The Chipko Movement Of North India
India’s hill forests are a critical resource, not only for the women who utilise them for gathering food, fuel and fodder but as a watershed, regulating water flow to the valleys below. However, commercial logging in the Garhwal Himilaya region led to landslides and disastrous floods.
In the 1970s, local resistance to forest destruction gathered pace in the form of the Chipko movement (‘Chipko’ means to hug). By 1974, hundreds of women from the Chamoli District in Uttar Pradesh had pledged to save the trees at the cost of their own lives if necessary. When the loggers arrived the women went into the forests and put their arms around the trees, telling the loggers that they would not be able to cut the trees before first killing them.
The contractors withdrew and the forest was saved. The Chipko movement spread and many villagers began to guard the forests, fast for them and hug the trees to prevent them being felled. When forest officers accused the women of being foolish, saying:
Do you not know what the forests bear? Resin, timber and foreign exchange”, the women replied. “What do the forests bear? Soil, water and pure air! Soil, water and pure air are the very bases of life!
Source: Adapted from Weber, T. (1989) Hugging the Trees, Penguin, Hammondsworth.
