Amba Jamir
Senior Policy Analyst & Development Strategist
A global alarm was sounded this week. On February 5, 2026, The Guardian in the article “Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn” published a stark warning from climate scientists and economists: the mathematical models governing our world are fundamentally broken. These models - the “faulty radars” of our modern financial systems - largely ignore the “cascading failures” and “compounding shocks” of the climate crisis. While mainstream economists predict a manageable dip in GDP, physical scientists warn that the global economy could “cease to function as we know it” because, as the experts put it, “we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks.”
For those of us in Nagaland, this isn't just a distant news story. It is a mirror reflecting a dangerous local trend. While the global north fears a financial crash, Nagaland is quietly experiencing a “Resilience Crash.” We are in the midst of a “Great Decoupling” - where we are severing our ties to the land in favour of a modern economic promise that the world’s leading experts are now admitting is a house of cards.
The 70+ Year Campaigns Against the Fire
For over seven decades, sustained campaigns of the state, its agencies, and even academia has vilified our traditional land-use systems. Shifting cultivation (Jhum) and our intricate fallow and resource management systems have been dismissed as primitive, unscientific, and environmentally destructive.
Such campaigns are finally “bearing fruit” - but it is a harvest of bitterness. Across Nagaland, we see a worrying trend:
• The Idle Lands: Vast tracts of traditionally managed community land, once kept fertile through the sophisticated fallow cycle, now lie unmanaged and under-utilized. In our traditional systems, these lands were never truly “wild.” They were ably managed and governed through the sophisticated management of fallow forests and maintenance of the jhum lands. This cycle was a biological clock that ensured the soil stayed fertile, but it was also a social contract. It mandated when to clear, when to plant, and when to let the land rest. It was a rhythmic exercise of community authority and environmental stewardship.
Today, as shifting cultivation declines, this rhythmic management is disappearing. When land lies “unmanaged and unutilized,” it is not just the soil that suffers - it is our institutional sovereignty. Land that is not actively governed by the community becomes commodified and vulnerable to encroachment, legal disputes, and external exploitation. In a world where food security is becoming a global crisis, leaving managed lands to fall into disuse, or abandoning food production for other landuse, is an economic failure. These lands are our primary assets. By abandoning their management, we are essentially “closing the bank” that has sustained us for centuries.
• The “Hobby Farm” Fallacy: Among the relatively well-off, there is a growing trend toward establishing individual farms and plantations. Some of these ventures exist on purchased lands; however, many are technically situated on “community land.” These holdings are becoming increasingly bifurcated and “fenced off” from the very community that has stewarded such lands for generations. This creates a dangerous precedent: the physical and legal exclusion of the collective from its own resource base.
This “fencing off” is more than physical; it is an emotional and social decoupling. It creates a situation where the community - the historical custodians of the resource - is now excluded from its own land. There is rarely a mechanism for benefit-sharing, and as these lands are converted into individual plantations (or monocultures), we lose the diverse, “mixed-crop” safety net that has always been our best defence against climate volatility.
• The Loss of the Commons: The erosion of the “Commons” in Nagaland - our community-managed lands - is more than a shift in tenure; it is a liquidation of our historical social and environmental insurance policy. Traditionally, these lands functioned as a collective safety net, managed through multi-cropped systems that guaranteed a baseline of resource security for every member of the village. By allowing these lands to be bifurcated for individual “experiments,” we are essentially trading this proven collective security for private gambles that, in many cases, have yet to “see the light of day” economically. These ventures often driven by government subsidies and schemes, focus on single-commodity monocultures aimed at external market systems that are economically fragile.
Unlike the traditional mixed-cropping system, which has been “market-tested” by generations of environmental shocks, these individual ventures often act as a high-risk swap: if a private plantation fails, the individual loses their investment, but the community has already lost its access to and governance of that land. This creates a double loss: we sacrifice the institutional oversight necessary for environmental security and water management, while simultaneously destroying our local “bailout” mechanism at the exact moment - as The Guardian warns -that the global economy is becoming most unreliable. We are trading a system of interdependence, the bedrock of Naga resilience, for a fragile independence that is proving to be both economically invisible and ecologically vulnerable.
