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Environmental Movements in India

The document discusses several environmental movements in India that aimed to protect natural resources from exploitation and promote more sustainable development. It describes the Chipko movement where people embraced trees to prevent logging, and the Appiko movement in southern India similarly focused on reforestation. Other movements mentioned include social forestry initiatives by K.M. Munshi and campaigns by environmental groups like Greenpeace to conserve forests and wildlife across India. The movements emerged in response to conflicts over the overuse and degradation of natural resources from intensive agriculture and industry.

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461 views2 pages

Environmental Movements in India

The document discusses several environmental movements in India that aimed to protect natural resources from exploitation and promote more sustainable development. It describes the Chipko movement where people embraced trees to prevent logging, and the Appiko movement in southern India similarly focused on reforestation. Other movements mentioned include social forestry initiatives by K.M. Munshi and campaigns by environmental groups like Greenpeace to conserve forests and wildlife across India. The movements emerged in response to conflicts over the overuse and degradation of natural resources from intensive agriculture and industry.

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Environmental Movements in India!

The environment in which we live plays a vital role in our survival. The environment
includes all the natural resources such as air water, land, forests, minerals, etc. It is
our duty to protect the natural resources. However, due to some of the reason or the
other, there is a lot of misuse of these natural resources, in the form of land
degradation, water pollution, air pollution, and deforestation.

All these factors lead to deterioration of our environment. There have been many
efforts made in order to reclaim the environment by people through voluntary
organizations, which are concerned about the environment. There are instances
where people have revoked and adopted non-violent action movements for
protecting their environment.

Our discussion would be on such environmental movements in India. We would be


dealing with the Chipko Movement, the Appiko Movement in the Western Ghats,
Vana Mahotsav initiated by K.M. Munshi, and also the environmental organizations
such as the Green Peace and World Wide Fund for conserving forests and wildlife.

These environmental movements are an expression of the socio-ecological effects of


narrowly conceived development based on short-term criteria of exploitation. The
movements reveal how the resource-intensive demands of development have built-in
ecological destruction and economic deprivation.

Members have activated micro-action plans to safeguard natural resources and to


provide the macro concept for ecological development at the national and regional
levels.

The past five decades have witnessed a high rate of resource utilization. Intensive
agricultural and industrial productions have paved the way for increase in demands
for the resources. This has resulted in conflicts over natural resources.

These conflicts become more serious when the industrial technologies utilizing the
resources face challenges from communities, whose survival is dependent upon
these resources and are threatened by destruction and over exploitation of the
resources. Such conflicts, which are based on the deteriorating condition of the
natural resources, are leading to environmental movements at different levels.

Among the various ecology movements, in India, the Chipko Movement (embracing
trees to oppose fellings) is the most well-known. It began as a movement of the hill
people in the state of Uttar Pradesh to save the forest resources from exploitation by
contractors from outside. It later evolved into an ecological movement that aimed at
the maintenance of the ecological stability of the major upland watersheds in India.

Spontaneous people’s response to save vital forest resources was seen in the
Jharkhand area in the Bihar-Orissa border region as well as in the Bastar area of
Madhya Pradesh. Here, there were attempts to convert the mixed natural forests into
plantations of commercial tree species, to the complete detriment of the tribal peo-
ple.

In the southern part of India the Appiko movement, which was inspired by the
success of the Chipko movement in the Himalayas, is actively involved in stopping
illegal over-felling of trees in forests and in replanting forest lands with multipurpose
broad-leaved tree species.

In Himachal Pradesh, the Chipko activists intensified their opposition to the


expansion of monoculture plantation of the commercial Chir Pine (Pinus roxburghii).
In the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan, there has been a massive program of tree planting
to give employment to those hands, which were hitherto engaged in felling of trees.

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