About Kamaljit S. Bawa
Kamaljit S. Bawa is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Founder-President of the Bangalore-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). He has published more than 200 scientific papers and ten authored or edited books and monographs. He is a recipient of the Gunnerus Prize in Sustainability Science, the MIDORI international Prize in Biodiversity, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His latest book, Himalaya: Mountains of Life, a sequel to Sahyadris: India’s Western Ghats, was published in 2013.
Since the nineteenth century, ecology has been defined as the study of the functional interrelationships of living organisms, played out on the stage of their inanimate surroundings. Ecology has developed through an ongoing dialogue between two distinct ways of seeing the world. We might call these “synthetic” and “analytic” tendencies. Throughout the history of ecology, they have competed for attention, at times replacing one another sequentially, at others coexisting uneasily.