The Erosion of the Map and the Soul
The decline of these systems is not just an agricultural shift; it is a psychological and territorial one. The traditional jhum cycle was the heartbeat of our territorial literacy in many Naga communities. Because the cycle required the regular rotation and management of land, every generation was physically tethered to the village's boundaries.
Today, that cycle is breaking. As we abandon jhum and its fallow management, the younger generation is losing its “map.” Many youth today do not know the whereabouts or the boundaries of their own village territory. They have become emotionally detached. When a people lose their emotional connection to the land, that land ceases to be a source of life and becomes a mere commodity. It becomes land that can be abused, violated, and destroyed without a second thought. We are not far from a situation where our youth feel like strangers in their own ancestral homes, a generation that is, quite literally, “neither here nor there.”
Passing the Fire: A Mahlerian Perspective
In this crisis of identity and land, we should reflect on the words of the Austro-Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler:
“Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche.” (Tradition is the passing of the fire, not the worship of the ashes.)
To be sensible and informed in 2026 does not mean we should “worship the ashes” by demanding our youth live exactly as our ancestors did in 1900. That would be a rigid, frozen adherence to the past.
However, we must “pass the fire.” The “fire” is the spirit of our land-use: the resilience of our food production systems, our resource management practices, the wisdom of community conservation, our heritage seeds, our knowledge systems, our social capital and safety net systems, or the decentralized governance of resources. This “fire” is exactly what the Guardian article suggests the global economy is missing: a system built to survive shocks.
The Aspiration Gap: Youth in the Global Limbo
Our youth are naturally and rightfully looking toward service-oriented careers and urban opportunities, seeking to participate in the “modern” global economy. This is an understandable pursuit of growth and new horizons. However, the reality of the 2026 global economy - as highlighted by the Guardian - is one of increasing volatility.
Many of our young people find themselves in a precarious limbo: neither grounded in ancestral self-reliance nor fully absorbed by a stable modern economy. They are moving toward a service sector that is highly susceptible to the “cascading failures” of global markets, while simultaneously losing the ancestral “territorial literacy” and land-management skills that have always been our people’s ultimate fallback. This is not a critique of their choices, but a warning about their vulnerability. Both society and the state must take this up as an urgent challenge. We must ensure that our youth are not forced to choose between “the past” and “the future,” but are instead equipped with local, innovative, and win-win solutions that allow them to be modern professionals and facing the challenges with solutions that are:
• Local: Grounded firmly in our specific hill ecology and our unique community tenure systems.
• Innovative: Using modern technology to reduce the physical drudgery of traditional farming without losing the “multi-crop” diversity that acts as our natural insurance.
• Win-Win: Creating pathways where youth can manage the land as entrepreneurs while maintaining the community safety net through benefit-sharing mechanisms.
• Ecosystem-based Solutions (EbS): We must view EbS not just as an “environmental option,” but as a lucrative entrepreneurial frontier. Managing a healthy ecosystem provides services, water security, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity, that have immense value in a world where these resources are crashing. Our youth can be the professional stewards of these “natural assets.”
Closing: The Survival of the Sensible
We must not abandon our traditional agricultural resources and practices out of a misplaced, emotional rush toward “modernity.” We must keep them because they offer the best adaptation and resilience opportunities in the face of a climate crisis that is already here.
In the Guardian article, experts warned that we “cannot bail out the Earth like we did the banks.” Current economic models are failing because they ignore the physical reality of our planet. In Nagaland, our “bank” is our land, and our “capital” is our social systems and our traditional knowledge of how to live within it.
We must be informed enough to realize that resilience is the only true currency of the future. By reclaiming our managed fallows and re-engaging our youth with the land, we are not going backward; we are building an “adaptation shield” against a global system that is currently heading toward a crash. We must ensure that our youth know their boundaries, walk their land, and carry the fire of our ancestors into the uncertain era of climate change.
If we choose to be sensible, our land will not just be our history - it will be our survival.
