Lee may have been crazed but he was no tree-hugger. Sections of the media and blogosphere quickly branded Lee a “crazed tree-hugger” ( here, for instance). This happened this week, when a gun-toting American called James Lee took staff at the Discovery Channel hostage in a protest about the state of our planet. Worse, the label is often used to gather peaceful humanitarians, rational scientists and many other people with a concern for the environment, and lump them together with misanthropic - and in some cases violent - eco-extremists. Since the time of Gaura Devi though, people have increasingly revealed their own detachment from the natural world by labelling others “tree-huggers” in an effort to belittle their environmental ethos. Its originators knew intimately that humanity is a part of nature not apart from it. Tree-hugging, then, is as pro-human as it is pro-tree. The Chipko movement, as it became known, spread across India and inspired people around the world to take a stand against destruction of the environment. When news reached the state capital, the chief minister investigated and ruled in favour of the villagers. More villagers joined the protest and after four days the loggers left empty-handed. When the loggers began to abuse and threaten the women, they hugged the trees to prevent them being axed (see image below from The Hindu newspaper). The Indian government had permitted private companies to log areas of forest that local communities had managed in a sustainable way for generations, and in the 1970s villagers in the highlands of northern India began peaceful protests against the deforestation.Ī turning point came on 26 March 1974, when Gaura Devi and 27 other women from a village in what is now Uttarakhand state confronted loggers who had come to take their trees. Nearly 250 years later tree-hugging became well-known worldwide when, once again, Indian villagers took on more powerful opponents to protect trees their community had long nurtured and benefited from. In the bloodbath that followed some 363 men, women and children were slaughtered, but when the Maharajah heard of the villagers’ bravery and devotion he banned any tree-felling from their areas. Some hugged the trees, putting their bodies directly between the axe and its target. These four deaths did not deter the tree-fellers, so many other villagers began to offer their own lives in exchange for the survival of a tree. When the axe-men took her up on her offer and severed her head, her three daughters pleaded for the men to kill them too in place of the trees. Maharaja Abhay Singh, the ruler of Jodhpur, had sent men to fell the trees but a brave woman called Amrita Devi offered to sacrifice her life if it would spare one tree. The shade they created was a welcome haven for farmers who toiled in the blistering heat. Their leaves and bark, flowers and sap were used in traditional medicines. They provided fodder for livestock and firewood for cooking. The trees were materially important to the villagers in their dry desert landscape. The first recorded tree-huggers were villagers in Rajasthan, India who sacrificed themselves in 1730 to protect khejri trees ( Prosopis cineraria, shown below) that their community depended on. But nothing could be further from the truth. People who use the phrase seem to imply that a tree-hugger would value nature ahead of humanity - and that therefore their views are immediately worthless. They told me the next day how the man had staggered up to a large tree and then hugged it intensely for a few seconds before meandering off into the night, unaware that anyone had seen him.Īs we laughed about this private nocturnal meeting between man and nature, I thought about the phrase tree-hugger and the way people tend to use it to denigrate anyone who advocates a more sustainable way of living. It was way past midnight in Montreal and on Rue Saint Hubert a blind-drunk man was weaving his way past my friends Marie-Josée and Diego as they waited for a taxi last week.
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