For survival of life on Earth, we need to find more sustainable relationship between world's forest and human life. It is important to understand how different meanings of forest may help this or relate to it.

This publication presents articles on different meanings of forest in India from writers, whose work and vision we see to promote survival of such human life which is an integral and sustainable part of indigenous forest life. With over 90 million indigenous tribal people, India has world's largest indigenous population, most of whom have until recently been living in a relatively sustainable way in the wild forests or closely connected to them.

The way indigenous forest dwellers of India see and experience the life and its changes in the wilds where they live, deserves a place in a wider global dialogue. We need to understand better how different meanings of wild forest can help human life to minimally displace Earth's own, indigenous growth of trees, plants and all life.

In this publication forest is discussed mostly from the perspectives of the people who see it as their inalienable home. The reader is brought into the world of India's indigenous tribal people, mostly called 'Adivasis', 'people who live without beginning' in the areas they inhabit. Adivasis have lived from time immemorial integral to wild forests, using them as a source of life. Local life of Adivasis has thus been well adapted to sustain these areas, which are however now taken away from their sustainable use - to be treated and governed as what is nowadays officially meant by 'forests'.

The wilderness of these areas has started to degrade rapidly after becoming governed as 'forest' in the modern literal sense. This meaning of forest, authorised by the modern law, science and governance, displaces the local indigenous life and meanings from sustaining the wilds, which have survived best in Adivasi areas:

Already around 30 million indigenous inhabitants have been displaced and 40 % destruction of the natural 'primary' forest has followed in India, as the tribal. areas have been taken to be governed as 'forests' under the modern rules and meanings. To defend this unjust destruction, the Government and its arms like the Forest Department have been consistently pointing at the rows of teak or Acacia plantations calling and counting them as the woods, while the real wilderness is fast shrinking. Recognising the need to correct this ”historical injustice” of displacing Adivasis from their ancestral forests, India made in 2006 a new Forest Rights Act (FRA). The Forest Rights Act decrees the authority of traditional forest communities to initiate the determination of their rights to use and protect the wild forests as their home areas compliant to their traditional law and culture. This is to follow also the constitutional amendment on self-rule of tribal communities, the PESA Act 1996.

But to implement duly such indigenous rights of forest life of the communities and of the wild forests, the modern world would need to understand and respect meanings of the life that has adapted to wild forests through millenniums.Now the actual meanings of wild forests for the life which has lived and sustained them, have however become superseded and misinterpreted by modern concepts. These have reduced forests into a mere resource, manageable by bio-geological, technical and administrative means for commercial life and consumption of the urbanites.