Chipko movement - wikipedia.org

The Chipko movement (literally "to stick" in Hindi) was a group of female 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.

One of Chipko's most salient features was the mass participation of women villagers. [1] As the backbone of Uttarakhand's agrarian economy, women were most directly affected by environmental degradation and deforestation, and thus connected the issues most easily. How much this participation impacted or derived from the ideology of Chipko, has been fiercely debated in academic circles. Despite this, both female and male activists did play pivotal roles in the movement

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" 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.