Environmentalism

Environmentalism is a social movement aimed at

preserving biodiversity and the earth’s environment.
We are living in a major extinction event — and
humans are the cause of it. Environmentalism is a
response to human activity that is causing extinctions
of species and of habitats.
The term “biodiversity” refers to the range of
different life forms in a given ecosystem. A coral reef is
highly diverse, whereas a cornfield has little diversity.
The term “biological diversity” was in use before the
1960s. “Biodiversity” was probably coined by W.G.
Rosen and first published by Edward O. Wilson.
The term environment is often used as a synonym for the
Nature (i.e., the biophysical and non-human environment) and
includes both cultural and bio-physical elements (Rappaport,
1979).
 ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
An environmental movement can be defined as a social or
political movement, for the conservation of environment or for
the improvement of the state of the environment.
 The terms ‘green movement’ or ‘conservation movement’ are
alternatively used to denote the same.
The environmental movements favour the sustainable
management of natural resources. The movements often stress
the protection of the environment via changes in public policy.
Many movements are centred on ecology, health and human
rights.
Environmental movements range from the highly organized and
formally institutionalized ones to the radically informal activities.
The spatial scope of various environmental movements ranges
from being local to the almost global.
The environmental movements are conceived as broad networks of
people and organizations engaged in collective action in the pursuit
of environmental benefits. Environmental movements are
understood to be very diverse and complex, their organizational
forms ranging from the highly organized and formally
institutionalized to the radically informal, the spatial scope of their
activities ranging from the local to the almost global, the nature of
their concerns ranging from single issue to the full panoply of
global environmental concerns- Rootes, Christopher

The genesis of concern for environmental protection in India,

can be traced back to the early twentieth century when people
protested against the commercialization of forest resources
during the British colonial period.
At the international level, growing salience of environmental crisis
was brought out by four important events.

The first event was the United Nations Conference on

‘Human Environment’ held in Stockholm, Sweden (1972).
The second event was publication of the report “Limits to
Growth”. The third, release of the report of the Brundtland
Commission entitled ‘Our Common Future’(1987).
Fourth, event was the ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 ((Vig,
Norman J. and Regina S. Axelrod 2006: 29; Salunkhe, S.
A., 2008: 38-40).
Guha, Ramchandra (1997: 345-346) lists the three events which occurred
within the country in 1973, that facilitated debate on environmental issues
in India:
First, in April, the government of India announced the launching of
Project Tiger, an ambitious conservation programme aimed at
protecting the country’s national animal....

Second, the publication of an article in Economic and Political

Weekly (March 31, 1973) entitled ‘A Charter for the Land’ authored
by B. B. Vora, a high official in the ministry of agriculture, which
drew attention to the extent of erosion, water logging and other
forms of land degradation in the country.

Third, on March 27, 1973, in Mandal, a remote Himalayan village,

a group of peasants stopped a group of loggers from felling a stand
of trees by hugging the trees.
These movements can be classified as new social
movements because of their following characteristics:
1)The movements were addressing novel issues like
environmental degradation.
2)The movements were massive with the active participation of
marginalized groups.
3)The demands of the new movements were novel in the sense
that it demanded right to livelihood and rights of displaced.
4)The environmental movements adapted non-violent strategy.
5)The movements incorporated hitherto unrepresented sectors
of society including adivasies, women and the marginalized.
6)Many of the new environmental movements forced the
governments to take affirmative policies in the form of new
laws and provisions.
The publication of ‘The Limit of Growth: A Report for the Club of
Rome’s Project in the Predicament of Mankind’ (Donella H
Meadows et al., 1972) and other reports, such as World Commission
on ‘Environment and Development’ (1987), and State of India’s
Environment: A Citizens Report (1982), have led to the monitoring
of the contradiction of growth and the erosion of the environment.
The Defence of the Planet and Save the Earth Movement,
formation of the Earth’s Friends Society reflects the growing
concern for the future of mankind.

