The Chipko legacy

Alienating people whose identities are linked to the forest and trees around them is not only unfair, but also short-sighted

The Chipko movement turns 50 this year. Celebrated as a poster-child of environmental activism, the movement that was born in the villages of Uttarakhand is today a well-thumbed case study for green crusaders all over the world. The success of the movement — the grassroots resistance that it built up, the legislative changes that it brought about — and the arresting visual imagery that it generated, where women hugged trees and stared down bulldozers and musclemen have also made it a popular modern-day David vs Goliath fable. But such a characterisation paints a distorted picture and tells just half the story.

Half a century after the moment of reckoning, the villages that led the protests are collapsing under a series of environmental crises. Unplanned construction, big infrastructure projects and reckless tourism have left many parts of the region uninhabitable, including Raini, the village that nurtured the movement.

Floods, recurring landslides and restrictions imposed upon the daily use of the forest resources have meant loss of livelihood and mass migration of the young. The region’s demographic profile is today fragile and vulnerable and likely to get worse. How did we get here?

The Chipko movement was radical, people-driven and successful. However, a whole new set of problems surfaced once the bulldozers moved out and the state stepped in. The forests were fenced off with laws, statutes and bureaucratic procedures from those who had risked their lives to save it.

In a recent interview, one of the women who was a part of the movement in 1973 and who still lives in Raini said that they did not know that they would have no control over the trees they saved. Today, she said, even when they need to pick up dry wood from the forest, they need a receipt from the forest department.

Alienating the people who have protected the environment all these years and whose identities are linked to the rivers and the trees around them, is not only unfair but also short-sighted. And yet this is how governments all over the world respond to environmental crises — putting themselves in charge, instituting laws to protect natural resources and disregarding the people who live in proximity with nature. The tyranny of corporate greed is thus replaced by the tyranny of authoritarianism and avarice.

By doing so, they ignore the deep ties that human beings have forged with Nature that are recorded in the myths and legends of the world. For instance, myths from different parts of the world imagine trees to be divine connectors, between the world of humans and that of spirits or, between heaven and earth or, between many universes and their creator gods. The Yggdrasil in Norse mythology has its roots deep underground, in the well of wisdom. The Kalpavriksha in Indian mythology represents Nature as an inexhaustible source of wealth and prosperity.

Forests spin their own web of connections. In the Sundarbans, the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, the idea of kinship between the jungle, the tiger and human beings is explored in the folk myths around Bon Bibi, a goddess worshipped by Hindus and Muslims. She stands between life and death at the hands of the shape-shifting tiger king Dokkhin Rai, who even though he is feared, is not the enemy. Tigers and humans are siblings, children of Bon Bibi and, as long as neither lets greed get the better of their senses, can both live in peace.

Such stories reveal a way of life that was not lived in conflict with nature. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report or the Madhav Gadgil report suggests that the stories help change the way people think and should be used more often and more vigorously in policy making. In the Western Ghats, where diversity has been in steady decline, the report found that many conservation practices that are found in local myths and folktales continue to effectively protect many elements of biodiversity to this day.

Yet government policies exclude people from the process of conservation, impoverishing communities and destroying indigenous cultures in the process. This is the story in every country — in China for example, a few decades ago, a people-led movement had helped stop construction of a dam that would have flooded villages along the Yangtze. The campaign is believed to have been responsible for preserving the biodiversity of the region and helping nearly a million people save their homes. Today, the dam is back on the table and people are barely protesting, because the government has appropriated the environmental narrative under the promise of building an “ecological civilisation” — a hypothetical concept that works on a state-knows-all approach.

Keeping people out of the environmental equation is a big mistake, one that can derail the best policies and movements. The Chipko movement tells us just how self-destructive such an attitude can be.