Kerala State Higher Education Council (KSHEC) vice-chairperson and noted historian Rajan Gurukkal has called for a fundamental rethinking of environmental history through a scientific framework rooted in thermodynamics and ecological carrying capacity.
He was delivering a lecture on the premodern environmental history of Kerala at the inaugural session of the ‘Anthropocene’ lecture series, jointly organised by the Forest department, Kerala Council for Historical Research, Mahatma Gandhi University, Periyar Tiger Reserve and Kerala Forest Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday.
Prof. Gurukkal argued that the prevailing historical interpretations are often shaped by “sentiments, stereotypes and political economic interpretations”, which fail to capture the core material relationship between human societies and nature. Environmental history, he pointed out, needs to be anchored instead in the principles that govern energy use and waste generation.
Placing thermodynamics at the centre of historical analysis, the historian said that all natural and social processes are fundamentally energy-driven. “While energy can neither be created nor destroyed, every transformation of energy produces non-usable by-products, leading to the gradual increase of systemic disorder or entropy,” Prof. Gurukkal said.
He opined that the central ecological challenge is not energy use itself, but the mounting volume of non-usable energy that nature must absorb. Sustainability, therefore, depends on limiting the production of such waste. Environmental history should examine how shifting cultural practices and techno-economic systems have influenced nature’s ability to absorb these by-products, the academic said.
According to him, a thermodynamic framework offers a fresh and more objective method for writing environmental history, one that prioritises energy transformation, waste accumulation and ecological limits. “While pre-modern Kerala witnessed the first signs of ecological strain, the true ecological overshoot began only with the advent of modern industrial development,” Prof. Gurukkal observed.
Head of Forest Force Rajesh Ravindran inaugurated the programme.
Published – December 03, 2025 09:01 pm IST
