The Chipko Movement, also called Chipko Andolan, was a nonviolent social and ecological movement by rural villagers—particularly women— that started in India in the 1970s, and aimed at the protection and conservation of trees and forests from government-backed logging. The movement is best remembered for the collective mobilization of women for the cause of preserving forests, which also brought about a change in attitude regarding women's own status in Indian society. The name of the movement, “Chipko”, comes from the Hindi word for “cling” or “embrace”, as the villagers’ primary protest tactic was hugging and encircling the trees to prevent loggers from felling them.
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The Chipko Movement was prompted by the rapid deforestation that overtook India in the 1960s, due to urbanization and infrastructural development that attracted many foreign logging companies. The uprising started in the state of Uttar Pradesh, then spread onto other states in Northern India. Women, who were solely in charge of cultivation, livestock and children, suffered the most due to the floods and landslides caused by the rise in deforestation.
The movement began in 1973 when women from Mandal village in the Himalayas “hugged” the trees on their land, when loggers came to cut them down. The women, led by Gaura Devi, surrounded the trees and chanted: “This forest is our mother’s home; we will protect it with all our might”.“If the forest is cut”, they said, “landslides and soil erosion will bring floods, which will destroy our fields and homes, our water sources will dry up, the benefits we get from the forest will be gone”. Despite threats and abuse, the women stood firm until the contractors left four days later.
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Chipko grew into a peasant and women’s movement for forest rights, with largely decentralized and autonomous protests. In addition to the characteristic “tree hugging” tactic, Chipko protesters used several other techniques grounded in Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha—nonviolent resistance. For example, Sunderlal Bahuguna, a prominent leader of the movement who spent his life educating villagers to protest against the destruction of the forests, famously fasted for two weeks in 1974 to protest forest policy. In 1978, in the Advani forest in the Tehri Garhwal district, Chipko activist Dhoom Singh Negi fasted to protest the auctioning of the forest, while local women tied sacred threads around the trees and read from the Bhagavad Gita. In other areas, chir pines that had been tapped for resin were bandaged to protest their exploitation. In Pulna village in the Bhyundar valley in 1978, the women confiscated the loggers’ tools and left receipts for them to be claimed if they withdrew from the forest. It is estimated that between 1972 and 1979, more than 150 villages were involved in the Chipko movement, resulting in 12 major protests and many minor confrontations in Uttarakhand.
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The media generated by the Chipko Movement put the notion of saving forests on the political and public agenda of India. In 1980, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a 15-year ban on cutting trees 1,000 meters above sea level in the Himalayan forests. She believed that the Chipko Movement represented India’s “moral conscience”. This decree was later extended to the forests of India’s Western Ghat and the Vidhya mountain ranges.
The movement was inspired by earlier protests against tree felling in India. In 1731, in Khejarli, Rajasthan, people sacrificed their lives for the Khejri trees which were sacred to the community. The tragic events started when Amrita Devi of the Bishnois faith, which prohibits tree felling, protested against a royal party who intended to burn trees to build a new palace. Amrita tried to stop them by hugging a tree, saying “If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it’s worth it”, but was killed for her act of bravery. More people then stood up to protect the trees, resulting in the killing of 363 people, before the royal party ordered the felling of trees to be stopped.
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As the Chipko Movement kept growing throughout the 1970s, protests became more project-oriented and expanded to include the entire ecology of the region, ultimately becoming the “Save Himalaya” movement. Between 1981 and 1983, Sunderlal Bahuguna marched 5,000 km across the Himalayas to bring awareness to the movement. Throughout the 1980s, many protests were focused on the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi River and several mining operations, resulting in the closure of at least one limestone quarry. Similarly, a massive reforestation effort led to the planting of more than one million trees in the region. In 2004, Chipko protests resumed in response to the lifting of the logging ban in Himachal Pradesh but were unsuccessful in its reenactment.
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Today, beyond its eco-social dimension, the Chipko movement is seen increasingly as an ecofeminism movement. Although many of its leaders were men, women were the nucleus of the movement, and the ones most affected by the rampant deforestation, which led to a lack of firewood, fodder, and water for drinking and irrigation. Over the years, women also became primary stakeholders in the afforestation work that happened under the Chipko movement. In 1987, the movement was awarded the Right Livelihood Award “for its dedication to the conservation, restoration and ecologically-sound use of India's natural resources”.
The Chipko movement’s appeal was wide-ranging. The movement was co-opted and popularized by global journalists, grassroots activists, environmentalists, Gandhians, spiritual leaders, politicians, social change practitioners, and feminists. The feminist movement popularized Chipko, pointing out that poor rural women were the frontline victims of forest destruction. The Gandhians accentuated the Chipko movement through symbolic protests such as prayers, fasting, and padayatras (ritual marches).
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On its doodle blog in commemorating the 45th anniversary of the movement, Google wrote, “The Chipko Andolan also stands out as an eco-feminist movement. Women formed the nucleus of the movement, as the group most directly affected by the lack of firewood and drinking water caused by deforestation. The movement demonstrated the power of non-violent protest is an invaluable and powerful agent of social change.”
