This book brings together Madhav Gadgil’s best essays. They deal with many facets of the natural and human worlds, and how the two impinge on each other. Gadgil’s detailed studies of hunting and gathering communities have led him to controversially champion traditional methods of conserving nature. The merits of state-sponsored conservation initiatives are weighed up in his work, as is planned ‘development’. These essays stimulate and provoke us to think for ourselves about the natural world and our relationship with it, urging us to take a hand in shaping it.