Have you ever wondered where the phrase ‘tree-hugger’ came from? I’ve been called that a lot, so I did. Check it out:

The Chipko movement (literally “to hug” in Hindi) was a group of peasants in the Uttarakhand region of India who acted to prevent the felling of trees and reclaim their traditional forest rights that were threatened by the contractor system of the state Forest Department. The movement began in Chamoli district in 1973 and spread throughout the Uttarakhand Himalayas by the end of the decade. In Tehri district, Chipko activists would go on to protest limestone mining in the Dehradun hills in the 1980s as well as the Tehri dam, before founding the Beej Bachao Andolan or Save the Seeds movement that continues to the present day. In Kumaon region, Chipko took on a more radical hue, combining with the general movement for a separate Uttarakhand state.

At its height, Chipko gained widespread attention from the international environmental movement that was making major headway in drawing global attention to ecological concerns. Unlike, environmentalists of the West, Chipko was thought to embody an “environmentalism of the poor” [3] and thus a novel example of the growing reach of environmental concerns. The tactic of tree hugging, long an epithet for environmental activists in general, also inspired and fired the imagination of activists in the West.
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