In India it is also seen that the ethnic practices of worshipping

planets, trees, forest, and rivers reflects the natural and social
domains and the wisdom of seeing unity in the living and the
non-living world in the Indian tradition.
Environmental movements in India have contributed in defining the
models of development, shifting from a resource intensive and
ecologically unstable state to an ecologically symbiotic state of
functioning.

A couple of environmental movements experienced in India so far

include Chipko Andolan (Barthelemy, 1982), Save the Bhagirathi
and stop Tehri project (Manu, 1984), Save the Narmada movement
(Narmada Bachhao Andolan) in Madhya Pradesh and Gujrat; Youth
organisation and Tribal people in the Gandhamardan Mines against
Balco, the opposition of Baliapal Test Range, Bauxite mining in
Kashipur and Niyamgiri; the Appiko movement in the Western
Ghats; the campaign against the Silent Valley Project; reclaiming
wastelands in Bankura district, and the opposition to the Gumti Dam
in Tripura, etc., are some examples.
Bishnoi Movement:

Year: 1700s, Place: Khejarli, Marwar region, Rajasthan state.

Leaders: Amrita Devi along with Bishnoi villagers in Khejarli
and surrounding villages.
Aim: Save sacred trees from being cut down by the king’s
soldiers for a new palace.
It was in the year 1730 when the Maharaja Abhay Singh of
Jodhpur needed wood for the construction of a new fortress.
Since the Bishnois neither obeyed the demand for the delivery of
timber nor made any payments instead, the ruler sent his soldiers
out into the villages with the order to chop down Khejri trees
(Prosopis cineraria).
These trees, which prosper even under extremely harsh
conditions, have always been worshipped by the Bishnois - and
in appreciation the trees offer them shade, food, building
material, humid soils, protection and clean air.
When Amrita Devi heard of the imminent danger, she hurried, followed
by relatives and neighbours, to the place of the tragedy, named Khejarli, a
place at which the Khejri tree grows and tried to prevent the soldiers
from what they had come to do. However, when all reasoning failed, she
hugged the first tree to be cut in order to protect it. The soldiers beheaded
the woman whose last words would become history. "sir saanthe runkh
reho to bhi sasto jaan"(If a tree is saved even at the cost of one's head, it's
worth it).

The quiet village Khejarli still exists and is situated about 30 km

south of Jodhpur. A tarred road leads into the place, which consists of
an accumulation of scattered huts and a pond. A small structure - they
call it a temple - reminds of the 363 Bishnoi martyrs for saving the
khejri trees, whose demonstration of altruism seems to still inspire the
India of today.
Indian Gazelles and Black Bucks roam around this shrine of mass
self-sacrifice denoting the fact that animals and vegetation are safe in
this region.
For modern societies it is unbelievable to find that Bishnoi women
feed milk to the babies of the black deer with their breast caring for
them as their own children.
 Chipko Movement
Chipko Movement started in April, 24 1973 at Mandal of
Chamoli district of Gharwal division of Utter Pradesh. The
Organiser of the movement had a belief on the ideology of
non-violence as propagated by Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba
Bhave. The movement was raised out of ecological
destabilization in the hills.

Locally it is called as Angwal.

The continuous natural distress like flood, and land slide due to
Alakananda (1970) river and other catashophes like Tawaghat
tragedy (1977) and Bhagirathi blockade (1978) Branch Rivers
of river Ganga caused massive flood in the Gangetic plains.
A look into the forest policies and forest resources exploitation data
show that due to over mining of forest resources in different time
periods such natural calamities have occurred.
In 1973 the State Forest Department gave a lease of forest trees
to Simon Company, a manufacturer of sporting goods from far
off Allahabad. The relationship between the erosion and floods
on the one hand, and mass scale falling of trees on the other
was recognized. On March 27 decision was taken to ‘Chipko”
that is ‘to hug’ the trees that were threatened by axe and thus
the chipko andolan (movement) was born.

