The Many Shades of Green

Forest Futures: Global Representations And Ground Realities In The Himalayas
Antje Linkenbach

The Chipko movement in what is now Uttarakhand is widely and justly celebrated as a pioneering environmental movement to save Himalayan forests. Sorry, what did you say - an environmental movement. I thought it was a peasant movement. Wait a second - wasn’t it a feminist movement?

Now, now - these are labels that “outside” experts and professionals have given Chipko. Have you asked people what do they think of it? Do they all think of it the same way? All the time? What about the ban on tree-felling? Did people approve of it? Don’t people ever want to cut down trees? Do they never encroach on forest land? Are they content to grow crops merely for subsistence or do they have other aspirations? What about growing cash crops like apples and using fertilizers and insecticides?

If you have had 101 questions that you were afraid to ask or didn’t know who to ask here is the book for you. It will disabuse you of many myths (romantic or otherwise) and notions that have been built around the Chipko movement.

So does the real Chipko stand up? Well, maybe there is none. Like in the movie Rashomon people see events differently and there are many perspectives, rich and varied, dependent on whom you ask and what you read.

And even though this may suggest that the book dwells quite a bit on differences, rivalries and conflicts (which it does because of the very nature of the study and in any case there is no dearth of laudatory accounts), as the author emphasises Chipko is a remarkable movement both in what it did in the region and the impact it had worldwide.

The one jarring note in the book is the chapter titled Ecology and Development. The author digresses into providing the backdrop and the context to her work. However, her discussion of development theory and the Indian development debates and experience is inadequate if not actually misleading. Even the “conventional development” discourse in India is far richer than what the author suggests. The discussion in the chapter also seems superfluous to the main theme of the book.

The sections on agricultural cycle, marriage relations, history, religion and rituals of the study village necessary as they are could easily have been shortened. The relevance of the lengthy discussion and the links to the subject matter of the book is neither shown nor is it self-evident. And while the author subjects Chipko and its history to critical analysis (that is what the book is about) she accepts rather uncritically certain other aspects (e.g. the struggle for the formation of and the expectations from Uttarakhand).

These small matters notwithstanding, on the whole the book is a very useful read and addition to the literature.