Ruth DeFries is a professor of ecology and sustainable development at Columbia University in New York City. But on most days, her heart is in India.
“I know that, in my generation, a lot of us came to the cause of conservation through Earth Day, and that was true for me, too,” says DeFries. “It shaped me in my teenage years. I think of us as ‘Earth Day adolescents.’ But for me, what absolutely increased my awareness about the environment a thousand-fold was living in India in my early 20s.”
DeFries spent three years in India, where her awareness of how people and nature are intertwined was awakened. “I saw how everything is so connected that you can’t think about the environment or nature without thinking about people,” she says. “In India, people rely on nature and everything nature provides so directly that you can’t deny it.”
Today, DeFries calls India a second home. Most of her research is centered there, but the implications of her work are global. Her students are studying bioacoustics—the sounds and frequencies that humans cannot hear— to learn more about diversity and species. And she is studying the impacts of India’s Green Revolution, a movement that began 40 years ago and encouraged farmers, through federal subsidies and other enticements, to grow high-yield rice and wheat instead of the variety of crops they had grown traditionally.
Her research shows that in just a few decades the Green Revolution has resulted in devastating environmental and social consequences. Growing high-yield crops places financial strains on farmers and strips the land. It demands tremendous quantities of water and yields an amount of greenhouse gas that is becoming untenable.
“The Green Revolution crowded out the traditional cereals that had been grown for centuries,” says DeFries. “I’m not saying the Green Revolution was all bad—in some ways it was very good because famines were eradicated and some farmers gained wealth. But there were also negative outcomes, and one of the major ones was the loss of diversity in the cropping systems.”
