at a protest advocating for the rights of Indigenous communities and the systems they depend on. He is currently the director of the Bangladesh Resource Center for Indigenous Knowledge (BARCIK), where he has worked since 2003, and continues his research.
In this interview with Mongabay, Partha reflects on his philosophies of research and activism, shares why ecological justice matters and expounds on how scientific research can support Indigenous communities facing environmental destruction. This interview has been edited for length and clarity and has been translated from Bangla.
Mongabay: Where does this begin for you? Can you tell me about the moment that first made you feel like the natural world was something worth fighting for?
Pavel Partha: My grandmother taught me that all human beings are part of this planet. I grew up hearing the term Dharitri Ma, which means Mother Earth [in Bangla]. That idea was very significant to me as a child. When I was admitted to the Botany Department at Jahangirnagar University, I was interested in the environment and I read many books, but I did not yet have a clear ecological perspective. While I was studying at the university, I was already traveling to many places, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts, forests, tea gardens, rivers and the coast. I spent time with Indigenous communities, local communities, farmers and fishers. I started simply as a nature lover, but one who felt a sense of responsibility.
Later, when I began spending time with local and Indigenous communities, they helped give structure to my ecological thinking. Before that, I had been influenced by different schools of thought within the environmental movement and I worked from a humanist approach or a biocentric one. But the more I learned from Indigenous and local communities, from their traditional knowledge and their relationship with the Earth and ecology, the more I moved toward an ecocentric worldview.
Mongabay: You eventually went to Jahangirnagar University to study botany and conducted what became one of the earliest ethnobotanical surveys in Bangladesh. What pulled you toward that intersection of science and people?
Pavel Partha: By the time I reached university, I had already begun to understand the discrimination embedded in our knowledge systems; how Indigenous and local practices are often ignored and how, in the name of research, they are sometimes appropriated through what can be described as biopiracy. I gradually came to rely on Indigenous traditional knowledge and wisdom, and I began to question the idea that science can be divided into binaries such as academic or institutional. Science is science.
When I started my ethnobotanical research across 14 different communities in Bangladesh, I worked closely with these communities and learned directly from them. Their ethnobotanical and ethnoecological knowledge is itself a rigorous science.
Let me give one example. During my ethnobotanical study in Moulvibazar, in a Khasi [ethnic group] settlement located within a significant rainforest region of Bangladesh, I learned from a Khasi traditional healer who showed me many plants. Some of these species, when viewed through academic plant taxonomy and identification, appear quite ordinary. But to me, their practices felt both authentic and scientifically grounded.
For instance, Niang-sowath [a plant from the Araceae family used by the Indigenous community], I first recorded its ethnobotanical relationship with the [Khasi] community in my master’s thesis [the community uses it to treat boils and scabies]. What I observed is that Indigenous communities do not only understand plants in terms of their uses. They also understand the habitats in which they grow, the animals and birds associated with them and the broader ecological relationships that sustain life. This ethnoecological worldview is in many ways more holistic and scientific. Many practices in their communities, such as how they protect sacred groves, have also contributed to the conservation of critical biodiversity. These ideas and knowledge systems are extremely important for us to recognize and learn from.
Mongabay: During your university years, you became involved in several movements and environmental struggles. Was there a moment when you realized that documenting communities was not enough and that you also needed to advocate alongside them?
Pavel Partha: When I was a university student, the Bangladeshi government started an eco-park project at Madhabkunda Waterfall in Moulvibazar. Around 1999, 2000 and 2001, they proposed an eco-park covering a significant area that belonged to the Khasi Indigenous community, the tea-garden Indigenous community and also a sacred place for Bangladeshi Hindus. When the Khasi community began protesting the project, I became involved in the anti-eco park movement. I learned a great deal from the Khasi community.
After that, I became involved in other movements and protests, including the Bibiyana Long March [a protest against the export of gas from Bibiyana Gas Field] and the Phulbari Anti-Coal Mining Movement. Through these people’s movements, I realized it was important not only to participate but also to document them [movements]. At the same time, I realized that the communities’ own learning and explanations of ecology had never really been documented. I tried to understand these people’s movements, and I observed that when mainstream society looked at them, the communities’ own involvement and perspectives were often overlooked. It was as if these were simply movements to save a river or protect a pond. Their critical relationship with the natural ecosystem, and the spiritual, economic and social dimensions of that relationship, were rarely recognized. That is why I became involved in this work in this way.
Mongabay: Throughout your work, you’ve argued that ecological justice should be central to decision-making. Yet in Bangladesh, development and conservation are often treated as separate priorities. How has that shaped the country’s approach to environmental governance, and what would need to change to make ecological justice a reality?