The local residents in Gopeshwar were denied the similar

demand of getting few trees, required for making farm tools.
On March 26, 1973, Gaura Devi (Head of the village Mahila
Mangal Dal.) and the other women in the Reni forest region of
Uttarakhand followed the footsteps of Amrita Devi, and in the
process laid down a legacy of environmental protection that was
one of a kind.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt of ‘Dasoli Gram Swarajya Sangh’(DGSS)
wanted to establish small industries using forest resources, with an
aim to provide job opportunities to local youth and check migration.

Girda (Girish Tewari) Inspired the movement in Kumaon region

with USV. By beating of hudka (a rhythming instrument) and singing
various songs.
“Today Himalaya is calling you,
Wake up my son,
Do not allow my auction,
Protect me from being slaughtered.”
The Chipko movement of 1973 soon inspired many such agitations
of ecological protection. In the immediate aftermath, it soon spread
to other sub-Himalayan regions like in Gopeshwar (1975), Bhynder
valley (1978) and Dongri Paintoli (1980).

Bahuguna enlightened the villagers by conveying the importance of

trees in the environment which checks the erosion of soil, cause
rains and provides pure air. The women of Advani village of Tehri-
Garhwal tied the sacred thread around trunks of trees and they
hugged the trees, hence it was called ‘Chipko Movement’ or ‘hug
the tree movement’.
The Chipko movement experimented and established certain
original approaches, like marginality, action research and social
investigation. Few social workers integrated the Chipko movement
for preservation of forest in the sub-Himalayan region of Gharwal.
The movement made people conscious of the value of forest, its
preservation and the need for maintaining ecological balance.
Let them know they will not fell a single tree without felling one
of us first. When their men raise the axe, we will embrace
(chipko) the trees to protect them”-Chandi Prasad Bhatt
Success of Chipko movement
The movement has spread to many states in the country.
It stopped felling of trees in the Western Ghats and the Vindhyas.
Generated pressure for formulation of a natural resource policy.
Achieved a major victory in 1980 with a 15-year ban on green
felling in the Himalayan forests
More than 1,00,000 trees have been saved from excavation.
Started protecting forest slopes and Restoring bare ones.

“Our movement goes beyond the erosion of the land, to the

erosion of human values. The center of all this is humankind. If
we are not in a good relationship with the environment, the
environment will be destroyed, and we will lose our ground.
But if you halt the erosion of humankind, humankind will halt
the erosion of the soil.”- Chandi Prasad Bhatt
Appiko Movement
Year: 1983, Place: Uttara Kannada and Shimoga districts of
Karnataka State.
Leaders: Appiko’s greatest strengths lie in it being neither driven by
a personality nor having been formally institutionalised. However, it
does have a facilitator in Pandurang Hegde. He helped launch the
movement in 1983.
Aim: Against the felling and commercialization of natural forest and
the ruin of ancient livelihood.
The Appiko Movement was locally known as “Appiko Chaluvali”.
The locals embraced the trees which were to be cut by contractors of
the forest department.
The movement took place in the Uttara Kanada district of Karnataka
in the Western Ghats.
Sheth, Pravin (1997) pointed out that, “the Appiko movement
succeeded in its three-fold objectives include 1] protecting the
existing forest cover, 2] regeneration of trees in denuded land, and 3]
utilizing forest wealth with proper consideration to conservation to
conservation of natural resources....

On September 8, 1983, a group of around 70 villagers from

the Salkani village of Uttara Kannada district stood hugging
the trees of the Kalse forests to prevent them from being felled
by state authorities. Founded and led by environmental activist
Panduranga Hegde, the movement christened Appiko (“hug”
in Kannada, symbolising protection for the tree) became south
India’s first large-scale environmental movement.
 Hegde says, “Women are impacted the greatest when the access to
the forest is not provided.” Deforestation and excessive state
control brings about a decrease in forest produce. Owing to the
gendered division of labour, it becomes women’s responsibilities to
procure fuel wood and fodder for livestock.
Environmental personhood is a new and upcoming legal concept. It
refers to viewing natural resources as a person with rights that are
violated by human activity.
Appiko has seen a snowball effect as it has gained popularity in
other regions.
Through the mobilisation of various groups, sustained awareness
campaigns, community activities like folk dances, street plays and
marches into the interior forest regions, the Appiko movement has
taken on a larger goal — to save the Western Ghats.
In 2011, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel designated the
entire Western Ghats as an ecologically sensitive area. Parts of the
Western Ghats were declared a heritage site by the Unesco and have
been recognised as one of the world’s 10 biodiversity hotspots.