The Chipko Movement is remembered till this day not only as the people’s struggle against big businesses and the government machinery but also as a reminder that when it comes to allies, women have always protected Mother Nature.
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The Chipko movement is considered one of the first instances of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism, also called ecological feminism, is a branch of feminism that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women. It emerged in the mid-1970s alongside second-wave feminism and the green movement. Its name was coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974. As an academic and activist movement, ecofeminism uses the basic feminist tenets of equality between genders, a revaluing of non-patriarchal or nonlinear structures, and a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections, and the merits of intuition and collaboration.
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To these notions, ecofeminism adds both a commitment to the environment and an awareness of the associations made between women and nature. Specifically, this philosophy emphasizes the ways both nature and women are treated by patriarchal (or male-centered) society. Ecofeminists examine the effect of gender categories in order to demonstrate the ways in which social norms exert unjust dominance over women and nature. The philosophy also contends that those norms lead to an incomplete view of the world, and its practitioners advocate an alternative worldview that values the earth as sacred, recognizes humanity’s dependency on the natural world, and embraces all life as valuable.
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In Feminism & Ecology, Mary Mellor writes that ecofeminism brings together elements of the feminist and green movements, while at the same time offering a challenge to both. It takes from the green movement a concern about the impact of human activities on the non-human world, and from feminism the view of humanity as gendered in ways that subordinate, exploit and oppress women. According to feminist scholar and theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, “women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this [modern industrial] society.”
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Here, you will find simple earth-based and nature-oriented practices, prompts and rituals inspired by The Chipko Movement, that will help you connect with nature.
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“When we look deeply at a flower, we can see that it is made entirely of non-flower elements, like sunshine, rain, soil, compost, air, and time. If we continue to look deeply, we will also notice that the flower is on her way to becoming compost. If we don’t notice this, we will be shocked when the flower begins to decompose. When we look deeply at the compost, we see that it is also on its way to becoming flowers, and we realize that flowers and compost “inter-are.” They need each other. A good organic gardener does not discriminate against compost, because he knows how to transform it into marigolds, roses, and many other kinds of flowers.
When we look deeply into ourselves, we see both flowers and garbage. Each of us has anger, hatred, depression, racial discrimination, and many other kinds of garbage in us, but there is no need for us to be afraid. In the way that a gardener knows how to transform compost into flowers, we can learn the art of transforming anger, depression, and racial discrimination into love and understanding. This is the work of meditation.”
Practice by Thich Nhat Hanh
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In solitary practice, begin by sitting or standing erect, and breathing deeply and rhythmically. As you breathe and as your spine straightens, imagine that your spine is the trunk of a tree. And from its base, roots extend deep into the center of the Earth. And you can draw up power from the Earth, with each breath. Feel the energy rising like sap rising through a tree trunk. Feel the power rise up your spine, feel yourself becoming more alive with each breath.
From the crown of your head, you have branches that sweep up and back down to touch the Earth. Feel the power burst from the crown of your head, and feel it sweep through the branches until it touches the Earth again, making a circle, returning to its source.
If you do this exercise in a group: Breathing deeply, feel your branches intertwining, and the power weaving through them, and dancing among them, like the wind.
Meditation from The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
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Dive deeper into the history of the Chipko Movement, ecofeminism, environmental activism, and the wisdom of trees and the forests, with these resources including books and documentaries.
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✎ Book
‘The Chipko Movement: A People's History’
by Shekhar Pathak -
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‘The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya’
by Ramachandra Guha -
✎ Book
‘Of Myth and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History’
by Haripriya Rangan -
✎ Book
‘Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development’
by Vandana Shiva -
✎ Book
‘Ecofeminism’
by Vandana Shiva & Maria Mies -
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‘Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth’
by Carol J. Adams & Lori Gruen (Ed.) -
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‘Ecology Is Permanent Economy: The Activism and Environmental Philosophy of Sunderlal Bahuguna’
by George Alfred James -
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‘Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism’
by Irene Diamond -
✎ Book
‘Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her’
by Susan Griffin -
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‘Like a Tree: How Trees, Women, and Tree People Can Save the Planet’
by Jean Shinoda Bolen -
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‘The Hidden Life Of Trees’
by P. Wohlleben -
✎ Book
‘Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature’
by Karen J. Warren (Ed.) -
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‘Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest’
by Suzanne Simard -
✻ Illustrated Book
‘The Architecture of Trees’
by Cesare Leonardi & Franca Stagi -
✷ Documentary
‘On the Fence: Chipko Movement Revisited’
by Pramod Mathur
Sources:
When Women Lead: Looking Back At The Chipko Movement (inbreakthrough.org)
Chipko Movement | Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology
Chipko: A case study in civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action
Standing up for trees: Women's role in the Chipko Movement
What is the Chipko movement? | Indian Express
The Chipko Movement: The Women who Hugged Trees | Tottenham Trees