Pavel Partha: The word for ecology in Bangla is protibesh. We get this idea from the word neighbor. We call our neighbors protibeshi. This idea of protibesh as ecology, I learned from the word neighbor, protibeshi, and this neighbor is not only human beings but also plants, birds, fish and all living organisms, everything that we see and do not see. But this idea is not reflected in our policies. Instead, we talk about forest conservation, river conservation, environmental conservation, but we are not really reading the relationship; we are ignoring it.
Because of this, in mainstream environmental governance in Bangladesh, we often see policies that do not fully understand ecological relationships. An environmental impact assessment is done, and sometimes ecological impacts are mentioned, but social impact assessments are never done, even though ecological and social impacts are deeply interconnected. As a result, we see interventions like building large roads over wetlands such as Chalan Beel.
In the name of conservation, we create botanical gardens or safari parks or sometimes zoos, but these are not ecological solutions. I think the core issue is that our state and policy framework is highly anthropocentric. It places the human being at the center and imagines development from that position. But we need to think in a non-anthropocentric way, through ecological relationships and ecological justice. If we read Bangladesh’s laws and policies carefully, we can see this gap clearly. The state does not yet have a holistic approach to environment, ecology and nature. For example, in water policy, forest policy and environmental policy, it is said that agrochemicals are harmful for us, but at the same time other economic and business policies continue to promote agrochemicals.
Mongabay: You’ve spent decades traveling through forests, villages, tea gardens and Indigenous territories. What have you watched disappear in your lifetime?
Pavel Partha: I wrote many articles arguing that, for example, if we lose our birds, we also lose our vocabulary. It also affects our linguistics. I have seen that in 1997, when the American Occidental company had a [gas] blowout in our Sreemangal Magurchhara, a lot of plants, animals, wild mushrooms and medicinal plants were destroyed. That area is [inhabited by] the the Khasi and Tripura Indigenous communities. In the Tripura community, there is a plant they call Kuthui-rogni-khlum [Ixora arborea]; this plant has white flowers. They believe that when someone dies, the soul of the deceased is guided by the flower of this plant on its path to heaven. After this accident, many plants did not survive; among them Kuthui-rogni-khlum is no longer there. The new generation actually does not know the names, and these practices are not there anymore; the belief has changed. Because of my work, I have seen that a lot of fish, rice varieties and plants have already disappeared. Because of this, the community’s identity and knowledge are also disappearing. I have also seen that in the name of extraction in places like Sherpur, Jamalpur, Netrokona and other areas, Indigenous communities have been displaced, and their Indigenous knowledge has been forced to change. I have documented a lot of their knowledge, but it is no longer practiced by the community anymore because the plants and animals are simply not in those territories. I call this noneconomic loss and damage; we are also losing intangible cultural heritage.
Mongabay: In the face of so much loss, how do you keep yourself from becoming cynical as a researcher and activist?
Pavel Partha: I have witnessed displacement, environmental destruction, ecological crises and currently the accelerating climate crisis. At the same time, I have also learned from people and communities who experienced displacement and destruction before I was born. They told me about the Kaptai Hydroelectric Project in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It didn’t just displace the Chakma community, it also displaced natural resources. Trees, ferns, mosses, wild animals and traditional jhum rice were also lost.
Discrimination, wars, the arms industry and power politics continue to shape environmental destruction. The neoliberal economic system treats human beings, together with plants, flora, fauna and all living beings, as commodities. Unless we break this paradigm, we cannot build another relationship with nature.
If by cynical you mean hopeless, then no, I am not cynical at all. I may not understand the language of trees, land or fish, but there are communities who do. Their resistance, spirit and knowledge give me hope. They give me the courage to keep writing and make my work more ecology-oriented and people-oriented.
Mongabay: Research often unfolds over years, while activism demands immediate action. Looking back on your decades of work with marginalized communities in Bangladesh, what gives you the greatest sense of progress? And what work remains unfinished?
Pavel Partha: I conduct ethnobotanical and ecological research through participatory action research. The people I work with are never my objects of research. We are all subjects, and I take ownership of their struggles. My book Biological Diversity of Madhupur Sal Forest was published just before the Madhupur Anti-Eco Park Movement, which began in 2004, and it became an important document in protesting the eco-park project because it documented the forest’s biodiversity and the community’s relationship with it.
I am always asking how my research could strengthen movements for ecological justice. We are fighting for ecological justice, but most people in Bangladesh are still not part of that movement because our schools, colleges and universities remain rooted in anthropocentric ideas. Our textbooks rarely reflect communities’ ecological relationships with nature.
Sometimes I write newspaper columns, sometimes research articles for academic journals, sometimes books, and sometimes I discuss my work with policymakers and communities. The trust I now receive from the communities I work with is the result of a long process; it doesn’t come from one-day practice, but there is still so much I want to research.
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Citation:
Partha, P., & Hossain, A. E. (2007). Ethnobotanical investigation into the Mandi ethnic community in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Journal of Plant Taxonomy, 14(2), 129-145. doi:10.3329/bjpt.v14i2.532