The Appiko movement goes by the slogan Ubsu (save), Belesu

(grow) and Balasu (rational use) to spread awareness about the
fragile state of the region’s ecology.

It has lived up to the promise it made on September 8, 1983, a

quarter century ago, when people from villages around Salkani
in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka undertook an 8-km trek
to lay siege to a tree-felling site in the Kalase forests.
Narmada Bachao Andolan
The idea of building dams in the Narmada river basin predates
independent India. In 1946, India’s Central Waterways, Irrigation, and
Navigation Commission constituted a committee to study the
feasibility of such a project.
Fifteen years later, Prime Minister Nehru inaugurated the Narmada
Valley Development Project. The Narmada Project’s costs have been
both human and environmental though the foremost issue remains the
displacement of the Narmada basin’s inhabitants.
The Narmada basin is almost 100,000 square kilometers in size and is
home to twenty-one million people.12 The Sardar Sarovar dam’s
impounding of water in a 455–foot–high reservoir would ultimately
submerge 37,000 hectares of land in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and
Madhya Pradesh, and divert 9.5 million acre feet of water into a canal
and irrigation system.
Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal
The Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal (‘‘Narmada Tribunal’’)
was set up in 1969 to resolve the river water sharing dispute
between Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra.
Additionally, the Narmada Tribunal aimed to set out conditions
regarding the resettlement and rehabilitation of those displaced
by the dams.
In 1978, the Narmada Tribunal approved the Narmada Project
and final planning and work commenced.
Since the early 1980s, the Narmada Project has faced mounting
opposition from a variety of sources. Protest groups formed in
all three affected states and included or were supported by
individuals facing displacement, students, social activists,
Indian environmental NGOs, international NGOs, and
transnational networks.
In Gujarat, nineteen villages, whose submersion the Sardar
Sarovar dam ensured, formed the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh
Vahini, a youth protest group. The group engaged in protests
and initiated court actions, ultimately forcing the government
of Gujarat to offer a more generous resettlement package.
The group’s belief that Gujarat’s water needs made the dam
project necessary guided its decision to focus on rehabilitation
efforts and to ensure that the government adhered to its
promises.
In contrast, groups in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra
opposed the dams altogether. Two such groups, the Narmada
Ghati Navnirman Samiti in Madhya Pradesh and the Narmada
Ghati Dharangrastha Samiti in Maharashtra, subsequently
merged to form the Narmada Bachao Andolan in 1989.
 The NBA’s Methods
The success of the NBA campaign resulted from its innovative
strategies of resistance that operated simultaneously at the
grassroots, national, and international level.

The Narmada River Development Project involves the construction

of 30 large Dams and many small ones on the river and its 51 main
tributaries. The project basically aims to increase food production
and hydropower generations in Gujurat, Madhya Pradesh and
Maharashtra.

The construction of dams and reservoirs will displace estimated one

million people and will submerge 350,000 hectares of forest land
and 200,000 hectares of agricultural land (India Today, 1992).
The Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujurat is being strongly opposed by the
tribal people due to the fact that it will submerge
almost 40,000 hectares of land and 250 villages. Similarly, the
reservoir behind Narmada Sarovar Dam will be the largest manmade
lake in India submerging 91,348 hectares and displacing 120,000
people from 255 villages, which includes13 forest villages (Shiva,
1991).
With respect to the funding of the project, the World Bank
supported with an approved loans in 1985. For various reasons
the Central and State Government could not meet the
resettlement and rehabilitation guidelines and social and
environmental issues went unaddressed (Kothari and Singh,
1988).
The Narmada basin is one of the richest areas of the country
for valuable forests and variety of wildlife.
The Narmada basin has two world famous national parks like
Kanha and Satpura; and five Sanctuaries, Kheoni, Panchamukhi,
Bori, Ratapani and Sidhore. Narmada basin also falls on route to
several migratory birds flying to South from North.
The withdrawal of World Bank funding was a moral victory for
the movement. Anti-project movement was very high among the
residents of basin area in Madhya Pradesh, while in Gujurat
dissatisfaction was observed among people whose lands have
been encroached without adequate compensation and inequitable
compensation by the Government (Appa and Sridharan, 1992).

