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February 21, 2021 08:02 IST
Remembering the people who contributed to the extraordinary Chipko movement and why the battle to protect forests and mountains is far from over
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Remembering the people who contributed to the extraordinary Chipko movement and why the battle to protect forests and mountains is far from over
As we watched with shock the videos from Uttarakhand, of a flooding river rushing down the mountains in a wave of fury and destruction, it seemed obvious that an ecological balance is urgently needed to face the challenge of climate change in our century.
However, this was not so evident in the early 1970s. That was when the Chipko movement was born.
‘The real Chipko’: How Shekhar Pathak wrote the first exhaustive, people’s history of the movement
Pathak’s new book focuses on the ordinary, often unlettered, men, women and children who shaped the forest rights struggle. Dec 27, 2020 · 06:30 am
I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working on a dissertation on the social history of forests in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. In those days the UP State Archives were well run; the files one ordered came to one’s desk fairly quickly, and with all their pages intact. On the inside back cover of each file was a list of all the scholars who had seen that particular document before. Studying the records of the Forest Department and the General Administration, I found that in some cases I was the first person to have ordered a particular file, but in most cases the second. The person who had got to these records before me was a cert