By linking the problems of environmental changes and

degradation of the Valley with issues of economic equity and
social justice, the movement forced the bank to withdraw from
the project (Estana and Prakash, 1992).
Medha Patkar’s stance on the Narmada issue is emblematic of her
broader political philosophy. According to Patkar:

When the state has, under the principle of eminent domain, full
right to resources, the state is expected to act in favour of the
most disadvantaged communities and use the resources in such
a way that the common good would be really achieved, of
course, within the value frame work [sic] of equality and
justice.... [Instead,] the state is using its power, its laws, ways
and means, its police force, a physical brutal force, to take
away the resources.... That is like a privatized state, which is
privatized by those small elite sections, and this is being done
more and more and more brutally and crudely, in the new
context of globalization and liberalization....
Alongside Medha Patkar, social activist Baba Amte provided moral
leadership to the cause to preserve the Narmada River. Though
renowned for his work against leprosy, beginning in the early
1980s he involved himself in the struggle against mega dams.
Amte first achieved national prominence for his work on dams with
the publication of Cry O Beloved Narmada in 1989, an elegiac
booklet that made the case for a dam-free Narmada.

In 1987, Patkar met with World Bank officials in Washington,

D.C. and questioned their 1985 loan agreement in light of the
fact that the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests had
not granted environmental clearance to the project, as required
by Indian law.
The NBA and the Supreme Court
The NBA approached the Supreme Court of India in May 1994
out of a sense of urgency and following significant internal
discussion. The decision of Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam
Ltd (‘‘SSNL,’’ the corporation responsible for the Sardar
Sarovar dam) to close the sluice gates of the dam meant water
was rising in the valley.

The NBA’s lawyers began to push three novel legal arguments

—one, that the project was an unconstitutional taking; two,
that it violated the equal protection clause of the Indian
Constitution; and three, that the government had infringed on
their right to reside and settle in any part of India
After 1997, the Court’s approach to the Narmada Project shifted
dramatically. Instead of undertaking a comprehensive review of the
entire project, the Court decided in February 1999 to vacate the stay
on construction work on the Sardar Sarovar dam and to limit itself to
the question of resettlement and rehabilitation.
In April 1999, Booker Prize winning author and activist Arundhati
Roy penned her oft-cited essay, The Greater Common Good, in
which she criticized the Supreme Court’s decision.

On March 10, 2008, the Supreme Court finally heard the Sardar
Sarovar case. Counsel on behalf of the farmers alleged that the
Madhya Pradesh government’s policy of paying cash and creating
fakeland registries was in violation of the Narmada Tribunal
Award’s directives and the constitutional right to life under Article
21
 The Silent Valley Movement, Kerala
The silent valley is located in Palghat district of Kerala. It is
surrounded by different hills of the State stretched over a total area
of 8950 hectares. The flora and fauna of the valley is natural and
very rich in biodiversity. The valley has contributed varieties of
genes for pest and disease control of rice.
The idea of a dam on river Kunthipuja in this hill system was
conceived by the British in 1929, while the technical feasibility
survey was carried out in 1958 and the project was sanctioned by
the Planning Commission of Government of India in 1973 with a
cost estimation of Rs. 25.00 crores, which enhanced to 80 crores in
1980.
The project had dual purpose of generating 240 MW of power, to
irrigate 10,000 hectares of additional crop land and to create jobs for
2000 to 3000 people during the construction period.